The Future and How We Get There

The Cross is the in BIOS of creation. It is the Symbol/Reality of how God governs human relationships. Life revolves around the love of giving and the trust of receiving. In God this is called the perichoresis of the Trinity. In Creation that perichoresis is reflected in the sacrifice to understand and control creation which Dominion requires. That sacrifice uses the control of creation to meet another’s need. In a Trinitarian Cosmology, needs are not shortcomings but rather openings where ethical action becomes visible making things better. The fruit of dominion is the gift fulfilling others. Ethical exchange is the basis of fruitful human order. Made in God’s image, we are ethical beings who know what is right and judicial beings who do what is right, using every skill, privilege, and advantage to provide for others not control them. This voluntary exchange when ethical, generates exponential, multilayered growth spreading resources to those most able to use them, When it is corrupted by coercion, theft, deceit, or broken faith, human order collapses. Thus the cruciform pattern of sacrifice, dominion, and mutual provision is the logic of flourishing built into creation itself.

Introduction: History, the Story of the Perfection of Doctrine

These three remain, Faith Hope and Love.

Faith is what each Person of the Trinity has in the others. Trust is that bond in the Trinity that believes — trusts — that the one loving them brings only what fulfills them. Trust maturing to faith is that confidence in what others bring, and that is the image of God discipled in each person. Trust in us grows as our ability to judge matures and grows wise. But its root is always Trust — that infant on its mother’s breast knowing that if she roots, she will find a breast and if she cannot latch, there will be a mother’s hand there to provide whatever is lacking to nourish her. The infant does not “know” these things the way we do. Jesus called that infant’s Trust “faith” Kingdom faith. Without that simple reception of Christ one is outside the People of God. Any person is capable of this Trust. Trust transcends their maturity or immaturity. The analytical ability the Greek, Roman, Secularists call “Faith” is a mere “belief system” that leaves us outside the Kingdom of God if it does not have that infant’s trust at its root. “Assuredly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will by no means enter it.” Jesus went on to make that child’s Trust the pattern of a true conversion, “Assuredly, I say to you, unless you are converted and become as little children, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven.” Faith is the Trust that we belong and our needs will be met.

Love is what draws each Person of the Trinity to provide what fulfills the others. Love is His design we reflect that commits us to give to those we love something that makes life better. Love is a defining characteristic of all people. It is a design of God making humanity like Him. It is what makes us Human. Love is not what separates Christian from non-Christian. It is who we love that separates us. Who we love and how we love them either makes us or breaks us. It is because those who do not know God are in His image also that love irresistibly attracts them to what God has said and the story He tells of faith, love and their child, hope. They want these things more than life itself even in the corrupted form they so often find it among believers and unbelievers alike.

Hope is the child of Faith and Love. Where a person loves those whom they fulfill; and where a person trusts others to fulfill them, hope for the future is born. We do not know what “future” means to God. But we do know that in a time-bound creation, hope is the optimism that the future we are going to will be better than the past we came from. Hope is the compound interest of the Spirit — its proof of work, the substance of faith and love. Which is not judgment on the past. It is simply the design character or the BIOS of God’s Creation where the uniqueness of each Person in the God-head is made more perfectly unique the more perfect their Oneness becomes. Yet with this perfection in each person, their Whole is not fragmented by the increasing perfection of each Part. This is our BIOS, reflecting their reality. It is our fundamental design characteristic. We were created to be guided by love to fulfill others, and by Trust to receive fulfillment from them which makes a better and better future the substance of yesterday’s hope.

Apart from contact with the Bible, there has been no other civilization with an optimistic philosophy of the future. The good future is the historically and culturally unique heart of the Bible. This Hope is not confined to the experts in the faith, love and logic of Christianity. Following Jesus is not a two or three story house with the upper floors reserved for the philosophically wise and the moral saints leaving the children, commoners and sinners on the ground floor with some simple legal do’s and don’ts. There is “One Lord, Faith, Birth and Baptism.” There is one rule for all. The Doctrines of the most humble child or commoner are identical to the doctrines of the Doctor of Philosophy. The mysticism of the common Christian is the same mystery driving the saint out to the desert to sit on a pole and yet he finds no greater understanding. Hope is inevitable if one lives the simple doctrines of the faith however nuanced at any level of expression. This hope is breathed in every verse, doctrine and narrative however well or haltingly understood and poorly or perfectly lived out. It is the story of life from Genesis 1 through Revelation 22. As these realities clarify in the lives of each Christian, they draw each life into a part of that story growing every generation into the past, present and future fulfillment of that Faith, Hope and Love. As John Owen said, God’s word is the river where babies paddle and elephants drown.

This is the meaning of Atonement, כִּפּוּר, kippur. The Trinitarian Oneness God promises in Genesis 1 & 2, the One Flesh of Marriage, is lost in Genesis 3 because the Trust of Genesis 1 & 2 is lost in the mist of the conflict between an analytical faith and a mystical experience. Kippur is the removal of the things which destroy faith and love and the restoration of that unity, Atonement — the removal of anything blocking Trinitarian unity.

As the rest of the Bible makes clear, maturity requires analytical growth. But it cannot be growth if it abandons the Trust which defines Faith at every level. When Love and Trust are breached, there is no hope for the future. This is why God promised that he would remove the things that breach Love and Trust. That removal is called death. “The day you eat of it you will die.” Death is the reality of no future. These actions make the future impossible. If God did not remove the things which make the future impossible, death would be the end of every matter. The rest of history is about how God’s promised death sentence, is carried out on someone else so that Oneness can be restored for you. The word describing that breach of Love and Trust is sin. Sin cannot be a way of life. Sin is the end of whatever we call life and future. Sin is secondarily a list of things to do or not do. Primarily sin is anything that makes the uniqueness of each person greater at the expense of their unity, or a unity that makes itself greater at the expense of the uniqueness of each person involved. The promise of death to that which removes the future is balanced by the River of Life which not only gives life and hope to each communicant, it pours out of each communicant giving hope to the world.

The death of death and the outpouring of life raises another point of distinction between Christian doctrine and all doctrines of all other religions and philosophies. Christian Doctrine tells a story that is as accessible to the simple as to the complex, the wise as to the fool, the infant and the emperor, the sinner as to the saint. Christians come in all these sizes and shapes. But the truth they grasp is One. Jesus, Moses, the Patriarchs, Prophets and Apostles lay the same cookies on all the shelves, from top to bottom. The adept is no farther ahead than the novice and does not pursue his perfection for any different reason than the novice wants to seek God. This is the Trinitarian understanding of spiritual, social and physical reality. God being Three in One doesn’t deny that there are degrees of achievement, gifting or empowerment. God just doesn’t grant to them a status of “better,” “greater” or “more worthy.” God doesn’t grant power over others because of these status points. Greatness attaches only to the ethical walk of each person pouring the river of life out from the heart. A widow’s 2 cents is more valuable than the Billionaires’ grant. A child may lead and be greatest in God’s Kingdom ahead of the aged ruler who submits to the child’s faith if nothing else. The faith of the child is the essence of Kingdom belonging while the reasoned faith of the wise is a conceit leaving him far from the atonement כִּפּוּר Kippur of trust that receives like the child. The penitent whore and drunkard can find themselves ahead of the cloistered sober chaste wife of the pharisee. What is taught to the newborn on the breast who fails to latch is of the same substance as what is taught in the highest graduate student who does not grasp a point. The trust of that newborn is the substance of things unseen by the graduates. “Out of the mouths of babies you have made praise perfect.” Perfect. . . . Perfect. Stop and meditate on that.

Throughout all time, God marks His people. And His marked people eat with Him.

First marked as His Image to unpack all the potentialities in creation;

Then marked as His Circumcision claiming the future in spite of sin which He will cut off in time;

Finally marked as His Baptized in Fire and Water becoming a people in whom He dwells and through whom He will release the river of life to recreate that future begun in the garden.

His mark is both symbol and substance of what He has done, what He is doing and what He will do. God’s people marked as God’s family, God’s Priests, God’s Kingdom and God’s Congregation are the living representatives of the Faith, Hope and Love that created and will restore a world of peace and plenty. From the first chapter to the last God is preparing a table in the wilderness. That wilderness is the blasted fruit of their alienation which reduced like a cancer the bursting plenty of creation. God’s story of humanity begins and ends in a world of overflowing sustainable plenty, exalting our union in a way that magnifies the unique calling and purpose of each person united. On the way, He tells His story of the adventure of every life and calling that builds to a whole that would not be there without each part taking each step.

God tells you that as a part of His family, in His lineage, His legacy, His history — you are coming from somewhere very good, a Garden walking with Him; fulfilling each other; creating a world characterized by that Garden’s fruitful fullness. This fulfilling is not haphazard or random. God’s provision in Creation-history is how we unlock an infinite plenty which though it can be soiled, it cannot be suppressed, even by sin. His story takes you to a wedding feast where God's congregation, ekklesia, are not mere guests, but God’s bride.

When God finished committing His story to writing His purpose in creation cried out, “The Spirit and the Bride say Come. Let Him who hears say come. Let Him who is athirst come and drink freely of the River of Life. . . . All Creation is waiting for the children of God to be revealed.”

Your life receives meaning and purpose as the story reveals you, clothed in the truths which clarify your world and your purposes. It does so to whatever degree you live those truths and wherever you are found in history living them. In the years allotted to you, there is a cumulative social effect over time reshaping culture, social order and interpersonal expectations. Reshaping the future itself.

This book introduces a series on how you are a part of the story God is telling about His world. Our growing understanding of how it all works together steadily takes shape in the lives of those following Him. It sketches the elements of that optimism grounded in the history God recorded from Genesis through Revelation. This record has already transformed your world and life today and will continue to transform you and your children “Showing mercy to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.” These doctrines create a people who unleash a world where, “these three remain, Faith Hope and Love.”

The font of this historical culture-change is the story told by a very particular Being. Though we call Him by the generic “God” or “The Lord” He told us His name is YHWH, or I AM. The story He wrote down explains who He is and what He is doing in the world.

The Optimism of the Bible’s story begins in a moral universe which can only be Good, if its Creator is both All Powerful and Personal. It is only moral if this God establishes justice and healing by suffering and restoring in His Person what His image bearers do to pervert His goodness as they find it in themselves and His world. This world only works if this All Powerful Personal God is Trinitarian. One Person of that Trinity is the Logos. The Logos is the fire of Trust and Hope who not only became fully Human, but died on a Cross atone כִּפּוּר to make His people a people who can unite with each other and Him. He came out of the grave to transform fallen humanity, into a people who live by trusting God so that they might bear the weight of glory which created them to love.

“Weight of glory” evokes a fully engaged humanity fully unlocking creation, through ethically self-governed lives individually and corporately. It is this wholeness that bears the weight of glory. To be human is to know it should be this way and recognize it when you see it. Glory and its weight are normal, to those building uniqueness of person in the power of their unity. To those tearing that unity or uniqueness apart? Glory is crushing.

It took 1400 years for these truths, the BIOS of creation, to penetrate Western Culture until every element of the West accepted them as the axiomatic structure of life. These ideas are encapsulated in six or seven simple heads which are called Christian Doctrine. That they are propositions is not the essence of their significance, but a necessary characteristic they share much the same way as they are historically true while at the same truths shaping that history. They are rooted in what actually happened since creation — chapter headings of the greatest story every told, the click-bait of the social media-defining exchange, communion, faith, love and hope.

• Creation and Fall: God’s image bearers, we become like God.
• Incarnation: God wants to rescue us, so He becomes like us.
• Atonement, Cross: Jesus takes on all the evil rightfully ours.
• Atonement, Resurrection: God Brings New Life and Creation.
• Ascension: God Rules the world providing every Good we lost.
• Pentecost: God enters in fire His people— His dwelling.
• His Return: God transforms the earth through His people.
• The Trinity— God is not a system of balanced extremes, nor of rational mathematical/legal rules. God does not pit the uniqueness of each person against the collective unity of purpose and fellowship. We embrace the Trinity, Genesis 1&2, John 17.

Believers in these doctrines from infant to sage cannot help but be optimistic about and believe in the Future. Those who are not believers but live in a world shaped by this belief begin to construct alternative futures for us but don’t go back to hopelessness, they merely build bigger idols. No one can escape this infectious hope.

I. FAITH: Celestaforming — 2,000 Years and Counting

By the dawn of the modern world, the reformatting of the Western mind had taken place making that modern world not merely possible but inevitable. The conceptual framework was in place, and no, this framework was not math, science, and the yearning for freedom, meaning and self-discovery. The Framework, was the basic ideas that gave Math science, freedom a constructive world to grow.

In 1500 if you asked the nun, the whore or the proper wife; the Lord of the Keep or wakened the sleeping town drunk from the gutter; the soldier, the knight, or the peasant; the merchant, the sailor or the traveler and asked what they believed, they would tell you these same doctrines that changed the world in the next 500 years. Every person, from child to dotard, could tell you these ideas and would be shocked if you asked if they believed them. “What? You think me a Jew? A Moslem? A Witch? An Atheist? A Gypsy?” And if you asked that outcast fringe of Western society what these distinctive beliefs were, they too could have told you. In fact, they were socially outcast because they did not believe that God was Three and One; that God became man, died on a Cross and came back from the dead as payment for their sins etc. These were not merely the arcane teachings of the priestly intelligentsia. For 1500 years, time itself was marked hourly as church bells called everyone to pray, remember, meditate and celebrate these ideas. Wars were fought defending and attacking them. This singular understanding overtook the Western Mind from 300 to 1900 are continues to transform the world. Over those centuries these ideas reformatted the twisted human soul to grasp and undergo an ethical-social morphing. The Oneness world of the East finds them naïve. The individualistic empirical mathematical world of the classical Mediterranean and its 14th Century Renaissance finds them whimsical seed-picking. The mysterious Order/Chaos Chthonic world of Ancient Civilizations would find one more ineffable deity to worship on the way to achieving a unity that absorbed all distinctions.

This series of lectures will look at the impact of just one of these ideas, The Trinity and the Cross, which is its symbol, as an introduction to all of these doctrines and how history is transformed and perfected by them.

The ultimate reality being Three distinct Persons yet One Being. The Human being? A creation reflecting that Trinity in His person and in His social order. This transformation has already recast the story told by the pre-Biblical (pagan) ethical-social-technological fabric of the human world in ways no one thought possible. Take for example:

* The historically unthinkable idea that a society, if ethically bound, becomes stronger by dividing the functions of government into individual power-centers rather than uniting them in one leader. This is the first political outworking of rejecting what Jesus rejected calling it a “Great One” concept of rule. Both the Logos who is the Second Person of that Trinity, and Moses His law-giver opposed central controllers at every turn.

* The historically unthinkable idea that the common person could be self-controlled and actually hold the “Great Ones” accountable to “the Mob” whom Jesus called His Ecclesia. Yes, 98% of humanity being illiterate serfs, peasants and slaves were called “the mob” before the bedrock of Western Consciousness was reshaped by Christian doctrine transforming them into churchmen and citizens. Who imagined that dividing authority into as many units as there are ethically responsible people could create a stronger united purpose instead of an anarchic “mob” needing the threat of government violence to unite it? (Other than Moses in Deuteronomy 1:13 and Jesus in Matthew 20:25) The concept of representative government is a thoroughly Biblical step (not end product) toward no longer needing violence-based governing at all. The enlightenment takes credit for it and to that extent those committed to Any-god-But-God (AgBG) have moved a major step toward Trinitarian social order that in time will need no executive representatives to unite us. The Divinely Created order designed into our being, irresistibly draws us in our basic humanity to love those around us, and fulfill their needs. (See Cross Diagram pg. 2.) Even where some want to remove God, they can only do so after stealing His ideas. Ancient pre-Christian religion (AgBG, Any-god-But-God) was hopelessly inadequate after AD 33 to persuade anyone when opposing Christianity head to head. Its recent success since 1700 came after it appropriated the ideas of liberty, self-control and prosperity found in Scripture.

But when they adopted the Sermon on the mount while exiling God from their philosophy, they found a new problem tearing at them. They had no way to reconcile whimsical utopianism in the case of Teilhard de Chardin, New Age, One-world spirituality movements vs hard authoritarian utopianism of Marx, Fascism, or Davos, and the American Way on the other. Those who steal God’s ideas become whimsical or deadly having no way to reshape humanity other than the executive brutality of government reducing those controlled to the “freedom” of automatons at best, a subspecies of whatever government controls them, or meaningless shells and Orcs at worst.

People in God’s Image whether in groups as small as a family or as large as a Nation State and leagues of such states are not designed to be controlled by violent force from the outside. Knowing this, the new post-modern enlightenment must develop a mechanism, theory or story that mimics the Holy Spirit’s heart transformation. We are living through the horror of their trial and failure in the 20th Century where 900 Million were murdered by the state, not including wars, or abortion in its attempt to create the New Man who could live in utopian peace.

* The Historically unthinkable idea that the world outside of God’s Covenant People would someday accept the ethical ideals of Moses’ and Jesus’. Western Europe and the Mediterranean were moved to become a newer, kinder, gentler humanity. Compare the Vikings to Sweeden and Norway. To compete, the Classical Pagans 1,000 years after their defeat turned these achievements of Christian Doctrine into the Enlightenment taking credit for much of what Jesus and Moses said, while rejecting Jesus and Moses as credible witnesses.

