"How Shall We Then Live?"

Still practicing my typing...

TNY has an interesting article on Mormonism, which is now in the spotlight more than ever.  It makes the point that if Brigham Young had not been willing to compromise, the U.S. Army would have pretty well wiped our their Salt Lake colony and were in fact on the way to do so.  Mormonism hence survived by its willingness to be complicit with political might; it is doubtful that Smith would have done so, but Young was much more of an entrepreneur and purity of doctrine came in a distant second to worldly success.

Of course the article states in its round of certainties that all American religion devolves into enterprises based on success, wealth-making, and empire-building.  The extent to which this is true is embarrassing; but the very definition of religion makes it into a purely human enterprise.

  My point would be that journalists in particular and McWorld in general wouldn't be able to begin to discern true from false Christian individuals, nor differentiate between the Holy Spirit and the weltgeist of any given age.  Stephen made that claim before he was stoned; and Kierkegaard's main theme was exactly this--that the Protestant (Lutheran) church of Scandinavia was so far from the Holy Spirit that it operated only by sight, not by faith; or by faith in word only.  Of course we know that McLutheranism soon became a political force just like Catholicism before it. So man quickly turns Jesus into an "Article."  As H.G. Wells also noted--indignantly--in "When The Sleeper Wakes."

David Wilkerson's son Gary makes a point in the World Challenge newsletter this month that I had not considered before.  He says that the New Covenant is not between man and God, but between God and Jesus.  It had been demonstrated--as examples--for many centuries that making a covenant with Adam, Noah, Moses, or the Prophets was an exercise in futility--but had to be demonstrated beyond doubt. As GK Chesterton implied and modern environmentalists aver, original sin can be now assumed as fact.

But God had had, all along, an Agreement with not only His Son but His Spirit before Jesus' incarnation.  But that covenant came to flesh in that flesh could not save itself--in fact  flesh unaided always works mightily towards its own destruction.

So in a way the New Covenant was before the Old--not an act of desperation on the part of God; nor on the part of most men who are well content with the status quo and hell-on-earth.  It's Hell all right, but at least it's our Home-Built Hell.  Which ties into the current campaign slogan, "We built it!"  Sad to say, this is perfectly correct, and an impetus to a quicker decay from the heights of still-indelible Grace.

Grace cannot be a cult, a cult is an organization, like religion in general, that is created specifically to root out grace and to cancel both its methods and purpose, not to mention its effects; which if from God as Gift must be marked by and essential allegiance to full reality, i.e. Truth from God, not  the truthiness of man.

Man can't handle this; but is too proud to admit it, so turns inward on himself and "self-esteem."

Whatever God wanted was done-"once for all"- by Jesus--as predicted by the Prophets but unattainable by any of all of them--or by me/us. "Jesus Himself is the guarantee that the Covenant is being kept. Every other man would fail at this, but one man keeps the Covenant perfectly: Jesus. He is our surety." And no other has appeared. "No man spoke like this Man." True now more than ever, now that we have tried a few billion other alternatives: hey! "Business is Business!"