* Just as unthinkable, when one AgBG civilization after another started down the Moses/Jesus road they became historical optimists. This optimism inevitably flows from God’s revealed standards and actions in Scripture. Modern and Postmodern humanism lusted after the hope those standards offered claiming that even without the character of the Triune-God to give their ethics and hope meaning they would usher in a golden age of peace. Ancient AgBG being unable to compete with Jesus and Moses disappeared in 600 years. Then, after another 1000 years it found new credibility in the world by incorporating Moses and Jesus into their vision. You see? These ideas had begun to celestaform the west. Seeing their success, the AgBG accepted vast drafts of their teaching and buried their source. Today we find versions of the Sermon on the Mount promoting the state as the only way to love our neighbor. The deified AgBG state regularly guilt trips Christians for failing to live up to their own standards. This enlightenment adaptation of Jesus and Moses is working. On the Left, Christians are incorporating the State-god into a pantheon along with Jesus and empowering it to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and disciple our young. On the Right Christians believe the state-god is necessary to protect them and so they empower it with a military and police force to pacify the world. The failure of the enlightenment State-as-God is a direct testimony to the fact that there is no creative or neutral ground where those who look to Any-god-But-God can build. It’s all God’s dirt, God’s unity, God’s diversity He has built into His creation. This is the impact of the 2nd Commandment. “You shall have no other God’s besides me.” There is nothing in the created order, or in the human social order that can replace the executive and judicial function of a Triune personal God.

* The historically unthinkable idea that unimaginable prosperity flows when individuals ethically control their own property and they only exchange what each side ethically agrees to. The radically Trinitarian aspect of this is that ethical-economic division of labor produces an unmatched unity of the whole while at the same time producing the freedom for each person to maximize all that is unique and good about them. Unethical exchange is abhorrent to all except those with the might and power to benefit from it because it eats away the value of each person and destroys the effectiveness of a violence based unity. This Trinitarian reality results in a world where far more needs are met for each member of that society than anyone imagined before 1700. Today this economic unity in diversity and the Trinitarian ethic which drives it unleashes the creative genius of 8 billion people threatening the adequacy of executive violence based government everywhere to stay out in front and maintain its myth of control. No! I’m not describing Capitalism. Capitalism is the radical dualistic corruption of this Trinitarian world where goodness grows where people meet each other’s needs. Capitalism suppresses this reality in favor of a dualistic concept of a world where one person can only gain at the expense of another. For that world only “might makes right” and therefore the executive is a necessary part of the rejection of Trinitarian Ethics. The same twisted fool who thought up Communism also Coined capitalism.

* The unthinkable transition to an economic order which to be credible incorporates central features of Biblical revelation: Whether Capitalist or Communist or Free Market, each by its own internal logic can only gain credibility by affirming a good future something undreamt of in any other culture in history. The concept of a world where people could be trusted to freely meet each other’s needs is one of the modern marvels of society, unknown as a theory in the Ancient world though it has unreflectively formed all trade on the personal level people trade when the value perceived by each side is roughly the same. This only happens where the ideals of not harming others, breaking oath, stealing or lying are held. But to create a comprehensive system from that fact is a thoroughly optimistic economic concept, among other things the optimistic fact that interest can be compounded. Compound interest only works because things of value are built by borrowing money from their future productivity. This can only works if the future holds more value than the past. It is the belief that people, even sinful people, not only can but demonstrably were making the world a better place. Into this 1800 year old success story of Christian Doctrine, Karl Marx described that economic freedom as “Capitalism” and showed why it is not sustainable because of corruption (Inescapability of sin, another Biblical concept). He understands that people must be remade into beings capable of exchanging with each other without corrupting the process. The New Man must be created. Marx believes this is possible stealing the concept 1800 years after the culture Jesus Christ founded had transformed the thinking of the Western world at a fundamental level that made optimism possible on a personal, cultural and theoretical level. Optimism is an integral part of everything written in the Bible. I said Marx “stole” the idea because Marx rejected the Triune God as the pattern for his New World. But for the first time in history someone outside the Christian world was credibly optimistic thanks to the Christian Doctrine’s impact on the culture he was living in. Marx made the state his god to be the one that creates this new man capable of exchanging with other New Men without need of the violence inherent in a state, and these new men would create a world that no longer needs the state to control it. Both Capitalism and Communism are theoretical systems designed by Marx to appeal to two different aspects of what Jesus and Moses taught, but in both cases he made state violence the God that presides over the creation of the New Man.

This is a good place to pause this list of common place ideas and practices today that would be unthinkable to the ancient and even Medieval world. Contrast Marx’s Dualistic flat world of non-moral scarcity which he dubbed Dialectical Materialism, with a Trinitarian world. Trinitarian ethics places the future in God’s promise to change the heart of each person being sufficiently to make them the guardian of right and wrong thus making any sort of exchange possible. What is Trinitarian about these ethics? The Trinity is not an abstract idea like the one and many problem. The Trinity is three persons who must get along. We may take that for granted, but YHWH does not. His moral being is the character that we understand as law. His law is not arbitrary it is the only way separate persons can be united. God is the embodiment of free exchange to go beyond merely meeting another’s needs, but to fulfilling one another. This is the polar opposite of individualism in which each person does not reflect God’s character, but are themselves the source of right and wrong. The best such a system could do is to grant rightness to whomever is the mightiest. Trinitarian exchange by contrast is the embodiment of love and trust. A side benefit is it puts resources into the hands of those who can do more with them than the one who traded them away. This Trinitarian reformatting of the Western Mind is the single greatest source of sustainable growth in wellbeing ever experienced. It is the earthly reflection of the same dynamic of the Trinitarian government in God which created heaven and earth. It was introduced by this Trinitarian God’s law, not given to rulers and socio-religious lords, but to each individual member of that community in the desert, called out of the Executive master/slave social system perfected in Egypt. God said to each member, “I Am YHWH Your God, therefore you shall . . . .” God personally grants His law to each person in community in a binding relationship as the basis of Trinitarian human government among themselves. No executive state present. Not even the Priests mediated right and wrong to the people. To compete, the Any-god-But-God magicians must buy into more and more of what Jesus and His Servant Moses said. So the Modern world was taken over by these magicians who stole as many of these ideas as they could, took credit for them, and called themselves the light. Enlightenment. Sound familiar? Ever heard of that being done before?

* The historically unthinkable ethical union of a man and woman in marriage trusting them to reflecting the Triune God, not their parents, society or friends. “A man shall leave his father and mother.” This union creates a stronger whole than either of the parts on their own or under parental authority. In doing so it creates stronger parts to the union than either would be alone. The union multiplying responsible family units accomplished exponentially more than either of them alone or under their parents. Everyone is made stronger, better, fuller when the 20 year maturation of the child and 40 year maturation of the children takes place in that trusting lovers’ union we call “Family.”. Both Puritans and Quakers were in the forefront of this historically radical concept stemming from the One Flesh of Genesis 2. Marriage is for lovers called “Sweethearts” — a term they coined. Love as an ethical, binding, uniting force that gives without physical threat, with an oath, without stealing what is unique to the beloved and without lying is Trinitarian to the core. Only a dim approximation exists outside Gods’s 3 in 1 example. The Trust necessary for that love to be received is the other side of the bond. Love drawing two to become one flesh is the spiritual structure of the Trinitarian God creating social order in His image transcending any sin. This Trinitarian Love-Trust fulfills all who are shaped by it. It buries the alternative premodern ideal of socially controlling the marriage on the one hand, or the postmodern idea of the individual in ultimate control fucking whom they can. Marriage is Trinitarian. Forsaking all others, one man and one woman become One. In fact it is the defining point of the 7th commandment — Keeping your word is Fidelity. Breaking your word is Adultery.

* The historically peculiar idea that an individual is both an Identity, as well as one who reflects on their own Identity and both together are also the Identity. It is historically unique that this concept of identity finds its freedom in the ethics of God’s law, not unbounded choice. It is not that this peculiar reality wasn’t noticed in the past and in other cultures. It was only after the Trinitarian concept had reformatted the Western mind did this idea rest comfortably as an inescapable reality reflecting God’s Image in each of us and we could begin to study the mystery of personal identity. Unbelieving Psychology tried to flatten this dynamic out into competing poles and extremes or triads pulling at us. As much as anything this tells us how much the world needs and is ready for this Triune Vision of God: first bringing all the social sciences into being and now bringing order to them. Though these disciplines were structured independently from the Trinity in the 18th Century, they will in time be restructured by it at which point the AgBG will realize they need to buy into more of what the Bible says and then take credit for the Trinitarian world as they have for the ethical world. But that will be a problem the AgBG movement will pose to our grandchildren. The idea that our “self” arises out of the conflicting vision of each half of the brain is a physiological snap-shot of that Trinitarian identity as the inexplicable things going on at the sub atomic level are a snap shot of Trinitarian Cosmology.

* It’s easy to scoff, “what is Christian about the West?” as many Christians today do thinking themselves radical critics of the obvious. The Christian West has secularized and become the bastion of transhuman individualism, they say. But the West has also been home to brutal Fascist and Socialists centralizers Like Hitler, Marx and Mao. How is today’s West the fruit of Trinitarian thinking? First of all, Secular individualism and Secular corporatism would not exist were they not a last gasp of the non-Trinitarian Cosmology of the Modern and Ancient world. To give you an idea of the power of the Logos speaking through Moses and incarnate in Jesus — even the secular rotting leftovers of the first civilization they gave birth to, known as “The West,” are the one place that 8 Billion unwashed hordes across the planet most want to migrate to. These hordes are not Trinitarian. But when presented with a world shaped by Trinitarians, a world where uniqueness as person does not fragment their unity, and their unity as a people does not absorb their unique personhood, these hoards are more than willing to leave everything behind and cross any country’s border legally or illegally to access the fruit of that Ethical Tree, even if the AgBG think they hold YHWH hostage or claim he has nothing to do with it. “Clutching at the [tattered remains of Western Christian] garments, the immigrants say, ‘Take us with you, ‘for God is with you.’” Zechariah 8:23. And you must ask, if Christian Doctrines and ethics are so unworkable, why did the Secular Enlightenment adopt them so fervently and try to keep the God who ordained them so locked away in the attic like the crazy aunt? We understand why they did it, but you also have to ask, why did Christians adopt that sort of two or three story house as their cosmology of sacred and secular? That house is Any-god-But-God architecture to the core.

Some object that the historical processes that made the Trinity and other Christian doctrines central to our thinking were in their day often defended by brutal and bloody wars, inquisitions, executions. But what should impress us is the fact that we condemn them on the basis of the faith they established. These doctrines give birth to world-changing faith, hope and Love.

Be humble with me a minute. In their day they believed themselves to be the pinnacle of the same faith as ours. Shouldn’t this challenge us to reflect on how we, think of ourselves as the “real pinnacle” just like they did. Shouldn’t this humble us to think that though we share their doctrine and their optimism, the future generations who grow out of that doctrine’s optimism as we did from theirs, will see us to be as far away from where God is taking us as we judge our forebearers to have been. But it will be the clarification of the same story clarifying this doctrine we live out through time.

These basic doctrines of Scripture are compelling, causing Zechariah to predict that once God is unleashed in the world, “Ten Gentiles would grab hold the cloak of one Jew and say, ‘Take us with you for God is with you.’” Moses, so blown away by the potential of this code entrusted to him personally by YHWH, realized that the productivity would be unthinkable to the ancient world. 165 days out of the year would be feast days, holidays, and road-trip-weeks to festivals where they rejoice with all their heart with all their family, with their poor pastors and aliens in their town and their employees all of whom they bring along. Then a week’s road trip back. This productivity would permit 1 year out of 7 and 2 years out of fifty to be free of labor and debt. God promised a way to work together that would unlock sustainable plenty; a world which contained that abundance; and the ethics to make its unpacking possible and fruitful. Jesus and His servant Moses are just getting started. To compete, all those who reject them can do is secretly steal from them, lie about it, and hope nobody notices.

The distinctly Christian understanding of the basic issues of Human experience aren’t abstractions. They have literally reshaped the lives and social order of the entire planet, even social orders and cultures that have no Christian background at all. Once put into effect the world says, “I don’t care what it is or how it got here, I want that!!” The thinkers then reproduce as much of it as they can take credit for. At its best we call them the Enlightenment, namely People trying to get in on Moses’ optimism. At worst it is Nietzsche’s Nihilism, namely people realizing that there is no center outside of God.

History is the growing acceptance of who we are in God’s Trinitarian order of Creation and how we live out what He demonstrated when the Father, Son and Holy Spirit created all things, became Flesh, took up the Cross, walked out of the Tomb, Ascended to Rule Heaven and Earth; and filled His people with His own Presence, the Holy Spirit, to prepare all things for His return.

If you want a glimpse of the future, its government, its human relationships, it is found in John 17. The Trinity as laid out in this prayer is both basis and beacon of History.

20 “I do not pray for these alone, but also for those who will believe in Me through their word; 21 that they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us. . . . 22 And the glory which You gave Me I have given them, that they may be one just as We are one: 23 I in them, and You in Me; that they may be made perfect in one, and that the world may know that You have sent Me, and have loved them as You have loved Me. 24 “Father, I desire that they also whom You gave Me may be with Me where I am, that they may behold My glory which You have given Me; for You loved Me before the foundation of the world. 25 O righteous Father! ... I have declared to them Your Name, and will declare it, that the love with which You loved Me may be in them, and I in them.”

History is the story of God perfecting the doctrines of Faith, Hope and Love as they work their way into every life and culture removing the need for institutional violence to force them into the warp and woof of human experience. We call this process History. Jesus called it making disciples. It is the story of the weight of that Glory that God’s Law and Grace from the heart bears up.

This book introduces the Crisis of the Cross series which unpacks the practical life impact of the basic doctrines of our faith in the story God is telling of a world they are increasingly Celestaforming. This is the Kingdom of God you see unleashed in the world.

II. HOPE: The Trinitarian God, His Creation & Image.

The Christian hope is the future Jesus prayed in John 17 asking for the close relationship between how the Transcendent Godhead gets along within itself, and how we are to get along with others as those who reflect His Triune Image. The Classical statement of the Trinity is a relationship of three distinct self-governed Persons of the same Being, whose voluntary love leads them to an ethically governed unity of purpose creating the Joy which unites into a full Oneness of fully separate persons. Around AD 250 to 350 they called this Perichoresis. (it’s worth Googling. It is the central idea of this book.)

From 300 to 500 the first 4 major summaries of what Christians believe emphasized that this is not a power-relationship where the Father controls the Son and Spirit to keep them “in His plan.” Omnipotence is a Divine attribute of all three not a specific hierarchical characteristic of one over others. The Father delights to do all the Son asks unafraid of manipulation. The Son does the will of the Father by no other force than love and faith. The same with the Spirit flying on the wind where He will, yet fully communicating the will of the Father and Son. They are neither irreconcilable fragmentation nor undifferentiated oneness.

Some reading this want to dive into the technical descriptions and arguments. Others who actually have a life want to know what this has to do with serving lattes in a Coffee Shop. In either case you are like someone walking into a smoke filled garage poker game. Some want to be dealt in and drown in the cigar smoke, dim light, bourbon and technical moment of the game. But most will quickly shut the door and apologize for bothering them. In either case, stop. Even if you join the poker game or slam the door, my goal is to get you to look at how these ideas reshape human order. Your order.

For instance, this is the ideal of Marriage — No power plays. No manipulation. Each fulfilling the other.

This too is the ideal of human organization and government — everyone joining in to make the world better without being forced or taking advantage of others.

This is the ideal of friendship, neither side manipulating or controlling the other.

This is the ideal for the market. You try to find a fair price for what you buy or sell.

This is the ideal of almost any human relationship where Jesus and Moses have had an impact. You don’t want a master/slave world, where terms are dictated by some disengaged master. You don’t want a world where slaves get away with whatever they can. You want a world of willing volunteers.

You hold a trinitarian ideal unless you are a self-styled “realist”. The realist says that’s all well and good, but there is evil out there and only the great ones can organize us and be entrusted with the violence necessary to stop it. This is a Zoroastrian or Buddhist understanding. But this view of God and evil is based on the idea that either evil grows to overcome the good in history, or that they both grow together in a perpetual war. What the realist denies is that God is moving history in a completely different direction where the Trinitarian Image in we share is the only cosmology of earth.

Those without trust or knowledge of YHWH, I AM, call all of these ideals Utopian except the Realist who in reality is one of them on this point seeing no hope but only eternal conflict until God destroys the world. To be believable, a utopia requires a Trinitarian ethic and ideal of social order to be adopted by each member of society. That is thought to be impossible, and yet that is exactly the high Medieval Age in Europe. Then in the last 500 years we have begun to see a change in the ethical and social ideals of the world, as we would expect if YHWH–I AM really is the creator, sustainer and director of History and is moving it toward what he designed it to be in the beginning.

Even Christians balk at the implications of their own theology. Like the AgBG world view, Christians can’t help but treat God as a mere actor in this world, or as the creator of a neutral world and people who are merely like Him because they have logic, or artistic ability or some minor attribute like that. They let the Any-god-But-God define what “deity” is. And so they define small and expect small and settle for small.

What I am going to go into next, is the YHWH – I AM as he is shown in the Bible, not as an exercise in technical pin-hopping, but as the designer of a world that reflects what we hope against hope it can be. That God is who we reflect. Therefore, YHWH, the I AM, is the pattern we were designed to follow for our own social governance — just as the Transcendent God who is fully One Divinity yet fully Three in Persons each fully sharing all attributes of Divinity; so too we are inescapably separate persons, on the one hand and yet fully Human in our being “bone of each other’s bone, flesh of each other’s flesh.” When cut we bleed both individually and for each other. We share all attributes of humanity as His Image — Made in His Image to be like Him. Though made finite, that Image bestows upon us as persons together in a society the capacity to achieve boundless potential within His Created Order — but infinity, or eternity, opens only if walked into it ethically, hand in hand with our Creator, Recreator and Lover. “And this is eternal life, that they may know You,” This is what Paul calls “the weight of glory” that Jesus speaks of in John 17, requiring an ethical foundation to bear it gloriously. “You are the Light of the world . . . a candle set on a lamp stand. . . . A city set on a hill.”

Trinitarian ethics? Yes, because they are the nature of the Divine Three and One. They unlock infinite, eternal, fruitful, opportunities building exponentially while multiplying opportunities stacking one upon the other, nestling one within the other. Our shared humanity constitutes an ontological union, analogous to God’s shared divinity. Likewise, our physical, gendered, mental, and spiritual diversity distinguishes us as separate persons reflecting the diversity of the Three Persons of the Trinity — we are designed to achieve unity not through external coercion, but through the ethical design of human reality. Through mutual love and support we fulfill the needs of others while having our own needs met by others. In the opening Diagram of this book, we are the circle of dominion taken to fulfill others, not control them. Our God does not violently enforce Unity among the Three; so too, recreated in His image, we embrace the freedom to sacrifice to meet one another's needs. The Cross at the center of the diagram of the Trinity.

This is often called the “Economic Trinity” when referring to God. Its financial aspect is called an “economy.” But that financial economy is only a finger of the universal exchange based on each person providing the needs of others freely back and forth. We long for it. It is His Image we reflect. Ethical unique selves, uniting in an ethical oneness, in as many interpenetrating organizations as we need to take dominion in the earth and share the fruit of that dominion with each other.

In such a world there is no need of violence-based government of executives to create the necessary organization to first take dominion of and then share the fruit of that dominion with each other. We are 8 billion people meeting the needs of 8 billion people simultaneously. Apart from sin, there cannot be too many people.

The Trinitarian ideal refers us away from both Eastern and Western obsessions with controlling central power on the one hand and unbounded anarchy on the other or some teetering conservative, liberal, dualist or egalitarian balance in between.

The story of our history begins with the Kingdom of God being the freedom of ethical judgment governing every organization we need. That ethical order found in Genesis 1-2 was broken. Its breaking killed the possibility of that Trinitarian unity. Sin corrupts the integrity of the person so it is consumed by the whole or the whole consumed by lawless anarchy. We were broken down to the place where the only hope of unity in an unethical world was power-based Master/Slave relationships controlling our corrupted relationship with God, with Family, and with State. This is what God turned our parents over to in the futility of their mind. And many still cling to it trying to perfect the corruption Christ Resurrected to overcome.

The Christian hope is not found in the purification of that Master/Slave relationship. Faith in God does not grant Master status or executive status to special Christian officers and slave status to 2nd class Christians and unbelievers. The Christian hope is in the Cross where we find the end of the Curse that comes with sin and its attending Master/Slave relationship which death brings to His Trinitarian Creation.

Redemption establishes the Trinitarian Servant — each person using whatever advantage their dominion in creation grants them to serve each other. Redemption removes the coercive Master to force that service. The Trinitarian servant combines both the submission and sacrifice required to do for another what they cannot do for themselves. Trinitarian leadership is the authority the servant has which must be submitted to if we are to be served. This is how the servant leads making executive leadership irrelevant. This is the governing order of Trinitarian ethics. It is True within the Godhead and reflected in social order — an order without need of a human Master to direct it by force. Or as John summarized it:

John 17 21 that they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us. . . . 22 And the glory which You gave Me I have given them, that they may be one just as We are one: 23 I in them, and You in Me; that they may be made perfect in one, and that the world may know that You have sent Me, and have loved them as You have loved Me.”

III. LOVE: Trinitarian Order — the Self-Correcting Code.

Love gives what sustains, repairs, endures. The Bible from beginning to end affirms this all-describing nature of God whose Love nourishes, builds, never fails. It is introduced to us as a separate creation with infinite capacity to sustainably re-form abundantly into every physical provision for our individual appetites and pleasures and Community. Abundance requires a sustained Personal Love in its Creators and Creatures.

This fruit of Love in Creation is followed by the promise that what ends such Faith, Love and Hope will itself be removed. “The day you eat of it you will die.” God is not promising punishment. The failure to Love and Trust destroys the future (Hope) and so God promises that such failure will not be the end of His story. He will kill it before it can kill the future Hope. He begins His Story of the history of the world with some final promises that those who stalk its future will be severely limited in what they can do. “On your belly you shall go dust shall you eat.” The bitter enmity of the serpent toward life will end in him and his seed being crushed. The enemies of the future are limited to perverting what Love, Trust and Hope provide, build and sustain. They can never lay hold of what creates a future only these things create. To mitigate the damage of losing Trinitarian unity God provided control to replace Love, and clinging to security to replace Trust. These are now symbolized by the sword to fight what fear and scarcity deal us — something the sword can never fully do. “Put away your sword Peter who lives by it dies by it.” The best then, that those who seek to build or destroy what is Good can do is take hold of the sword, the power to control others, and provide an artificial unity of a Master who protects, provides for and creates direction for his slaves — a future that is always stabbed to death by the sword that created it.

Having fallen by doing those things which destroy the Trust and Love, that is required to unite unique persons, this parody of unity and diversity comes to typify the created order. Some even look to it as God’s good provision founded in creation itself, instead of an iron lung or crutch sustaining us until we can grow to be what our created design cries out for and even the physical creation groans to see revealed. The only symbol of order which God tells us stands from the foundation of creation is a cross not a sword. The power of Love is to sacrifice what you might gain for the good that the other trusts you to provide.

The story God tells is of how Love and Trust in their restoration are marked by the glory and hope that attends them. Even the glimmer of the good that lies ahead for ourselves, for the world, and the story of history moving toward it, has everyone wanting to believe that the design of their soul and what they can build is real. It is.

What unleashes hope? The simple beliefs that reside in the soul that something we were made for — life itself, Resurrection — is both our future and also the reality of today’s issues.

Christians have always had what Israel in dispersion, under kings, and ruled by judges had, what Moses Had, what the Patriarchs had, what those who called on the name of the Lord had summarized in a simple line of an ancient creed, “He shall come again to judge the living and the dead.” The simple hope that Love and Trust give birth to. God doesn’t win because He is strong enough to destroy the world and start over. God is strong because He is the Being of righteousness. It is the Triune God who both reveals Himself as Three in One, embodies the Love and Faith that, created a world that is structured by that reflection of its Creator. Christians introduced the government of that Trinity in each unique person that overflows in a Love and Trust that knits us together and changes everything we know about our existence.

It took a few thousand years to begin to understand what God revealed from the beginning, which is the game-theory of self-repairing, self-sustaining and self-enforcing love which gives birth to fellowship — the whole which strengthens each part rather than absorbing them; To each part which strengthens the whole rather than shattering it. This is the essence of the Trinity’s self-maintaining nature and a steadily improving state of being in any social order He creates.

Is Trinitarian Order utopia or anarchy? Is the history that begins in a Garden walking with God and ends in a Wedding feast where God’s bride fills the garden-city-earth . . . utopia or anarchy?

Neither. Those are hobgoblins of Dualist/Monist social thinking. The Bible calls His Glory, Reality — The Reality pf God’s world lived in Hebrews 11:1 Faith, Hope and Love.

Let’s look at Jesus the author and finisher of Faith:

“3 And this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent. I have glorified You on the earth. . . . 22 The glory that you have given me I have given to them,” This eternal life Jesus is speaking of in John 17 has the optimistic future of, “The earth filled with the Glory of the knowledge of YHWH as the water covers the sea.” The fruit of this personal connection with God bears directly on the Kingdom of this Triune God. His Space-Time government begins in Genesis 1-3, It reflects Him, Three and One, whose glory we share.

The story God tells us is encapsulated in the two prayers prayed by Jesus Christ, “Thy Kingdom Come; Thy will be done; On earth as it is in heaven.” And the other we just read, “that they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me.” The government of the Divine Godhead is the government of His people. Not government of an elite either religious or civil over His people, but the government of self control within each person. The purpose of eternal life is also called, Salvation, Recreation, Redemption, Rescue, Rebirth, a New Heart, New life, New Family and New Creation: the Body of Christ, קָהָל, (Qahal), ἐκκλησία (Ekklesia). The Cross summarized this Unveiled Reality being the figure God places at the foundation of creation; at the high point of His entry into History; as the summary of the Christian life which overcomes; and at the consummation of all things. It is the symbol/reality of a people fit to bear the weight of the glory which self-governing unity brings. History is God making His people as fit for the 2nd Adam as Eve, (כְּנֶגְדּו kenegdo), was perfectly designed for her Trinitarian unity with the Genesis 2:18 Adam. He the 2nd Adam, we the 2nd Eve, the Bride.

This is why ethics is the next issue in the Creation/Garden story, as well as the character of God revealed in His Name later in that story: “I Am YHWH your God visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the sons to the third and fourth generation, but showing covenant loving kindness to thousands of generations of those who love me and keep My commandments.” I Am reveals His purpose in history. Mere innocence is necessary to bear the weight of Glory. But though it must always be present in the form of Trust it is insufficient to bear the weight of that glory itself. Innocence is intended to mature and bear fruit in wisdom and understanding of how to walk in God’s creation so as to meet each other’s needs. Innocence is the originating trust found in Eve and in every child. A person’s and a people’s ethics grows out of that innocent trust in the goodness and character of God both maintaining it on the one hand and healing it when damaged or broken. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is at the doorway of life along with the Tree of Life. As people grow ethically it determines their ability to bear the weight of reality. Those ethics determine how far their line will extend into that history before the glory crushes them in the third or fourth generation, or they become manifestations of that glory to the thousandth generation. In this process I AM, YHWH, moves all events toward the thousand generation fulfillment of Genesis 1:27-28 — a place of fruitful peace, purpose and plenty, the result of ethical fulfillment of the character and purpose of God reflected in their Image likeness as they unfold all that creation holds — taking Trinitarian dominion.

It is the ethical character embodied by each Person in the Trinity which directs the relationship between Them. It is Their love that drives it. As that love-motivated standard is woven into the space-time reality of humanity it becomes the only structure of human reality on which the future can rest. It is the nature and end of History. The following summarizes the standard causing the Glory of God’s and creation’s Reality that either consumes or establishes the work of our hands:

6- Don’t harm the innocent — It’s the seduction of Murder.

7- Don’t break your word — It’s the seduction of Adultery.

8- Don’t take what isn’t freely given— It’s the seduction of Stealing.

9- Don’t distort your story so as to justify harming others, to justify breaking faith, or to take what they would not otherwise give — It’s the seduction of bearing false witness.

10- Don’t break these internally where no one knows you have broken them — it’s the seduction of coveting.

Seduction? Yes, the vain hope that violating them can bring a future higher than belly crawling dirt eating curse. A future attended by anything other than God’s promised death.

Reject for any reason you wish this inviolable foundation and structure of any social order, any culture or family, any church or state even a business, a club, or a dinner with friends, you make that social order impossible. You live in a world where you cannot escape the reality of everything you have experienced being the simultaneous One and Many in both your person and society. This means you cannot escape the moral dimension of any decision made in it. You cannot escape how it shapes your future and how violating it makes a good future generationally dead. You cannot escape into any satisfying alternative explanation. You cannot escape reality. Reality is what proclaims the glory of God, crushing alternatives.

This Transcendent Trinitarian Ethical Reality is the precondition of what must be real for all you value in life to be real. Faith is not how you desperately wish the world worked. It is the world as you experience it whether you wish it or not. The Transcendence of those values does not lie in them as impersonal eternal truths. They are the essence of personal truth because they shape the Person. They are the story of personal truth because they are the only way unique persons interact fruitfully with a sustainable future. Go back. Review them. Can people work together to build a sustainable “anything” with even one of them missing? No. You can’t sustain an objective world, or personal life-order with one of them missing,

So how do we sustain the world filled with God’s Glory inescapably declared by every aspect if we cannot even keep a standard that is so obviously necessary to keep from being crushed by its glory?

This is why the Lamb was slain from the foundation of the world. Trinitarian Ethics are necessary for unity. Therefore, the Justice and Healing required if they are broken means that a moral world begins with the healing that Trinitarian Reality requires if it is to exist. It is why the law does not begin with these ethical standards but ends with Commands 6-10. These commands begin as His Being Itself. Beings in His image, we are all inclined toward them and all human cultures to exist at all reflect a version of them. But as noted earlier, they are impossible to live out apart from a personal relationship with God. And so every religion is formed reaching out for what they know must be there or their culture, their lives are empty.

The First 3 Commandments lay out that relationship of love — “Accept, Love and Respect Me, I AM without substitutes or mediators!” Is this not the ideal we demand in marriage of each other? The world is designed as a place to walk with God. Abandon the design and you abandon the walk, you abandon the purpose of creation. You will find it impossible to even think much less understand anything without presupposing relational Reality. If you prefer some other personal or impersonal Transcendence which tries bravely to tell a believable story out of what only the Personal Three in One is capable of telling, the alternative will twist, distort and end your world which cannot even bear the weight of itself, much less the glory of objective reality. All experience compels you to know this reality — a Person who knows you and makes glorious knowing possible.

At every point in Christian history where there has been a renewal of personal faith, hope and love in the Transcendent Being of a Personal God, YHWH, it has always resulted in zeal to keep His laws, and a resulting leap forward in personal and community freedom and joy.

Trinitarian law is not given in a vacuum as if rules are sufficient apart from the Love-Trust-Hope relationship with God and others. Only in this context do the rules give us hope that we will “know how to conduct ourselves in the household of faith.”

This is why the two summaries of Trinitarian Law are not legal commands themselves but rather the Love and Trust that is necessary to motivate us to embody the ethics guiding the give and take of love. This is also why the first three of the Ten Commandments begins with a personal I-Thou relationship which begins with personal exclusiveness between God and each person who would covenant with Him and continues by forbidding raising to God’s status in our lives any other created thing or activity, and concludes with respect for God in every detail of life because we represent him.

There is no substitute for the work of the Holy Spirit. There is no tactical replacement, no institutional replacement, no emotional replacement, no liturgical replacement, no ritual in heaven or on earth that replaces walking with God, living by His law the way He does, expressed in the fruit of His Spirit, Love, Joy, Peace, Longsuffering, Gentleness, Goodness, Meekness, Temperance, Faith, doing all without wrangling or malice. There is no holiness for us in God’s law without this fruit, nor are abstract principles the perfect form of truth. There is no Christian social order without the ἀλλήλων, (allelon) the one-anothering of grace found in the mutual debt of love. Yet also, there is no Fruit of the Spirit without Law. It is the Fruit of God’s Spirit that knows no other law order yet is out of reach of even the law if our embodiment of the law turns it into an end in itself, an idol.

If there is a book of by-laws for the Church it is in one-anothering. These 50 passages in the New Testament can be easily accessed by googling “One-Another.” The Greek is ἀλλήλων (allelon).

God gives us everywhere we turn a Trinitarian picture of the reality of our created likeness to Him. It is a Creation Order that inevitably presses all in history toward a glorious transformation. The Old Testament tells a thousand stories about how God in Christ Jesus is going to do it. The creation order is stacked against its violation always pushing every creature toward heart-faithfulness. Even the wicked work toward His victory as He stores up their wealth for the righteous who inherit all things. The New Testament tells a thousand more stories about How God in Christ Jesus is doing it.

This is Biblical Eschatology. Biblical Optimism not a handful of prophecies from the end of the story to be cobbled together in a procrustean bed predicting a thousand year kingdom with no way to tell when or if it has started. It’s a story of God designing a self-sustaining, self-healing, self-enforcing moral universe reflecting His self-sustaining, self-glorifying, self-enforcing Three in One nature where He can dwell bodily with us. His creation is a world that reflects His nature — where overcoming all obstacles to its fullness is inevitable due to His design and presence in us. Because of a relationship of life with him History is the story of lives flowing over pouring out in rivers of life.

IV. FAITH: Cross, The Symbol/Reality of Trinitarian Order

8All who dwell on the earth will worship him, whose names have not been written in the Book of Life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.

The Cross is the symbol/reality of the Three in Oneness of the Trinity. It both is the reality — sacrifice is central to purpose — and it symbolizes our reflection of it and the creative social dynamic that stems from it — sacrifice to meet others needs and to have our needs met is central to meaning. Only the Cross encompasses in both symbol and reality the ethical love-driven dynamic that makes unity in diversity possible in all creation, time and history. It turns all we are and do into a sustainable exponentially growing spiritual-social-physical order which reflects our spiritual-social image likeness to God. Moral Order in a created world is impossible apart from the Cross. The God of a crossless world would either be an impotent dither waiting for its forever creatures to act always reacting to their sovereign choices. If that god were a Supreme Being whether an Ideal, an Allah, a Prime Mover, a Oneness, or Personal, he would be Supremely wicked creating people for pain and destruction.

But none of these is the God of the Bible. The God of the Bible did not create a world where Moral failure could only be met with a sword, or stone, or burning with fire or a sovereign church or state. People, their churches and states do bring a measure of Justice, but theirs is a remedy that would kill those remediated in the end. “Put away your sword, Peter, what lives by the sword dies by the sword.” As does the justice or mercy provided by the sword.

Moral failure is met with the moral righteousness of God, the Logos become human in Jesus Christ. Not just human, but a servant. Not just a servant but on the cross One who gives His life for ours. But more than a ransom, one who pays the debt for, stand in place of, is punished for the sins of, His people also called, the world.

The Cross is necessary for there to be an ethical Creator or a Creation at all. Jesus said, “The bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” He did not say this as a remedy for sin. Even though it is sin’s remedy. His picture is incomparably greater. He said this because eating is essential for there to be life with or without sin. The Cross is, and symbolizes, that ultimate exchange of nourishing love, necessary in a world whose core programming is Trinitarian. The Cross is the shape of self-authenticating sacrificial love as necessary for two lovers, their family as it is for the world’s economy. It is how they work. Love’s exchange creates the unity Christ prayed for when he closed the upper room worship service with prayer. This unity does not come as a result of overcoming ethical breakdown. It is the original ethical unity making an ethical creation possible. Love doesn’t overcome sin in the sense that sin could rise to the point of threatening Love. Love is the original. The Cross is what the Tree of Life, looks like in creation before the loss of ethics turned it into a bloody stump of a tree in the middle of the desert which an unethical people make of their world. This is why “He is the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world” does not mean the world had sin and its destruction built into it. It means that sin never had a chance to overcome in the first place. It means that for there to be meaningful exchange of love at all there must be a willingness to do more than self-appease, self-soothe. There must be more than a husband and a wife, a Father or and a Son. There must be the Holy Spirit, an equal Person in order for that love to go beyond self-consuming perfection of Ouroboros — the Greek and Eastern ideal. The 2nd Person of the Trinity Jesus Christ is the fruit of that tree before, during and after it was withered into a Cross and then restored again to life by His sacrifice on it. “My words are Spirit, they are Life.”

In short, What sets the moral order of Creation off from all imaginary “God-should-have-done-it-my-way” critics, is that God personally pays the price to ransom His world. He pays the price of Justice. He doesn’t leave it up to a mechanical calculus worked out and executed by the fallen fools themselves. He rides the cross He asks you to merely carry.

This is why the central focus of every meeting with God is a Sacrifice, the consuming fire and a meal — His glory in a fallen world. Yes, if there is sin there must be some symbol of its reality, its wrongness and of its atonement that goes beyond revenge (human Justice in Romans 13) all the way to a sustainable Justice that heals, restores and brings life. For there to be life at all, and for this life to be primary, (not secondary like death) there is the reality of eating together and the personal cost, the sacrifice of making that meal and fellowship possible entirely aside from the sacrifice required by sin’s need of atonement. It is for Life that God prepares a table for us whether enemies are there or not. God feeds David the Shew Bread. But God also fed David from his mother’s breast.

The Cross of Jesus Christ is not an afterthought or plan B in the event that sin enters into the world. The Cross is the foundation stone of all creation making a sustainable moral world possible where people meet each other’s needs by sacrificing in order to exchange with each other to fulfill them with what they have sacrificed to create from their dominion of creation.

“The Foundation of the World” means, that even with no sin, no fall, no original sin, no corruption of ethics and the ensuing Genesis 3:16 curse on all human endeavor in this world; the pattern of the cross is the design of everything in the world and what we do in it. The Trinitarian ethics of the cross is the structure of all moral/social order, if there is to be any sanity or social connection to reality at all.

“Be fruitful, multiply fill the earth, take dominion in it.” we are told. The cross is the only way to fulfill that mandate. Dominion is submission of creation to the sacrificial service to, not control of, or dominion over others. It is the design of all exchange. Human social order is built on the ethics of the exchange of the cross.

For peoples and cultures to exist, thrive, flourish there must be an ethical way for each member to step into the dreams of the others and bring them to pass — a way for each generation to step into the dreams of those who came before and live those dreams using their dominion to meet needs in a way that creates a vision for those who follow to step into and continue the ever-growing ministry of-all-to-all. To accomplish this, societies are built from the foundation of the world around the idea that to rule creation means to find ways it can meet other people’s needs. Meeting needs inspires and funds dominion. Only God’s written Revelation tells us that our purpose is not to find ways to control others so as to meet our needs or force our solutions onto their needs. The story of the Bible is that where control is the passion, scarcity ending in death is the only result, and the Tree of life becomes a barren stump — The Cross is Creation’s archetype of nourishment, the self-sacrifice to meet another’s needs. The sword merely forces the sacrifice of others to meet our needs in a history captured by death and the sin it breeds.

The advance of death’s corruption is such that by the time the Word became flesh, the Cross had almost become a sword — its function entirely punitive with no apparent redemptive value. Even today, fruitfulness in God’s Kingdom still depends on the sword in many people’s mind. Are they optimistic? Yes, they all agree that their team wins. Usually by means of the sword because there is a profound doubt and ignorance of the pathetic extent of the only victory a sword can win. But Scripture stands. If there is to be a Christian nation, a political Kingdom of God on Earth it must be a nation of fruitful plowshares, not fruitless swords. To be Christian a nation must reflect a people for whom the Cross is their Tree of life. Only such a people will beat swords to plowshares.

A culture is the social fabric woven from its people’s lives as they simultaneously meet each other’s needs. A culture structures the ethics of God’s Kingdom into the warp and woof of the fabric holding people together at all. God made social existence itself to depend on each person’s willing sacrifice of time, effort, energy, creativity, and gifts to refashion creation into a form where their refashioned creation meets everyone’s needs at the same time. The Cross is at the center of what we take for granted as a mere “Economy” or “Ministry” or “Family” or “Business” or “Art” or “Government” or “Education” or “Science and Technology” or “Falling in Love” or “Keeping a Contract” or “Going to Church” or “Career” or “Calling” or a smile or frown. These things are the stuff of culture. Each exchange requires the sacrifice of the cross to bring life to others whether they have heard of the cross or not, What nobody has ever heard of from the foundation of the world is an exchange that did not cost anything. The Cross is the symbol/reality of charity as much as it is the symbol/reality of a Trans-national business as much as it is the symbol reality of a hug. It is the pattern of ethical activity meeting needs. It extends to all possible interactions of Humanity. All Human Psychological, Spiritual and Social interactions either carry through the ethical pattern of the Cross or are the corruptions of that pattern which Biblical ethics warns against. (see Lecture #2) The Trinity and the Cross are the foundations of social reality and therefore of the social sciences.

Apart from sin, God’s Mandate of exponentially fruitful rule, “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and take dominion of it.” assumes that we can freely sacrifice for each other to make that earth-filling union and fruitful-rule. What do we do with the incredible abundance of ethical, sustainable dominion? We don’t build more barns to store it. The cross is the pattern of finding more and more ways to meet other’s needs with it. Trading the fruit of the division of labor creates greater and greater abundance on the one hand which goes to meet the greater needs of those who can provide less and less for themselves. Christians who know their Bible should greet this growing interdependence with faith and hope. As specialization increases, so does quality, and so does excess value. This interdependence directly reflects the Trinity as well. It is odd that Christians are in the forefront of grimly idealizing those who make everything for themselves, as if the Gospel creates isolated self-sufficient candles on a glacier instead of an interdependent body. Their ideal is the family farm. They predict apocalyptic returns to the stone age. They abandon hope and faith in the possibility of God’s promised fullness of provision which the Cross apart from sin bears witness to. But also, they close their eyes to where the Cross even in a world of sin has proven growing fruitfulness.

Where does this despair come from? Not from Scripture. Scripture finds each part singing each line blending into the crescendo of the whole. That is a far cry from each part wandering off into its own individual corner whistling in the dark, alone. It seems like every time God promises another step in His plan his people tend to doubt His Kingdom really will come. Slaves in Egypt? “Moses you’re making it worse.” Wandering in the Desert? They didn’t think God could take the Promised land. Today? These losers cannot accept a God who is Lord of modern technology. The Trinitarian God of an interdependent future. No, they believe it is beyond their God to make it all work. It must be swept away in some apocalyptic event which they hoard their life savings to prepare for.

The Cross clearly fulfills the Cultural Mandate before the fall. After the Fall, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is corrupted to become a symbol of the Master/slave Relationship. The Tree of life is walled off from a world not merely in sin, but a world where the cross becomes the symbol of the Master’s power to kill and so control the slave. Even there, its tortured form makes the Cultural Mandate’s fulfillment marginally possible. It is still God’s design in God’s world that makes that incremental growth real. For this growth it is the sword, necessitated by sin, that turns “rule,” “government,” and “Dominion” into one person’s control of another. This turning the slave into the object of the master provides an aping of Trinitarian unity. It’s the best a fallen world can hope for. What Tolkien might have called, Orkishness. So strong is this corruption that even today most Christians read, “For if any cannot rule his own house, how shall he care for the Church of God?” (Which is how Paul described the elder’s task to Timothy), they understand him to mean that the Church will always govern itself by authority’s curse, in spite of Jesus’ words to the contrary, “It is not to be so among you.” They find only anarchy if God’s Law is internalized.

Yes, there is another way to understand “Rule” in this context. We look to Jesus who inaugurated this symphonic ministry of-all-to-all that is beyond what any one person or group of people was intended or gifted to control or direct by force. Even at its simplest level, executive governing belongs only to God. Moses and Samuel make clear that there is no other “God,” capable of such governing and certainly no finite king/mediator capable of imparting the grace necessary to order the earth by the sword. As David sang, “Who is like You, O Lord among the gods? Glorious in Holiness, fearful in praises, doing wonders. Who is like You?” David, the chief executive whose life and office made clear what such a mediating executive must be, also clarified why no human being is fit to usurp that office. There is only one God and One Mediator. When Jesus Christ ascended, He took David’s House and Throne back to where authority for God’s Kingdom political and spiritual is from. He did not appoint a stand-in. He forbade that sort of authority for his Disciples both at the Last Supper and in the street the week before. The executive substitute for God brought on by sin’s curse is the best we can do to imitate the unity of the creation order until the process of Discipleship Jesus commanded is fulfilled in the earth. The sword though preserving Romans 13 order, at the same brings an end to that order as promised by Jesus and Isaiah. The sword-based order guarantees that no one who creates with it can replace the God of creation, but will in the very life, culture, civilization they build become the force that kills it. “On your belly you shall go, dust shall you eat,” is another way of stating the future prospect of any justice other than the Cross.

The Triune Creator God, instead of establishing executive governors to control the exchanges making up our lives together, gives that controlling government to the people most directly involved in the judgment that, “This particular need of mine is what I want met by that particular sacrifice you make to meet it.” Or, “That person’s need is worth this sacrifice of my person and resources to meet it.” They reflect the ethical, “This is what I will exchange for that.”

This is self-government under God “where two or more gathered in His Name agree, I am there in their midst.” Matthew 18 goes far beyond Church Discipline, Punishment. It is the design of the Trinitarian Government in the God Head itself and it is our pattern on earth as in heaven. This is Trinitarian Government, The Cross, the keys of God’s Kingdom are interpersonal intimacy. This unites us to each other and to Him, “That he might fill all in all.”

The simplicity of Ethics lived by the Fruit of the Spirit in a government defined by one-anothering is the foundation of everything that builds the future.

V. HOPE: Abundance, the Cross and Trinitarian Order

Every human relationship is an exchange with the Cross at its center reflecting the Divine relationships within the Trinity. Two or more people deciding to accept each other’s sacrifice to meet each other’s needs is how the Cross naturally and most effectively describes the unfallen ideal of world growth and development distributing resources to those who use them best and storing value so the abundance is not lost, but made inevitable always reinvested. This is the worldwide significance of “Where two or three are gathered together in my name I am there in their midst.” It includes how the cross is the pattern for determining what part of that increase should go to each creative visionary (entrepreneur/owner) and what part of the increase should go to each participant (those who work for him or her) in that vision whose ministry to visionary and recipient of that vision makes it happen Each has authority to agree or disagree. Numerical growth from 2 to 8 billion or to 38 billion does not threaten the sustainable scale of the world of ethical self-rule where each works together voluntarily as One to fulfill each other. The Trinity’s creation is infinitely scalable. Without this Trinitarian design even the reality we live in every day would be impossible.

If all we knew was the beauty of the Creation order reflecting the glory of Divine Trinitarian order without sin shattering our vision, it would be hard to imagine the deadly load of guilt and shame of both masters and slaves which the word “Sacrifice” bears today.

Similarly, in our world defined by the awful guilt of sin restrained by the Master/Slave Relationship, it is hard to imagine the word “Sacrifice” meaning anything other than a vicious slavery. This is why we cannot stress strongly enough, Righteousness, Faith and the Cross do not need sin to define them. They are a design component of God’s Creation Order Sin is not. They are sufficient to overcome the defiling guilt and shame we bring to each other.

So gripping are the blinders our world puts on us, so great that deliverance — God taking our place, meeting our need, suffering what we deserved, restoring our basic humanity; that it is hard to imagine “sacrifice" meaning anything but His death for us. We don’t believe that even God could order His own Existence making Three One and One Three with anything but the same Master/Slave model.

Scripture says He does not order His Tri-Unity this way.

Your experience of yourself and God agrees with Scripture. You know no external strong man can stop you from sinning. Only God’s grace and growth in your life and society.

In the same way, when we hear the word, “Servant” or “Slave” we immediately link it to the master whose sword drives the servant to sacrifice himself on the Master’s behalf. They try to rehabilitate that relationship by attaching superior authority to it, or love, and perfect submission of the slave. They even quote Apostolic “I am a bond servant of Jesus Christ.” But Paul’s bond service, is a submission due only to God, not the pattern for what we owe men. Therefore, many cannot believe that within the Trinity the Father can simply love the Son and delight to do whatever the Son asks with no strings attached, no hint of being controlled by the Son whom the Father serves by doing whatever He asks. Or of the Son delighting to do only the will of the Father whom The Son serves with no need to be coerced. Or of the Holy Spirit depicted as free as a bird or the wind, and yet delighting to do the will of the Father and the Son in the earth, delighted to serve with no hint in Father, Son or Spirit of a Master’s scourge or a slave’s fear. “Perfect love casts out fear.” This vision of free unity is the vision of ethical character inspired by love. When poured out and manifested in the Creation it is the ethical structure of human personhood and organization that delights to fulfil the needs of others, needing no master to enforce it, no sniveling neck to manipulate and turn the servile head.

It is the sword wielding master whom the cross eliminates, not the love driven servant. It’s the power and authority to enforce submission which the Cross makes unnecessary, not the submission in love to be healed by another or to heal another.

People complain about the moral universe we find ourselves in, “Surely God could have done better!” they say.

Very well, think through what makes a moral universe sustainable, much less good. The moral universe you would create? Would there be freedom? Would there be the sovereign described in the Bible as filling all things . . . Alpha and Omega . . . All Powerful . . . Able to promise and guarantee fulfillment? Or would you try to have morality without Justice, limited to what only a sword can equalize?

Let’s look at the most fundamental human reality there is: we are finite and cannot meet all of our own needs ourselves much less our wants. So to exist, we must exist in relationship with all others. Yet you are neither spiritually, mentally nor physically joined as one. So as you imagine your perfect moral world, start by thinking of five things that such a world must exhibit to be both Good and Moral.

First, that each exchange embodies four ethical laws, don’t murder, break covenant, lie, or steal.

Second, these laws are not sufficient in themselves; they will multiply mercilessly or lead to ascetic disfiguration. They must be one-anothered by the fruit of the Spirit in their application, “My words are Spirit and Life.” Truth/Law (Reality and what we do with it) is clothed in Faith, Hope, Love, Joy, Peace Longsuffering, Gentleness, Goodness, Meekness, Temperance. Or this moral order only multiplies grief where torn.

Third, An Ethical World to be free must provide those who exchange with each other the authority to ethically judge for themselves if what they give is of greater value to them than what they get. Each has the privilege and obligation to use their ethical-judicial nature to determine what is equitable. This is not a freedom from ethics or freedom to redefine ethics. But rather the freedom that comes when the only ethical standard to specific situations is not only that standard that builds a world which can sustain and radiate the weight of glory, but that standard fills the center of your being instead of having to be imposed on you by an executive authority. “Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’”

Fourth, to be free embodies a personal relationship with the Triune Person whose character is the source of these laws we reflect. Living this law makes us free, or we become legalists, ascetics or anarchists — we decay into people who unhinge ethical reality from its source in the Logos and rehang their ethics on impersonal rationalist principles, upheld by imperfect applications — People who divide His Word-Being and His word-revelation as if they are two different authorities.

Fifth, there must be some way to heal the damage, tearing and death to the personal and social fabric of life. We call this Justice. Mere moral standards do not guarantee that they will be walked in. To establish a free moral order requires the Justice necessary to heal that moral order when torn and shattered. Without this healing resurrection, the end result of any moral world is pain, suffering and death. Any God of that world incapable of healing it will be considered either impotent for creating what he cannot control, or a monster in sovereign control cruelly presiding over the torture of His creatures. The dualist cannot get past this dead-god wall.

Trinity and His creation know no wall. The Three Persons are united to do what no one outside them can do and that is to pay the price of the Justice necessary to heal the world. If that is too transactional, the sovereign God must heal the fatal wound, and raise the dead to establish the vibrant life of creation — to establish His Glory.

If there is no Cross there can be no good moral order. If there is no sovereign God joining His people by taking their place on the Cross there would be no created act that would be sufficient to heal the standard of Goodness you claim for your moral world. This is why Peter’s rebuff of the cross was more than a kind wish that the Son of God not suffer. It was a direct attack on the very possibility of Goodness and Love that such a Tri-Une God embodies. It was a direct attack on the possibility of there being a God or creation.

The least understood aspect of Ethical-Judgments is the Logos embodies them and makes them the design component of a world that reflects His Being and Glory. The basis of His being is that internal Trust among His Persons which He is committed to seeing made the reality of His creatures. “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us and we beheld His Glory as of the only begotten of the father) full of Grace and Truth.” It is that Trinitarian Glory Jesus spoke of to the Father an hour before He was arrested, that “the Glory which you have given me I have given them;”

This God is that Being of infinite love who speaks to us in the written and personal Word. He is the reality behind the dim shadow we argue over in those problem of evil and sovereignty of God debates — “If God is Good he isn’t God if God is God he isn’t Good.” Shadow boxing.

A moral world and Moral God is only good with a justice that is not self-destructive if His sacrifice for it is the defining difference between an exchange that inexorably and inevitably builds the future and one that makes the future impossible. God’s Law, is the first written power point presentation of these ethics. The Cross, is the live worldwide demonstration of goodness. Both abhor executive government which in the simplest terms is one creature’s theft of another creature’s responsibility to judge ethically. The creature is entirely inadequate to exercise such controlling power without stealing from those he controlls. But for God, the embodiment of that power and authority, it is no transactional theft of meaning-purpose from his creature’s ethical judgment. It is their relationship that makes ethical-judgment possible.

In “The Land Flowing with Milk and Honey” the “New Eden” The Land God Promised to Abraham, God gave His people another taste of Creation’s Trinitarian government. This time lasting 400 years before they asked for the punishment themselves which God imposed in the break-up of Eden. There, as in Eden, they refused to trust YHWH, I AM, as King and chose to be in bondage to a surrogate whether one’s self — anarchy; or bondage to an executive with controlling authority — tyranny. (Later after return from exile they would choose bondage to the Law, Legalism.) Apart from the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit, Government could not be sufficiently seated in each individual to make anything other than an executive Spirit filled King a viable Genesis 3:15, I Samuel 8:4-7 option. Therefore, God told Samuel, “Choose a King for them as they ask.” Even as He told Eve, “He shall rule over you.” He gave Israel a King, knowing that in about 1,100 years He would personally take back for Himself the political kingship of His people because the law He gave Moses says God is King over Israel as in the Garden God designed it to be.

Then Pentecost happened. Pentecost is God filling His New Spirit-Temple which each believer becomes. This filled-temple is the precondition of a world God rules without recourse to tinpot executive mediators of God’s authority. Since Pentecost, the Holy Spirit in the midst of you has been syncing the world generationally, filling the earth progressively, sanctifying it. No, we are not there yet, but the celestaforming is well under weigh. Sanctification is the work of the Holy Spirit to set apart all things to fulfill their special purpose in a glorious union of heart, mind and strength.

The Kingdom of God is Creation’s only government. It begins at the cross in the foundation of the world. The Cross makes possible the creation which it defines. Philippians 2 describes a world where people with the mind of Christ, freely sacrifice to bring joy to each other. Kingdom government begins, with those involved in any exchange not with an exalted (or humble) executive authority telling them what to give, how much to give, and who to give it to. God’s image is the ethical design of humanity, investing each person with the same government found in the Trinity itself. In fact, He seats the universal government of creation in each regenerated heart now made His temple/throne room. He is taking His world to a place where each individual person is fully consistent with God’s Image. Each is fully capable of acting in unity with all others. This is not a power/authority to forcibly control others. Rather each is led by Truth in no need for a special rank to force them “to know the Lord.”

The paradigm of Creation’s pattern of government is marriage, the two becoming One Flesh. It is patterned after the Trinity: The Three Being One, united both in their Divine being but also in one holy ethical purpose uniting the Three Persons who though fully divine are fully separate Persons. This is the love story they tell. Two persons in marriage reflect that one in three union. “A threefold cord is not quickly broken.” Creation’s marriage before the loss of Trust-Faith (Eve) is the pattern of voluntary relationships freely organizing, freely submitting to one another to fit, designed, כְּנֶגְדּו kenegdo, to meet needs. They reflect the government of the Trinity as Jesus prayed in John 17 revealing the purpose behind Genesis 1 &2, “That they may be one as You Father and I are One,” but lost in Genesis 3, “He shall rule over you and you will serve him.” The first is Trinitarian bound by love driven ethics and the Cross. The second is fallen, bound by sword-driven ethics defined for others by the executive whom Scripture calls the “Kings of the Goyiim.”

The presupposition of Creation is that the world and human economy is marked by plenty, not scarcity. Dominion is given over objects we can control, not people. God’s Character, when reflected in creation is called ethics or Law. When driven by love, joy, peace, goodness, meekness, temperance and faith, ethical judgment unfolds infinite ways to discover how all people in all creation work together to unlock it to meet every need in an infinitely multiplying interlayered fruitfulness opened by His image in us to fulfill needs — a world of exponential plenty. Where ignored, twisted, rejected, shattered by casuistry or imposed by force, the same law results in dead ends — or ends in death. You can say it either way. The Sword-based social order of executive authority is only one of many dead ends even when attempting to enforce that basic law. What the sword gives life to by God’s law, kills that life by the same law. God’s structure of human order from the cross-driven heart is simply not the same as from the sword driven heart though it is the same law for both. God’s law was never intended for lawyers, mystics and ascetics, only for those bearing the cross on each other’s behalf.

VI. FAITH: The Trinity & the End of Days

Evangelicals have just emerged from a 150 year obsession with detailed time line charts of the end. At its high mark in the mid 20th century a preponderance of American evangelical churches insisted that if you disagreed with their chart of the end, you could not even be admitted to fellowship. The general effect of their belief that the Great Resurrection and Judgment Day was imminent, was to remove the significance for every moment of every day. Lost to them entirely was the overwhelming Biblical Contribution to human social order that Resurrection over Death and Judgment unto life is a story improving the world as we move toward these two great triumphs — as Doctrine perfects History.

At some point most thinking Christians trying to sift through the different philosophies of history discover that though claiming to be built on what the Bible says, none of them able to make their time lines work consistently.

Corrupting each is the idea that a few prophecies at the end or scattered through Scripture give us a time line of where we are in History. But there is one place they all agree, they believe God will win. Some say he wins by blowing up the earth and starting over or in eternity with the saved. Others say he wins by purifying history in the last 1000 years. Others say he symbolically wins to the eyes of faith. Others say he won in AD 70 when he destroyed the temple and the rest of history is . . . . Actually that last group has not been around long enough to know what or how Scripture applies to history with no future because every promise is fulfilled. But the point is, to be Christian is to be optimistic about what God will do. Someday, whether past, present or future God would be conquering the world and setting up his New Creation, the Kingdom of God.

But the Bible is more than a few prophecies. It encompasses the whole earth in every line, song, story and precept. Throughout the History of Humankind, God is bringing that story to the fullness of its completion, whether it was 2500 BC or AD 2500. Each moment of each life is necessary to be complete. It is not going too far to say the optimism of the creed’s Last Days statement comes more from the opening story in Genesis 1-3 than from Revelation 18-21’s confirmation of the opening story. The words of Scripture are optimistic because every line reeks of of a sovereign God who dwells personally with His people. It is the sweet scent of life. The Bible is not about how the world is getting worse and worse, but about the irrepressible glory of creation’s Trinitarian warp and woof shining brighter and brighter. So overwhelming is this glory that even under the rule of sin and its inevitable Executive Master/Slave government, the place improved. Got better. The order God built into creation and into our minds and hearts to unlock its plenty could not be erased, even with corrupted ethics resulting in the Tyranny of the Master forcing order and unity into the Anarchy of the slave. The world improved. Then the story tells us that the world is restored by the finished work of Jesus Christ on the Cross. The way to the Tree of Life is opened and history moves to a world defined in every part by creation’s Trinitarian order. It’s a story of how sin turns the Tree of Life in the Garden, into a cross of torturous punishment. How the Cross is transformed back into the Tree of Life again nourishing us with its Fruit. The fruit of that Tree is God’s Flesh and Blood. “My flesh I give for the life of the world. . . . Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood you have no part in me.” This is the Tree whose leaves heal the nations, replacing the sword of justice.

It is the Table of our Lord that is the center of this story, Food makes up 1/5 of Genesis 1, It is the Test of Genesis 2, and symbolizes what is lost in Genesis 3 until the last chapters of the Gospel. Then true food is restored in the first chapters of Acts. Eating with Him indwelt by his Holy Spirit is central to every thing He does to sustain and change that world. Food is the center piece of Mosaic Worship, and of meetings between God and man. By contrast, dirt is the food of the serpent, who slithers along impotent having no part of this growing glory. Glory only gives him greater opportunity to corrupt. In the enlightenment world the best he can do is pretend he can grant us the future. Until then he fought against his seed even having a concept of the future that is relevant to where they are. Now he is forced to admit there is a future and so He invents dozens of false futures as if anything in creation could support a future that denies the Trinitarian wholeness of Who God is and what He created.

It is worth asking why all speculators on the end times end up optimistic. Why is there no position that concludes from the jumble that not even God can save? They treat their interpretations of verses like a jigsaw puzzle of “prophetic pictures” of that end time that needs deciphering like a treasure map. Putting “Millennial” into their names binds them to an all too brief procrustean thousand year grid to plot our end time coordinates. We fit the jigsaw pieces into it, indifferent to the rest of Scripture. But it is the rest of Scripture which has already revealed the optimism. They don’t know why but they are predisposed to think God wins. This is because the calculus of Scripture is not so much for where or when we are, but rather to evaluate what must be done wherever and whenever we are, in the Celestaforming of the earth. “32The sons of Issachar…had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do.”

It is the optimism of Genesis 1-3 that leads us out of that internecine labyrinth of jigsaw puzzle speculation. It is the optimism of Moses pointing to a law that created unimaginably productive wealth. The optimism of God’s ethics caused him to leave the 40 years childhood grooming of Executive Egypt to found a society leading to Ephesians 4 adults, no executives officers needed, only the gifted. Productive plenty? Enough to support a third of the year to rest and rejoice. We recreate the original purpose and design Christ spoke into the original creation. He promised its ethical development creates abundance that is still throbbing today with life and growing.

Perhaps the greatest proof of the futility of today’s end times thinking is the simple exegetical/historical fact that if we tear these prophecies from the context of the flow of the story of Biblical History as if their only purpose is a secret window on the end, they will conclusively support 3 or 4 contradictory “secret windows.”

Their approach undermines how Scripture tells us to understand our times, and all times in the context of Scripture’s Genesis-Revelation optimism. See time from the Bible’s perspective and you will be able to learn what these prophetic stories are actually saying both about the end of the world and the meaning of your life today which will surely end soon incorporating you into the rest of God’s story. The judgment that is coming incorporates all of the preliminary judgments his people make every day. Remove the future? Remove final ethical judgment? And you remove the meaning, purpose context of today judgments.

These prophecies are pictures of the confidence in all circumstances surrounding God’s inexorable plan to move your life and all of history through your life to produce the Resurrection and Judgment both in your life, and in the sweep of His creation after you. God will resurrect, judge and restore what His original threat took away: “The day you eat it you will die.” Becomes in Christ, “Lest a grain of wheat fall to the ground and die it abides alone, but if it dies it will bear much fruit.” And “of the increase of His Kingdom and peace there will be no end.” Moses incorporated the original story of the curse showing how He would change the entire nature of sacrifice and death into one of increase and plenty. Jesus is the increase and plenty God promised through Moses. Christian Eschatology is about dying and being raised back to life, replacing the executive order-keeping curse with a life of self-control nourished by the restored fruit of the Tree of Life, the Cross, “My flesh is given for the life of the world.” “That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his death;” “Showing covenant love to a thousand generations of those who love me.” The Bible recounts how He sustained history through that time of living death which turned the prosperity and plenty of creation’s order into a gasping, grasping desert of pain, scarcity and frustration both in the unique gifting and calling of each person as well as in their society together — all of it cursed by the executive sword-based dominion/control over each other made necessary by the reign of death and from death, Sin. All of it redeemed by the Cross to its original purpose and glory both in each life and in their reach together with all others through History.

Scripture reveals a God who builds His plan in the earth to change it from death to life, from curse to blessing. He grants each of us our life and time, to be transformed into a growing band of people who are His dwelling place and bear the weight of glory He has prepared for us. Each of us are a step closer in God’s journey with His people through Time as surely as they walked from the slavery of Egypt, baptized at the outset, through the desert to the promised land. This is what Christ would do in the earth as we enter His Glory Cloud with the Prophets, Kings and High Priest of the Old Covenant.

The history after Genesis 3 is the story of those who break faith and are therefore cursed to build with sword-based executive governments. This makes it possible for their labor to succeed in the earth but only for a few generations. “I saw the wicked flourishing like a Green Tree, but when I passed by again it was gone.” “Visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the sons to the third and fourth generation.” “What lives by the sword, dies by the sword.” however, that, “flourishing tree” that “life of the sword” is real and “The wealth of the wicked” really is invested in the righteous. Executive government is the government of the sword. The story of the Bible contrasts these real-world efforts which inevitably fail to sustain the weight of glory, with those who seek ethically to be His dwelling place and the world they build. Each of us contributes a lifetime, an indispensable though small Spirit Filled part, to get there. Eschatology is what happens to those Living Temples bearing the ethical-judicial fruit of His Kingdom. Both the small picture of the eschatology of your life and era, (you will die) as well as the big picture eschatology where the Tapestry of the Trinitarian Unity of John 17 is made the end, telos, of our purpose in creation and personal life. Only a Trinitarian grasp of God can bring these ideas together — Only God is Lord of History. His Name tells us that History is a story of a personal place — creation, Heaven and Earth, Time and Eternity — where rejection of love and trust makes fellowship and ethics impossible resulting in the extinguishing of your future in 3 or 4 generations. This is contrasted with a thousand generations of expanding life, fruitful opportunity and emanating glory for those whose walk is with Him and in the ethics and spiritual fruit which make possible the exponential flowering of His creation into a fruitful garden city.

Scripture shows us that the future is the incarnation of God’s word in the social order of individuals, their families, churches, states, businesses, clubs and friendships. The future depends on the story told by the One whose Trinitarian Image we reflect. Our optimism has nothing to do with particular interpretations of what we imagine the end times to be. Scripture is the light God pours onto His people showing from a thousand perspectives how they win every day, the “prophecies of the end” are part of that light tying the end to the beginning to where we are now. Our optimism is based on the Genesis thru Revelation picture of who God is, who He tells us we are, what He tells us His relationship to us is, what He wants it to be and why we can be confident that He Has made, is making and will make all things new for one another. This is the Christian understanding of the Story God tells — History.

History is the Incarnation of Doctrine in the Earth.

And we will turn to that in the closing chapters to see how that process gives us insight to know the times so that we may know what to do in everything we face. Who to marry. Who to obey and not to obey. Who to vote for, or not to. What sort of changes we should support in law. What makes nations rise and fall. Who we should rescue . . .

Too many come to the same mistaken opinion for different even contradictory reasons that participation in the affairs of society is intrinsically sinful. For some it is because the world is sinful and passing, we look heaven as our abiding place. For others it is because our hope looks on high for its authority, or perhaps into the individual heart where the Spiritual Garden is to be tended. For others the world is intrinsically evil, the source of temptation and sin. In any case, they find it: sinful to vote; sinful to hold office; sinful to marry; sinful to be friends with those who are dying; sinful to have money; sinful to invest, or build industry develop technology; sinful to step outside the safety of the bounds of a Church building; sinful to do more than tend the responsibilities of Family and Church.

When you understand the times you discover that we are the one’s who should be most involved in politics, not because we are ushering in God’s Kingdom but we are discipling the world to move past the stop gap measures of political parties grasping for the sword. Understanding the times means you discover the future of faithful marriage and children raised in it. You discover the only safety any suburb and church holds, and therefore why our call leads to move (or at least reach) back into the troubled parts of society. Christians have the only foundation to both develop technology and industry and to use it in a way that does not consume us since we have the 2nd commandment to never let any created thing become our God and purpose. In fact we have the Dominion Mandate from the first Words of God to us to be fruitful, multiply and fill the earth. To find all the ways we can to sustainably put creation to the service of the needs of those all around us.

VII. HOPE: Understanding the Times: Trinity, Image, Ethics

32the sons of Issachar…had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do.

In the book that changes the world, a small desert clan is immortalized as those who had understanding of the times, and knew what Israel should do. Them? Issachar? You could scarcely imagine a less significant, less educated social group than the tribe on the outskirts of this gaggle of 12th Century BC clans lacking even a king to direct their lives. They didn’t know the end from the beginning. They didn’t even have a prophetic road map of where they fit into the end times, much less what would happen next. They were not in touch with the dead, or discerning the future through pagan magic seeking propitious “signs” of the times. But they knew that it was time to follow a woman into battle, something unheard of, a battle won by another woman who tricked the Syrian general into rolling up in a carpet where he was helpless as she drove a tent peg through his head.

When God speaks in stories it is not to confuse anyone, or reject propositions or detach Himself from an objective fact filled History. Rather it is to give to the wisest and the most ignorant alike something that to guide them does not depend on anyone’s differing abilities to understand, interpret or even read.

God knows the end from the beginning, but that is not what we have to know, or what he has told us so that we can discern what we need to do next. We don’t need an historical road map to know which events lead to which and from there to the end of time. We don’t need the wisdom of “our father’s traditions,” Lord knows, the sons of Issachar did not act in accord with them anyway. They followed a woman into battle, for God’s sake. God has given us the means to know wherever we are, whenever we are, what it is we must do, who to side with, and why. He has given us a way to evaluate which tells us what the end of those choices should be not so much for us to be accurate prophets, as much as for us to be a people capable of taking action and then being corrected. He has shown this not in a comprehensive map requiring the best minds to decipher and teach out of their insights into the metasphere. His stories put His cookies on the lowest shelf for any to see and apply. These cookies taste just as good in the metasphere too They grant even the wise the insight necessary at all levels to see and understand so that the thoughts of the gifted great ones are just as valid as thoughts found among those who can only reach the lowest shelf — the Issachar’s of this world. We act on what is in our reach, as did the sons of Issachar, confident that God reaches through us to effect all he planned to accomplish.

This is why the God of the Universe tells us stories in His Revelation of Himself before He came. Stories He lived when in the flesh and spoke in stories while with us. Stories we continue to live out today.

These cookies in everyone’s reach are called Ethics; Morality; Principles; Standards; God’s Law; Rules; Faith; Hope, Love; Long-suffering, Goodness; Meekness; Temperance — all the fruit of His Spirit filling His Spirit-Temples.

Don’t complicate it. They are equally in everyone’s reach because each persons involvement in the world is uniquely within their reach. When it comes to living with yourself as a purposeful individual, or living with others in any grouping or purpose, there are only 4 ways to give that purpose fruitful sustainability. Don’t murder, break faith, steal or lie, not even in your heart. (See Ch 2) See in the sick, naked, imprisoned hungry and alien Jesus the Christ — this is your reasonable worship. It is what Jesus did. We have no future apart from these cookies. When these cookies are the structure of relationships they open infinite ways to work together with each other. When ignored or defied, the sorrow and misery of the futureless end is in sight as God burns that failure out of His Story. “Visiting the fathers iniquity upon the children

Discerning how to apply them might not be as clear as we hoped. But they are a guide that even when misapplied can tell us or those who come after us what good came of it and how to apply them better. Ethics not end time prophecies are central to understanding where we are in history, where we are going and how we get there. God speaks through ethics to tell you where you went wrong, where you could go better, and where even nations get it right or wrong. Through them God tells you where the battle is, and what the sword or the cross overcomes. If you are the most insignificant youngster in Clan Issachar, you still have the tools to judge Egypt and Mesopotamia, along with Jerusalem, Saul or David. You can judge even your clan’s Judge. Judging everything thought and done is the duty and obligation of all God’s children, and the tools of judgment are those 4 principles given least as much as to the greatest. The Keys of the Kingdom are God enforcing His word when spoken by the least of these not the greatest. (Matthew 18:15-20)

For example, the centerpiece of that Law delivered on Sinai is self-control. Ethics are entrusted to each member of that nation gathered around Mt. Sinai, not to a set of elite empowered controlling officers of the state, or Temple, not even to Moses. “Now, O Israel, listen to the statutes and the judgments which I teach you to observe, that you may live, and go in and possess the land which the YHWH the God of your fathers is giving you. 2 You shall not add to the word which I command you, nor take from it, that you may keep the commandments of the Lord your God which I command you. 3 Your eyes have seen…” “you shall put them on your door posts . . . bind them to your forehead . . . and right hand . . . when you lie down and rise up go out and come it. . . . teach them to your children.” This was more than another personal relationship it was to be bound by the love of a Bride and Bridegroom. “I Am YHWH Your God You shall have no other gods before Me.” and later “You shall love YHWH your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength.” and in conclusion, “This is a mystery (marriage) but I speak of Christ and His Church.” No one is to love the bride in behalf of the groom or the groom on behalf of the bride. The false piety of refusing to speak His name was a subtle wedge driven by the enemy between us and the lover who died for us. No third party who mediates executive power between God and His people — not in heaven, among the Elohim, not on earth, among the executive kings or high priests. Our intimacy is on a first name basis, even a love name, given to us which no other person can know. There is no mediating office of prophet, priest or King. Not because Church and State are separated or joined. It is because you are the government of God in the earth and your future is to be “One even as the Father and I are One.” The River of life flows out of your heart-temple. There is no one in God’s law who mediated executive authority over God’s people to insure their love. And once in the New Covenant not even a special office of prophet, priest or king was called for. These terms are applied to each member of God’s family.

“My Kingdom is not of this world otherwise my servants would fight.” Jesus told Pontius Pilate universalizing a principle that we might have thought applied only to Peter when he tried to defend the King of the Kingdom with a sword: “Put away your sword, Peter. Who lives by the sword dies by the sword.” Jesus makes clear that when we pray, “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done one earth as in heaven.” We are praying for the sort of authority that the Gentile King’s executive authority knows nothing of. Executive authority has no place in the Creation Story, or in the world He is bringing in from heaven to replace the destruction of that place. “The Kings of the Gentiles exercise authority . . . but it is not to be so among you.”

In God’s Kingdom, even in Moses, each person was related directly to God. Yet there remained the question, “How do His image bearers relate to each other?” Again, Moses offers no executive mediation, only the behavior of each person from the center of their being. Only love structured by the care for each other, their life, bond, property and word as we would our own flesh. “You shall love Your neighbor as yourself.” “He shall cherish his wife as his own flesh.” Echoing the personal unmediated, obligation to love each other freely and meet each other’s needs. Marriage is the highest form of this One Flesh, Trinitarian association which these ethics echo from the garden. All human associations are to build each other up by trading gifts that meet needs as we would care for our own flesh. It is the curse that calls us to control each other forcing others to meet needs.

For all associations, from marriage to civil governments, ethical self-control is both the foundation of making them possible as well as the ideal of any organization when fully realized. Which is why every association (or government) can be judged by the least among us. Judgment is based on the unity established by free exchange. To be free, the exchange must be governed by ethical love vs the unity established by force, even if it enforces God’s law. From the Garden to Moses and the Prophets, to Jesus and His Apostolic witness the government of God’s Kingdom is found in the ethical self-control that serves and freely meets the needs around it. This is the Trinitarian government of the earth.

Whether you are judging individual families, churches, businesses or towns, provinces and countries, or geopolitical intrigue, or art, or food, this simple application of God’s Law will direct you to identify the future with this ethical heart. Those walking in God’s law, guided by His Spirit, sacrificing freely for those around them will accomplish more of whatever they hope to do. In doing so, God will bless their efforts and will push history, His narrative, forward toward the purpose for which we are made, the story He is telling.

Ethical self-control is not a point between the dialectic of tyranny and anarchy, master and slave. It brings the end of those dialectics. It is the ability to do a task and voluntarily submit it to the network of what needs to be fit together in order to meet the needs of all involved including the end recipient. A simple word for this is “organization” or “association” or “consociation” or “fellowship” or “covenant community” or ecclesia. It could be family, business, club, city, county, state or nation. It is the ecclesia of God. You might also say, in simpler human terms, Jon’s family, Bob’s Hardware, Swannanoa Ministries, South or North Korea, Swannanoa Christian church, Our Reading Club. Each can be judged to contribute to the future of the world whether in small or great moments by how its members represent together a life characterized by the Ethics that characterize the Trinity in its social unity and diversity and the government of the Trinity that makes God’s Kingdom possible. It is the Cross that measures each life and each Nation.

You don’t have to know the end from the beginning. You don’t have to have a mind that encompasses the big questions. “Teach them to obey all I have commanded.” How hard is that? Not, “make yourself indispensable to their being able to obey.” Take yourself out of the equation. “Teaching them to obey” without you or anyone else needing to hold their hand. It what children do, grow up.

Discipleship is building people’s self-control to be strong enough to handle and desire greater decentralization and the competence that comes with it and leads to it. Discipleship is building a people’s, a nation’s self-control to be strong enough to handle and desire the greater decentralization that comes with increasing ethical self-control. To do this all you need is the application of God’s law — Don’t murder, break faith, steal, lie — those four ethical principles, when internalized in each person’s character externalize the mission structure of every group you are a part of to reflect the growing sustainability of each member’s growing self-control in faith, hope and love and every fruit of God’s Spirit creating a greater unity.

No you don’t have to be the leading futurologist, Economic and International Expert, Ray Dallio, Henry Kissenger or any other to see what will happen among the nations and where you need to be. Reflect instead on God's Name, God’s Character, the Love that drives Him and on God's law. Then ask one question: “Wouldn’t the family, country, business or organization that needs less government to organize, control, protect or provide for it, be the country, church, family, business that will be more productive, more efficient, meet more needs, be more loving, be a kinder gentler place to be, and a fiercer defender of the innocent against the murdering covenant breaker, thief and liar? All in it will have a generationally growing standard application of dominion to their lives (standard of living) and will have more people in the world wanting to do what they are doing, to be in league with it, or immigrate to it. They will wear the cloak that “ten Gentiles will grab hold of . . . saying take us with you, God is with you.” This is what, “Be ready!” means. “Disciple the people’s and they will make every organization one that reflects Trinitarian unity. Don’t settle for less.

God's name: "I am the Lord your God ... showing mercy to thousands of generations of those who love me and obey my commandments." Produces just such people. The law He gave his people said as much, “ 6 Therefore be careful to observe this law; for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples who will hear all these statutes, and say, ‘Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.’ 7 “For what great nation is there that has God so near to it, as the Lord our God is to us, for whatever reason we may call upon Him? 8 And what great nation is there that has such statutes and righteous judgments as are in all this law which I set before you this day?

The government of Mosaic Law was not for God to be near its King and through the King or Priest to be near to the people. The government of the law of Moses is for God to be the executive political king and near His people with no earthly king to mediate between them, only a Spirit filled Prophet through whom He would speak to them. This was Israel’s government for another 400 years after Moses spoke these words. When Israel rejected God as king and wanted a human king like the gentiles then God visited the curse of Genesis 3:16 on them, until He came to take back political kingship over His people and establish His reign in all the earth, needing no other petty kings to build His reign upon.

This might seem like a natural place to turn to the question, “What is a Christian Country or State? But first lets ask, what is a Christian Family, the first government ordained in the earth.

VIII. LOVE: Children — Trinitarian History in a Nutshell

"In Pain shall you bring forth children.”

“Sing, O barren one, who did not bear; break forth into singing and cry aloud, you who have not been in labor! For the children of the desolate one will be more than the children of her who is married,” says the LORD.”

The story of Creation’s pattern of government is marriage. The two become One Flesh. One in their ontological being, both fully human neither with a gender-endowed, or image-granted authority to use force or manipulation (to take dominion) over the other. Both united in one holy, ethical purpose which included but was not limited to procreation and raising the next generation. Both fully two and fully one without mingling of gender or essence. We can call this God’s Kingdom order, God’s pattern for Human government.

This One Flesh union is patterned after the Trinity: the Three Being One, united both in their Divine Being but also in one holy ethical purpose uniting the Three Persons who though fully sharing all divine attributes are fully separate. The curse of the fall twists marriage’s reflection of this God into institutional power-control which became the government-in-exile twisted into the anarchy in exile pattern of all organization since, for the same reason. They alienated their Trust in God and His ethical design of human reality. This faithless alienation bred the only alternative union — Dualism pitting power-controlled hierarchy against power-desperate anarchy. Something in our marriages we are all too familiar with regardless of whether we think it good or bad or where in that procrustean bed we find ourselves.

By contrast, Creation’s marriage before that loss of Trust and Love is the pattern of voluntary relationships organizing freely, submitting freely to one another to meet needs. They reflect the government of the Trinity as Jesus prayed in John 17 “That they may be one as You Father and I are One.” He revealed the purpose behind Genesis 1 & 2, “And the Two shall be One flesh.” This Trinitarian purpose is lost in Genesis 3. “He shall rule over you and you will serve him.” Sin does not lessen the need for unity, it simply replaces the unifying attraction of faith and love with the command and control of force and violence. “Bearing the sword is not without it’s significance.”

The first government of Genesis 1-2, the seed of the woman, is Trinitarian. It is bound by Faith/Hope/Love-driven ethics and exemplified by the Cross — that love which sacrifices to make others whole; fulfilled; all they were created to be; instrumental from the foundation of the world; the essence of Trinitarian Unity. This is how a finite world can forever grow built on unwavering Trust into a world without end.

The second government from Genesis 3:16 to the incarnation, the seed of the serpent is fallen, bound by sword-driven ethics which of the central executive, made legitimate by executive violence, identified by the “Kings of the Gentiles.” God’s turning a husband into the family executive, His Covenant renewal with Noah and Paul’s connection between government violence and God’s provision do not prove that executive government is necessitated by anything other than the curse sin brings on. The Kingship he grant’s the men of Israel, is taken back by Jesus Christ 1,100 years later with the parting words, “It is not to be so among you.” The reason is because its purpose is only to remove the sin which prevents John 17 unity.

The Creation order of Trinitarian Government is out of the reach of those who from the heart cannot be trusted to act ethically with each other and with God. It was replaced by the master/slave relationship. A relationship designed for people who do not love or trust, or live by the ethics of the Trinity. You can have a revolution to replace one version of Master/slave executive government with another or even one that might be better, freer etc. But you can’t have a revolution that reestablishes that Creation order simply because we might believe that John 17 Trinitarian governance is How God made us to be and we prefer it. There must be an Ephesians 4 growth in God’s people individually and corporately to bear the weight of that glory. Just as there must be growth in children to stand on their own in fellowship with, not under the tutelage of their parents. Until then the crutch of executive violence keeps us from falling to eat dirt.

The story of History is how God has moved and is moving, shaking heaven and earth to reestablish that Trust based Trinitarian government in the earth and grow His people out of a need to be controlled by others because of their sin. This future comes from being filled with the Spirit they are given of Love, Power and Self-Control. Which is why discipleship not military conquest is the rule.

You can only take your small part of the world a little ways into this future God has for us. God designed the future to be reached through generational incremental transformation. The future rests on the challenge to bring each new infant from a state of complete helpless dependence on others to control their world, into that state of ethical self-control whose power is driven by Love, Faith and Hope, which we call a mature adult. The more morally incompetent a child is, the more authoritarian the control of their parents needs to be. Remember the principle, it isn’t mere sin that requires an executive, it is the inability to understand and live by the Trinitarian pattern. The morally immature are a danger to themselves and others however innocent (the child and the elderly) or premeditated (the criminal and socio path.) They are both a danger.

By now, it should come as no surprise: there is only one thing that all parents and experts agree on: the purpose of the upbringing is to produce children that need no external direction to choose and do what is good.

As the fallen marriage and family is the common metaphor and symbol of executive governments, it is worth noting that the Biblical purpose of raising children fallen or unfallen is to take them from complete physical and moral helplessness needing complete executive control into complete ethical interdependence without losing that newborn’s Trust and Faith — without which they cannot see God.” Paul said, the purpose of leadership and gifts is that those who are led — the household of Trust and Faith we call the “Congregation” or Assembly,” the ecclesia starts just like your own children and the purpose of it is for all of us in that household of faith to “no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting,” Paul says the goal of fellowship is to want the same growth from ethical immaturity that needs a controlling executive into the ethical self-control of the mature needing no human executive parent to think and act in their place.

This is in fact the foundational challenge of all social groups, growing the next generation from total executive dependence into a fully integrated life with others. The more ethically self-controlled each member of a group is, the less dictatorial, managerial, power-based direction from the leaders of the group are needed to control them. It is as true in the cub scouts as it is in the United Nations. The more ethically self-controlled the member, the less state executive apparatus is needed to control them. The smaller and less invasive the state (or cub scout den-mother) needs to be. The converse is true. The less self-controlled the member, the more controlling the governor needs to be. Again, the same can be said for business, church and of course the family, even a crime family who require intense moral self-control between family members. It goes without saying that all of the effort once put into control of those lacking self control is now channeled into finding more and better ways to meet needs.

Sin is any action (even if unintentional) that blocks Trinitarian unity and personal uniqueness (see chapter II). Nurturing children is not some special task brought on by sin. Regardless of one’s view of the source or definition of sin, it is always true even in a sinless world that the infant is born morally and physically unable to care for themselves. This makes them a threat to themselves and as they grow, a threat to others. The parenting task is to take executive control of a child from conception (or the child will die) and protect them and those around them appropriately through each level of growth while they learn how to take ethical responsibility for themselves and others. The goal in 15-20 years is that they take ethical and physical self-control of their own lives and no longer be a moral or physical threat to themselves and others. They won’t need and should not want an executive parent at this point. “The man shall leave his parents and be joined to His wife.” The mature adult does benefit from and greatly enjoys an honorable elder parent for fellowship and wisdom.

Each person born, is designed to ethically progress in both who they are and where they are into a better and better person and place over their lifespan. They are designed by God to be discipled by their parents from a state of utter moral and physical dependence on executive leader(s) into a state of responsible self-sustaining ethical living from the heart. A part of the community of God. The need for physical restraint or punishment is only legitimated by the measure of sinful threat they represent in any given situation.

According to the name of God, the world is expected to develop over the next 1,000 generations which means developing 1,000 new generations of people every 20-40 years from scratch to maturity. Whether taken literally or figuratively, that's a long, long time to develop a plan. God did not design the transformation of His creation to be quick, unstable and simplistic.

When raising children, Executive government is central to the early stages whether or not the world is Fallen or Unfallen. Sin is not what makes executive disciplinary control of the master/slave relationship inevitable. Any person who lacks ethical self-control is a danger to himself or others who must be protected. That person needs an executive in his life. One of the responsibilities of maturity is to provide executive protection for Children and the elderly, the mentally handicapped and the criminal who because of their moral situation require an executive to protect themselves and others. The first three are not necessarily intentionally immoral but are no less dangerous. The fourth is a result of the Fall.

The rest of this discussion will be about the unique circumstances every human being goes through. The child is helpless in almost every respect needing someone to act on their behalf, with only one exception one which Jesus says is the most important issue in respect to adult maturity and faith — Trust. Πίστις, Pistis. Faith. It is worth a word study since it is often confused with and limited to the sort of rational analytical decision making process so obsessing to the enlightenment and Pagen Greeks. But Jesus defines trust as a universal trait that we are born and can lose. Trust is not acquired through reasoning unless you are an ancient Greek Philosopher, a Renaisance man or part of Enlightenment Modernity. They theologies they foster know nothing of the Faith that receives Him without question. Trust is why Jesus can tell his disciples, “Unless you receive the Kingdom of Heaven the way this child does you cannot enter it” because “of such is the Kingdom of heaven.” And “If you receive this child you receive me.” Paul told the Galatians that receiving each other at the Lord’s Table is the essence of the Gospel and here Jesus says receiving the child is “receiving Him (Jesus) and Him (God the Father) who sent me.” This is the essence of Trinitarian fellowship it is grounded in Trust that embraces others and therefore a child is the best example of Love/Trust “With all your heart, soul, mind and strength.” Pistis, Πίστις, Faith, Love and Trust “without which you cannot see God.” It doesn’t come as a matter of disciplined exercise or learning. You are born with it. To lose it is to lose salvation itself. If as an adult God graciously restores it to you “Faith is a gift of God lest any man should boast.” Then like the Prodigal Son you are blessed to return to the steps God prepared for you from the beginning.

Jesus, Paul and James all said it was central to the Gospel. The infant’s Trust is the essence of saving faith. Their immaturity does not invalidate their faith or Jesus would not have said to his grown disciples to “look at the kids, if you don’t receive me like they, do you cannot receive the Kingdom for of such is the kingdom of heaven.” The rest of their upbringing is for us to strengthen and direct that trust until the day when the grown child lives a full orbed life consistent with his first faith and praise he uttered on his mother’s breast that Jesus said was perfect. That Faith and Trust that if he seeks, he shall find nourishment. This is walking with unveiled face with YHWH being part of that glory we receive from the womb.

So how do you learn to talk so children will listen and listen so children will talk in order to lead them into this world of self-control without denigrating the status they enter the world with? Even if you believe a physical rod is necessary, (God apparently found it useful) the purpose of the rod is not to produce an adult who needs to be beaten into accepting the basics of adulthood and then be beaten further so he will stick to those basics for the rest of their life. The rod, like the judgment of an executive with dominion over other image bearers, is part of what it means to live in a moral universe in which morality doesn’t make sense to the children who have inherited an image that to gain unity they must act morally.

This is the odd sticking point of raising children: how do you move appropriately from total executive control, which implies the even the possibility of a rod, to complete Trinitarian self-control — the adult building their own life and family which is a many personed unity reflecting God’s John 17 Trinitarian government in the Family.

IX. Child to Adult — the Pattern of Doctrine’s Perfection.

And Jesus grew in wisdom, stature and favor with God and Man.

It took you your whole life to get to where you are. When God became Man he followed the same course. We do not know what it meant for God to be a native part of created order, but clearly he created a place where he could become a created part of it. But a single cell and then grow? That seems like the opposite of our expectation of Divinity which should just Appear, Full-Formed Like Adam did. Or did he? Adam had no parents who needed to be prepared for the nurturing by gestation. No culture, sinful or righteous to grow into. Every event in his life, normal or unique would be a first in history. But once established, particularly after sin entered the world, this is how the God of the universe was fully Man in those first minutes before the single cell of a human being begins to divide for the first time. He was 100% God and 100% Man as much then as He is now, glorified seated with the Father. From that single cell onward, the story of God, the Logos, the 2nd Person of the Trinity took a very different turn. He entered into History becoming present to it, in a way he had never been present before the Incarnation. The Trinity now incorporated Human Being.

Love, Faith, and Hope make up God’s Character in eternity. For us in his image, law is the created reflection of the things that the Persons of the Trinity will never do to each other because it will destroy their ability to be Three and One to love each other and have faith in each other. When applied to our own created situation, ethics, morality and law are what in the created order make both personal integrity and corporate unity possible. These are the ethical and moral presuppositions of both community and personal growth. These are of the essence of the incarnation and the role the “Word becoming flesh” plays in our own fleshing out of the Word.

Now, God was experiencing Faith, Love and Hope as both creator whose being defines both person, community and as image bearer whose person and community were to reflect them. As Image bearer he was going to go through a 15-20 year process of growing up in which he would learn as a unique man what it is to be a man in community. As God, his Nature and Being defined “community.” Now he would discover by experience what God hath wrought.” This is why from conception to adulthood we see a snapshot of how God works in history. Jesus developed, grew in all human capacities.

Marriage is the primal relationship within creation bearing the same Trinitarian pattern. Marriage weaves a unity that does not absorb the uniqueness of each person but builds that uniqueness; At the same time Marriage is between unique persons who do not fragment that unity but make it greater also as they grow. Therefore, the ethics of this relationship (and all relationships) must reflect the ethics of the Trinity so that people are neither absorbed into the unity nor torn apart by their uniqueness. The same things that would destroy God, will destroy us. It’s why he promised that death follows their breaking. But it is also why he said that Peter’s temptation to him to avoid the cross would be a stumbling block to God himself. The cross is not the solution God thought up to deal with sin. The cross is how any failure to love or trust is healed. The cross is also ho love and trust is expressed even where there is no sin to be healed. Sacrificing to bring Good into other’s lives is the essence of perichoresis in the creation.

The fact that everything began with one family is not what makes marriage primal. Community of the family is primal because it is the womb in which everyone grows from a single cell into an adult seeking to reproduce the process. No one comes into the world either spiritually, physically or morally formed, not even Jesus though fully God and fully Man.

This formation displays in a brief course of years what God is doing in History from Beginning to end.

At conception the child is completely dependent on the love and faith of their mother and father who can only protect and care for their child by becoming the complete executive controllers. This would be as true in a world that is perfect as in a world that is noted for doing things that make both personal growth and unity hopelessly tragic. It’s called sin — harming the innocent, breaking your word, stealing and lying — the things that destroy love and trust ending in death. The amazing thing is, this growth takes children from being utter slaves to their masters, to complete emancipation from their executive parents. Their growth in self-control is growth in the ethics that make the Trinity a reality. The description of Jesus growing “in wisdom, stature and favor with God and Man.” Is the purpose of executive government. God himself cannot roll over, reach his mother’s breast, change his swaddling clothes without an executive to direct his path. Later as he grows to 12 he enters the discussions of the learned at the expense of his parent’s peace. But he still is not ready for what he came to do. The end result is an adult who can take care of business without the need of someone keeping them in line. Even if that “business” is redeeming and ruling the earth. And that is history in a nutshell. We go from innocent, to learning the consequences of Good and Evil.

When I first saw this, I stopped for two years to just meditate on this fact and what it means for our understanding of human government.

It’s not as simple as arguing whether a human executive government is ever Biblical. Clearly there are circumstances that call for an executive to override the failure of Love and Trust to inspire self-control. God was first to call for it immediately when Love and Trust were broken. “and he shall have dominion over you.”

Both Christian Anarchists as much as those who still think that ethical self-control leads to anarchy need to pay attention here. Executive government is not itself evil. It is an essential part of any moral universe that has people in it who are not morally competent. That is people who harm the innocent, break their word, steal and lie. They could be the senile elderly, they could be the mentally impaired, they could be criminals or they could be children. The issue is not why they do not exercise self-control. The issue is not their ability to be intentionally moral. The issue is not an attempt to distinguish between children and adults with some sort of mythical though legally useful “age of accountability.” The issue is insofar as they do not exercise self-control for any reason, they become a threat to themselves and those around them which makes it right to override of their choices and behaviors. Those people require an executive administrator authorized to exercise force to keep them from harming themselves and each other, and to repair as they can the damage they cause to the social and physical world.

The executive control is for these situations only. Its goal is to disciple whoever needs such direction to become someone who does not need it. And if they cannot or will not be discipled, to protect themselves and others from their lack of moral fortitude then force is called for to protect and provide for them and those around them.

So when it comes to raising children, it is not just the history of the world that is the perfection of doctrine. The history of each life particularly from conception to mature adulthood is the first and necessary stage of the perfection of doctrine in each life and in time the world.

How does doctrine work its way out into the details of a child’s life so as to lead to self-control? How can we as parents, as children, as aunts and uncles and friends in fellowship, participate in that organic growth from seed to fully self-controlled member of the human fellowship.

The Incarnation. The word of God must become the flesh and blood of our life so when we spend time with a child at any age, we learn to speak their language. We become credible guides to introduce them to God’s world. What is their language? Trust, Care, safety, strength, recognition of the world as they see it “while we lie down, rise up go out and come in.” As Christ learned how to see the world through our eyes and gain the credibility for our Trust and Love, we help them see the world through God’s eyes. The Incarnation is building a world of love and faith that can handle the crises of doubt and rejection which require correction and discipline. God speaks briefly of the rod being for the back of fools, and children who act in ways that if left uncorrected will kill them. But with or without a rod, the issue is how do you keep a child on the road of life when like Eve and Adam, they literally have no idea what certain “reasonable” decisions can bring either for good or evil? When we put together Proverbs with the Gospels we realize that it is the context of correction that is often the making or breaking of the Discipleship. The context is the time taken to build the bond of Love and Faith. Taking the time apart from any corrective action to be part of their world and look deeply into their eyes when you are not making a disciplinary point. It took God 30 years to build the context of his own life as Christ Jesus. Then another 2 or 3 years to build the context surrounding His ministry of the Cross. And another 40 years for the rod of divine executive judgment to fall on the back of Jerusalem in AD 70. Very little of that time is recorded, but in it God was at work looking deeply into the eyes of the world as he learned to look into eyes beginning with Mary and Joseph and in the end His disciples and the crowd’s eyes around the cross. Look into their eyes with the only thing they really need, the love of a parent reflecting the Love of the Trinity. That is what you really need every moment as much as they — the knowledge that you are both loved by your heavenly Father. This is the incarnation as we imitate Him making God’s word and love flesh and blood in the world of context we build for our families. It is the incarnation as they learn to live God’s word in the flesh and blood of their own history.

The Cross, Atonement and Resurrection. Paul pleads with the Philippians in chapter 2 that if there is any shred of God, Grace, love or mercy in them they need to have the mind of Christ. He begins with the incarnation — the Word made flesh is a servant not a master. He becomes the humiliation required meet that fundamental need of all image bearers, as well as each person of the Trinity. “Who is greater, the master sits at the table? Look, I am among you a servant.” That need is to Trust and be Trusted. When that blooms into ethical reality the Bible describes it as the River of Life and tells us it pours out of the sanctuary of the Holy Spirit — the center of your being. For God this is His state of existence. For us, it is that they be changed from the heart ethically and spiritually so that their Spirit born Trust would become the fullness of their personality in unity with God and each other. This is the nurture Moses spoke of not to women alone, but to parents together. Through humble interaction while lying down, rising up going forth and coming in this Trust each child is born with is to be clothed by instruction in and detailed living example of God’s Character. “Do not lead by authority, but be an example to them.” Is Peter’s teaching how Church leaders reflect our task in the home. Men have figured out a way to abdicate their responsibility in this from the curse onward by turning their gender advantage of strength and the survival tasks outside the home which depend on it into an excuse to avoid nurture. They turned the unavoidable necessity of division of labor for survival first into gender necessary roles then into gender requirements obligated by each rolls. Whatever it takes we will find a way to justify abandoning the nurture of the children who are the ones God gifted with the grace of Trust from birth. Their Trust is the Trust their first parents lacked at the Tree. Like that Tree they too will tend to grow up as twisted and as broken as the tree of life became before Christ hung on it to die for your child’s life.

Women though equipped to nurture in ways men aren’t have from the beginning abandoned this calling as surely as the men do as soon as they have the money and social status to do so, hiring nurses and nannies, cooks and maids. Do men really not have this nurturing capacity? Or has untold millennia of fleeing our joyful experience of it and training in it made us think as the homosexuals think their condition is natural so we think our’s is natural. The mother as soon as she achieves sufficient economic clout, excuses herself saying she is the administrative executive over the nursing/nanny/cook/maid staff nurturing the child. This is the same excuse men have used claiming that they are nurturing the child by properly administrating their wife’s care while they carry out their manly gender responsibilities. Deuteronomy 6 was not written to Mothers but to both parents. It is no accident that Paul summarizes to the Ephesians the transformation in the house when he summarizes the role of the woman as submission, nothing more needs be said, She has been the household slave since the curse. But the man’s role is outlined in terms of the household staff he thought a loving husband would place in her life, the washing maiden, the cooking kitchen maiden, the dressing and make up maiden. Wash her in the word. Feed her with the word. Cloth her in the Glory of the word. It is a picture of dying and living for another’s life as opposed to putting one set of slaves to work in order to free up another slave his wife. Healing the fallen Master/Slave relationship between husband and wife is the most powerful picture available short of the Crucifixion-Resurrection example of our Lord. It makes possible the Trinitarian life breathed into us by the breath of the Holy Spirit.

The story God tells of coming out of the Grave parallels the story of the cost of obedience, like His, leading us to join Him there in service, submission and meeting of other’s needs. What begins with the perichoresis between husband and wife extends to their refusal to hire surrogates to replace their perichoresis with each other or their children. Love and Faith, the sacrifice of giving and receiving.

The Ascension to the right hand of power to rule creation until every enemy is put under His feet. Not every doctrine works out into neat one-word headings especially for we who are exploring them in our immaturity in Christ. But we do what Jesus does. We take the child from where they are, and bring them to free self-rule over God’s creation with us. We equip them with the tools, character and ethics of rulers which is why God calls all of us, Royal priests, seated with Christ in Heaven. This is not what he calls a special few who are to form a leadership organization. This is what he calls every Christian. There is one King, there is one High priest. This is the reality our children are born into. They do not become royal children when they can figure things out. They are born in the household of the King. They are born with the faith and Trust that will bear them through eternity and back. They are born “seated with Christ in the heavenlies”. It’s party of why getting to the future is put with a past tense verb in the title of this book. They are born with the substance of things hoped for, the assurance of things not seen. With Christ we lead them to learn to make sound decisions fleshing out that Trust and heart-soul-mind-strength love that makes their praise perfect even as infants. As much as possible we provide options for them to learn to choose between two goods so as to strengthen their ability to choose the good over an evil with deceptively good aspects about it. There is a growing body of literature exploring how to keep our children on the side of God’s kingdom into which they were born by strengthening their judgment, not simply by punishing their failures of judgment through the rod, or sometimes harsher, lectures in moral philosophy.

You won’t run out because of something that happened next in the Theological development History which Scripture uncovers.

Pentecost, the Holy Spirit fills His Temple. This is no small moment. You will need the gift of tongues to understand and speak with your children in their language, and with each other when times put you all out of sorts. You will need that undying fire of a kingdom that though not of this world is very much in it, where God promises it will never go out because God has planted it in the root of your being from Birth. This fire kindles the Faith which from infancy makes your cries perfect praise of His glory and grace. It makes receiving you the heart of Christian fellowship from birth, “Receive the child as you would receive me.” Failure to receive that child brings the death penalty, “It would be better for him if a millstone was hung around his neck.” Worse than the death penalty, you don’t die, you must live with the twisting the rejection of God’s witness, your child brings to you, not even knowing why the judgment.

OK that’s all sort of a poetic way to put it. Clearly written down by someone who has never raised a child himself. But how does the poetry translate into real life. Why should we think the Incarnation, The Cross, the Atonement, the Ascension to the right hand of power, and Pentecost have a concrete application in growing up? It is because from the fall into Sin on we have not seen this relationship to God that saving faith which is to be nurtured, clothed, equipped, fed into the fullness of the Love, power and self-control God has called us to, “We are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to walk in all that he has prepared for us.” This is the honor of parents the child is to respect and will respect in the 5th commandment.

So from here out, I want to give practical examples of nurture.

Do we fight, “No” or do we direct the power of that sphincter to close off the gush of evil filth God designed it to control. But how especially when “No” is first exercised to oppose the very executive order required when a child comes into the world?

X. FAITH: The Trinity and the Christian Nation.

How would you know if a nation is Christian? How would you know if a family is Christian? A business? A person? Only one of those is a person. The rest are organizations, associations. What makes an organization Christian?

It has to be the words of the Incarnate Son of God, the Word, the Logos, which define what makes a Nation Christian. Jesus is recorded in two different situations defining a Christian organization whether Family, Business, Church or State when “he said to them, ‘The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them, and those in authority over them are called benefactors. 26 But not so with you. Rather, let the greatest among you become as the youngest, and the leader as one who serves. 27 For who is the greater, one who reclines at table or one who serves? Is it not the one who reclines at table? But I am among you as the one who serves.’”

In saying this Jesus is building on the language of Deuteronomy 17 the only place where Kingship is touched on in the Law God gave to His people through Moses. In Deuteronomy the Second Person of the Trinity specifically limited the authority of any “King” to staying firmly within God’s law and called deviation from God’s law the sin from the heart of exalting himself above God’s people. By definition an office is exaltation of the officer above others. No King is given Divine authority to go beyond God’s law. Even an Old Covenant King held no office of authority exalting himself above any Israelite. God’s covenant is with the people directly person to person, not through a Divine Officer of God’s court other than the prophet who has no executive authority.

So when you read anything about any King in the Old Testament you are either reading about a judge limited to judging. If he lusts after a grander title as in Judges 9: esp vv 7ff he is compared to the Bramble. You may also be reading about the line of usurpers who 400 years after Moses told God they did not want Him as King and so God established a Kingdom for them like the gentile (covenant breaking, uncircumcised) kings of the earth. “We want a King like the Gentiles” they said. God said to Samuel, “It is not you they have rejected, but me they reject as King over them.” I Samuel 8.

Any OT reference to a King is either to a Gentile King, a failed King, like Saul, a Usurping King such as Jeroboam or to David and his house who are promised an eternal rule, or to Jesus Christ the final heir of the eternal rule of the house of David’s. Jesus takes the Kingship back to Divine/Human kingship which Moses instituted in the first place. None of these speal of a Kingship as God’s creation design for exercising authority. In the New Testament there is no other King or executive established as an authority in any Kingdom organization as Jesus told Pontius Pilate “otherwise my servants would fight.” Jesus and His Trusted Servant Moses had no use for Sword-based control.

The task the OT Kings are given is a task usurped by the men of Israel who rebelled against Samuel and God.

The usurped Kingship God permitted and established was never to be a permanent institution for men to find who is the greatest and fill the Office of King. Jesus’s rejection of official authority is recorded 8 times in the Gospels. Reflecting Moses who functionally defined kingship out of existence in Deuteronomy 17:18-20. He provides no funding for such an office which in every government exercised by man has required the chief executive to support his rule by using violence to take money and possessions from the people.

The Kingship usurped by the men of Israel and established by God is fulfilled by the God-Man the Logos made flesh, Jesus the Christ 1,100 years later and never passed on. That was God's purpose in permitting the rebellion of Samuel 8. That we could all see and understand why this is not an office any man is capable of filling. Google Uriah, and ask him how a human king was working out. Ask Joab and Israel when a plague David caused wiped 75,000 people out. Today ask Marx how well polit bureaus make a people prosperous and happy.

Once filled by Jesus Christ, He made clear it is not the eternal creation order structure of any human institution that lays claim to being part of his Kingdom when he said, “It is not to be so among you.”.

It is God’s Kingdom with no other political mediators that is the structure of His rule over all mankind.

Most who hear this brief summary of executive authority from Moses to Christ assume that somewhere in the Mosaic Law and somewhere in the New Testament and certainly somewhere in practical experience or the Natural Law there are verses ordaining or setting apart an office for Great Ones to exercise authority. For an exhaustive study of this see Organizing God’s Kingdom without Great Ones: The Crisis of the Cross in Government

To be Christian, then, the first thing a nation would have to do is covenant with God’s King, Jesus Christ, and organize around His rule and authority. This eliminates the need for the Chief executive or his bureaucrats to have some way of being guaranteed to be Christian such as a theological oath to sound doctrine. Jesus rejects executive bureaucrats out of hand.

But How do we organize without offices and officers authorized to use violence — without executives and their agents?

The answer tells us God’s plan.

When God first formed His Kingdom at Sinai, God Personally “I AM” with each member, “YOUR God.” established covenant with them, not with a kingly hierarchy granted executive authority to enforce His Law. He established covenant with each of God’s people from Birth personally. Moses was a prophet and a judge — a prophet-messenger. Never a King. The people had the law delivered to them and were to spend the rest of their life studying it, applying it and judging by it in groups of 10, 50, 100 and 1000 and punishing wrong doers based on it. They were to know and apply it, post it on their door posts, when they prayed it was to be bound to their foreheads and right hands living and sleeping by it “when lying down, rising up going forth and coming in” and in all those moments teaching it to their children. Nurture was not the mother’s job. It was the parent’s Job.

The one time in that law where a King is mentioned it is to reign him in so as to make it impossible for him to be more than one of the people, a judge among judges.

Deuteronomy 17: “18 “And when he sits on the throne of his kingdom, he shall write for himself in a book a copy of this law, approved by[a] the Levitical priests. 19 And it shall be with him, and he shall read in it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the Lord his God by keeping all the words of this law and these statutes, and doing them, 20 that his heart may not be lifted up above his brothers, and that he may not turn aside from the commandment, either to the right hand or to the left, so that he may continue long in his kingdom, he and his children, in Israel.”

That is to say there should not be a special monopoly on violence or an executive office allowed to break the commandments in order to force people to obey them or to pay their taxes..

This second consideration reinforces the idea that a Christian nation is to be made up of such a people in covenant with God who make the Christian executive’s oath keeping or breaking irrelevant. The people should have no need of such an officer. It is their faithfulness and oath that matters..

The third consideration of a Christian Nation would be the glory of the immortal God being the pattern of God’s character which articulates the trust that makes the communion of the Godhead possible. That is the glory of full ethical

trust like a child, or saving faith if you prefer, that God created us as individuals and groups to manifest. This glory and the future only it can make possible was lost when we broke that trust. There was no other created structure that could bear the weight of where God was taking us. No other ethic, no other simple trust, no other relationship. The best that could be done to unite us was the inadequate replacements of God’s glory with a Master’s Control enforcing submission. This aped the authority and rule of God. The only alternative to slavery was anarchy which is the closest antinomian self-control available to men which apes freedom. This is as close as we can come outside of Christ to the willing submission of the members of the Trinity to each other which is the true pattern of human order and government.

Though the Bible records the requirement to submit to your executive governor, and has recorded much good that came from good executives enforcing unity by their sword. But the Bible has also faithfully recorded the suffering that the sword of executive rule or antinomian rebellion has brought.

Why is Xi + Putin irrelevant and short lived? Have you looked at Game Theory? It is a simple Q&A, Q. What set of rules motivates people to keep them thus making society possible? A. The set that cost people more to break them than to keep them. The incentives to break the rules is too high relative to the benefit of keeping them for Xi and Putin. Here is how a Trinitarian Christian looks at them — The Christian is multidimensional when it comes to the rules and keeping them (we are Trinitarian):

Dimension 1 — the set of rules is Don’t Murder, break your word, steal or lie. And Keep these from the heart a place beyond the enforcement of the external authority. “Not as eye-pleasers.”

Dimension 2 — *how* they are kept is often called the Spirit of the law but for Christians it’s Fruit of the Spirit that is the Spirit of the law: Love, Joy, Peace, Long suffering, Gentleness, Goodness, Meekness, Temperance, Faith. These are articulated in the Christian summary of self-government found in the one another (αλλήλων) passages throughout the NT. In Sum: “Take up your cross and follow me.” These Fruit rule out legalism, asceticism, along with anarchy vs central control as fruitful lawful social options. “Take Dominion”m is *for* others not *over* others. The ethical servant needs no Master other than Jesus Christ. Creation Ordinance is one flesh not he shall have dominion over you.

Dimension 3 — Social Historical failure of violence based Central Control is guaranteed. Ethical/Spiritual/Personal Game theory leads to Historical continuity toward a good end (Τέλος). The name of God expresses the cost of violating the law and defiling the fruit of its/His Spirit “visiting the iniquity of the father upon the son to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me” aka death. The gain of keeping law in His Spirit is, “showing covenant love and mercy to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments” aka life. What builds the future vs eliminates a future is expressed in God’s name. Central Control, the more central the social control, the higher the motivation to violate law and Spirit bringing death on the cultures so governed. There are other ways to become irrelevant and die. However. You asked about how Control Cultures die. This is how and why control oriented cultures don’t merely die, but fertilize the soil. The story God tells in His word is how historically in time God grows a world of cultures of changed hearts. These heart-changes lives move the social cultural traditions away from the externally enforced ethical unity of kings, warlords, presidents and CEO’s (Rm 13:1-2, 4-5) toward the internal unity of hearts transforming cultures generationally over time (Rm:13:3). That is, toward the voluntary unity within diversity and diversity within unity displayed within the Trinity. Each person internally governed by what we call God’s Law and Fruit of the Spirit. This is the heaven that any government in the earth is to reflect that Jesus prayed for in the Prayer He taught us to pray and in His High Priestly prayer which He prayed for us in John 17. This is the Kingdom of God. You might say, “Wait what of the individualism of Western Democratic Culture?” But by now it should be obvious, “Liberal” Individualism, Anarchy is no more an answer than “Conservative” Central control. Because of the same law and Spirit, the hand shaking Western leaders of individualistic cultures of imposed anarchy are equally short lived and irrelevant in the longer flow of history except as they fertilize the ground for the moving of God’s Spirit thru the next generation.

Even so when it comes to telling us what the future holds it always describes a way of living together that makes what the executives do, unnecessary, to be rolled up like an old cloak in spring and put away. Listen to a few examples:

• The earth filled with the Glory of the knowledge of God as the water covers the sea.
• Swords beat into plowshares.
• A child playing over the hole of an asp and the Lion lying down with the lamb.
• No one needing to be told to know the Lord.
• No one to make them afraid in my Holy Mountain.
• A Kingdom of God as a Mountain crushing the Gentile nations and filling the earth.
• A political estate ruled by the cross not the sword.
• an increase that shall see no end in peace
• Crops growing where nothing grows, on the tops of mountains.

This is the Biblical Legacy to the world — Hope creating history. History moving by God’s sovereign hand into a world defined and shaped by faithful Image Bearers in fellowship with God and each other, characterized by the Trinitarian structure and the joyful optimism coming with it. An optimism based on the structure of the being of humanity, optimism of the structure of human social order and a creation all designed by the Triune nature of God.

It is that nation, that peace which we work toward with the tools at hand being the weapons of our warfare, not the arms of the flesh. Jesus told Peter, “Put away your sword, what lives by it dies by it.” And promised Caesar a few hours later through Pilate, “My kingdom is not of this world otherwise my servants would fight.” Genesis 3:16 power to dominate others based on the sword is too puny to establish God’s Kingdom. Caesar’s authority is not worth settling for. In a few generations it is gone because it is the sword that established it. The lure of the violent short cut is irresistible and so we pour ourselves into the next election so that our representative can wield the state control of violence against our enemies.

So how can a small son of Issachar know what to do? Is voting or serving in an army or as a policeman intrinsically putting our faith in the sword? Our faith in the arms of the flesh? Our faith in an executive ruler other than God? Are we relegated therefore to the cheap backwaters of culture like the Amish, Hutterites and Mennonites?

In a two day period Jesus made three statements about the sword. We only looked at two of them. The first thing he said, though, was “If you have an extra cloak sell one and buy a sword.” there is a place for the sword in a fallen world, even in maintaining social order. But that growth of God’s Kingdom is not to take over the place of the fallen sword but to make it irrelevant. To remove the fall from Creation.

Just look at what The 4 principles of law say about what sustains the weight of glory, what sustains the future.

Don’t steal – taxation that is forced must resort to murder.

Executive government intrinsically murders and steals from its own people

The more it does this the more the unscrupulous will realize

But how can you have a commonly supported purpose unless we all agree to disagree and get one person who sets our direction?

I could give a reason why violation in a culture or law code leads to a breakdown in structure which leads to a corresponding crushing under God’s glory.

XI. HOPE: Holiness — Celestaforming Space and Time.

OK how about Defining holiness in terms of Telos. The fulfillment of the Clarification of Doctrine over Time. Such as the purpose for which you were created, John 17 unity with each other and God. The reason God must be “Holy” (Be holy for I am Holy) is because the ethical and personal dimension of holiness is 2 things

• “For I am Holy” Holiness is the minimum requirement for the possibility of living in a Tri-Une relationship at all. No member of the Trinity can do something that threatens their Perichoresis, their existence. Such as, harm each other, break their word to each other, steal what is unique to the other Person or lie about those things to each other. Holiness is the presupposition of Community.
• “Be Holy” So too no creature in YHWH’s Triune image can do these things that make holiness impossible and expect to unite with others, much less God. Holiness is the presupposition of Community. Holiness makes fellowship possible. Of course He must replace your holiness with His if we are to be His Kingdom. If He doesn’t do something to make you holy, it is out of your reach and so is John 17 fellowship and so is human organization.

So Holiness is living in your moment in history with the perfection of the purpose for which you were put there.

If you are reading a hard copy it ends with this note. The digital copy includes all of the paragraphs I deleted or significantly rewrote. I throw those to the bottom of the stack to skim when I think I’m finished to see what I missed or what the next essay should be.

From this point on I am moving out of the original outline for this series of essays. The original vision is to bring eschatology back from the futile pursuit of the last days that has led to the destruction of Christian Civilization and to a Technology that in a few generations will become a magical religion presided over by the new High Priests of a pagan world.

In place of the eschatological nightmare the Church has plunged into for 200 years, now, we need to embrace the simple glory of the optimism of Genesis 1-3 which flows through the rest of the story however dark and fallen it gets — the optimism of walking with God, and How God managed to make it happen. That, after all, is His goal for us, “I no longer call you servants but friends.” He remakes us to be his friends who can bear the weight of glory that becomes.

Once accomplished, this segued into a sketch of how Christian doctrine when lived out through history transforms it as the original quote at the beginning suggests, “History is the Perfection of Doctrine.” This is a much larger topic of which Optimism and Glory is all infusing, and an excellent point at which to introduce all of the doctrines the central beam of Glory refracts into.

So it gets fuzzier and fuzzier and takes me longer and longer to say anything coherent or that I want others to read unless their goal is like mine to apply doctrine to the details of practical life. There is a hunger today for holiness. Eliza Doolittle sang to her worthless suitor, “Don’t speak of love, stars up above, don’t say in words show me.” This is what we want and the overwhelming temptation of our fathers is to turn to the ascetic life of the fall that emphasizes our faithful adherence the second commandment, by abandoning God’s definition of holiness—be fruitful, multiply fill the earth and rule over it. This is not done by discipline of creation-denying rules of and magical incantations replacing the fruitful life, life, love, and prayer.

Summary of Executive government: The example of Kingship in Scripture.

Noa Napoleon Yes, "this word is fulfilled in your hearing." Luke 4:21 as every Scripture is fulfilled by Jesus Christ. Luke 24:13-36 "27 And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself."

How does Jesus fulfill Psalm 149? It is after all His Song sung about Him.

The Physical King it refers to is either David or a member of His line.

The task it refers to is a task usurped by the men of Israel who rebelled against Samuel and God That task was to defend as its King, YHWH the King of the Kingdom of God.

The usurped Kingship God permitted and established was never to be a permanent institution for men to find who is the greatest and fill the role of King with the greatest among them.

The Kingship usurped by the men of Israel and established by God is fulfilled by the God-Man Jesus the Christ. That was God's purpose in permitting the rebellion.

Once filled in Jesus Christ, He made clear it is not the eternal creation order structure of any human institution that lays claim to being part of his Kingdom King or Priest.

It is God’s Kingdom with no other political mediators that is the structure of His rule over all mankind.

XII. LOVE: Incarnation, Trinitarian Unity with Creation.

Maybe this starts the next Book done like this one except it is The doctrine of the Incarnation we trace in its transformation of Western Civilization.

Christian activism

Christian and politics

Christians and Justice

Christians and Business

Christians and Protecting the weak. Jesus says get a sword. Then he tells Peter not to use it. Then he tells Pontius Pilate His servants are not going to fight.

The Amish and Menonites and Hutterites.

Setting up a self contained Justice system can we learn something from Sharia? Not on the level of a law code but on the level of simply going to our own Churches for justice.

How Programming mirrors the incarnation of the word

Where we are going clarifies what gets us there and which movements of men move in the right direction.

We are moving toward personal self control according to the ethics that constitute our core programming or Image Likeness to God.

, in fact it inhibits it because it replaces the heart of meeting other's needs with the law of external enforcement. But violating God's heart-ethics makes executive government inevitable. It began in Genesis 3:15-16

God's Name reflects why: "visiting the iniquity of the father upon the son to the third and fourth generation of them that hate me."

To the extent God's ethical structure of His own being which is reflected in our being is violated, we violate the possibility of securing that future and wreak generational death and failure on ourselves and our posterity. Executive government is the best such a broken people can do

Do you want to be free? Prosperous, building sustainable lives and communities, then "make disciples of all nations teaching them to observe everything I have commanded you." As this process continues you will discover the Truth of Romans 13:3. That truth will drive the need for the government authority away and the poverty that dogs its steps, "Do you want to be free of the fear of the one in authority? then do what is good." Freedom from fear and freedom from want and need walk hand in hand in proportion to the good that a people does.

So, to evaluate where we are in God work in history, look no further than to ask how much central executive authority does a people need to control their lives and provide what their own self control expressed in their personal ethical living cannot provide for them?

But there has to be more to it. If we can’t know through a map of history, how else can we understand the meaning of our times? Is Christianity really a monastic, A-historical Amish seclusion after all? Have we no part in the cultures, politics and histories of the rest of humanity? That is the question of these last 4 lectures.

The Church’s three or four basic philosophies of history are optimistically aware of this future and integrate its optimism into their philosophy of how we get there and what we do now to be part of that journey. Each is optimistic after its own fashion but literally none of them believe that our History — the space time continuum begun in Genesis 1 and the Garden, corrupted by the fall and hope reestablished in Christ’s finished work on the Cross — none believe THAT history will produce that beatified world as the historical result of the Holy Spirit speaking through the Word to convert and sanctify individual heart by individual heart until all humanity can manifest that world. None are so optimistic as to believe that even God could rule the earth in this historical space time continuum without representatives who wield the sword in His name using authorized violence to enforce a divine righteousness. The necessity of the sword from Adam to the “end” is reality and it ends when this space time history ends. Which is why the Christian philosophy of History has always been disguised as speculations about the events of the end times, the bodily return of Christ, the resurrection, the last great battle followed by a new history in which the sword is not integral to its governing — then is remade a new heaven and earth.

None are so optimistic as to believe that the same history which Adam, Eve, Seth, Abraham, Moses, you and Jesus Christ stand in, is the History that is moving toward a time that will require no sword for leaders to lead in it. None believe THIS Space/Time continuum is the one that Christ died to transform and He will transform it without having to start over or slaughter every opponent in that day of the great and terrible Restart.

Neither Post, A or Pre Millenialists are optimistic to the extent that they believe the Cross not the sword will have the last word in a history that extends from Creation into Eternity.

Optimism — the idea that the Cross is the defining pattern of all human relationships and exchanges because meeting each other’s needs ethically is the defining pattern within the community of the Trinity itself.

Premills are optimistic compared to Pagans, Buddhists and atheists.

Amills are optimistic symbolically largely because they have ruled out the physical world as having anything to contribute to their perspective. Eyes of faith, baby! Eyes of faith! They are metaphorical optimists, symbolic optimists, and certainly more optimistic than Premills.

Post Mills are optimistic compared to Premills and Amills because they at least think God rules, transforms and redeems this History we live in. Their pessimism lies in the fact that they do not think the cross is sufficient to pull off this victory. Significant help from the state, a Christian state, wielding a Christian sword to enforce Christian righteousness will be required. They believe the use of violence to control external behavior is a necessary component of Christian social order from family to state. It is as if they think it is a victory to get to run the Beast (the Biblical metaphor for social order) and us running it makes it no longer Bestial but Christian. Make Nimrod Great Again is the best they can do.

What I am arguing for is an objective standard for Optimistic Post Millennialism, beyond, “Well, at least we’re more optimistic than them.” An objective definition where the world of swords beaten to plowshares is the future of this world we stand in today, not some other world God will create later. It is this world where our lives and witness and acts make a difference to the final outcome. The world we, Adam and Jesus stand in is the history begun in Genesis 1 leading to a Kingdom not made with hands (or swords) defining history as it fills the earth — kingdom where children and lambs have nothing to fear from snakes and lions. The world whose life, labors and prayers you dwell in today are woven together by God to make it the world of the cross, a world of swordless peace and justice.

Postmillennialism means this future world is the one growing out of what you, your children, your children’s children to the thousandth generation do in the world we are now in. This is how God designed us and the world we live in, and what he died to restore in us.

The Future and How We Get There. PART II.

Postmillennial optimism means this future world is the world the Holy Spirit is building out of what you, your children, your children’s children to the thousandth generation do in the world we are now in. But it’s not just the future, it is the world promised to Adam and Eve before the Fall. The world where pain, war, scarcity are redeemed in the cross which makes possible our return to the Trinitarian Creation Image likeness order God made possible.

Our optimism begins with the Image of God in each human being. Our design is to be ethically fruitful from the heart in all we do. These ethics must function as a private code for you that goes beyond a law written down, to a way of life, a character that reflects the ethical Character of God. It is founded on a personal, being-encompassing love for God as distinct from any other; whose Name we bear as our image either profaning or honor it in every thought, judgment and act. It involves our ordering and shepherding of our time so as to always see each day a progression in history to a world under our fruitful dominion. This is seen in our respect for those whose investment in us make us who we are and in the details of how we treat every exchange with others.

That closing list of “Don’t” is often taken as merely a list of things that make God mad. Much as an unreasoning child views the demands of their parents the reason for which go over their head. Following this list is as fruitful as a child who knuckles under and learns to say “Yes,” while resenting what it is they affirm. This list can become a corrupt field of those who realize the power they can wield over others if they can take the list and redefine it into a series of hard but doable works that they have mastered giving them status over others, perhaps their race, perhaps their observance or non observance of special days, perhaps their diet, perhaps their wealth which enables them to coast far from judging eyes.

But the purpose of what we call “God’s Law” is to understand his Character and how we reflect it from the heart. His law defines what will not work to produce sustainable fruit and will in 3-4 generations grind itself out root and branch by a creation that simply will not grow rebellion into a fruitful future. While at the same time it leaves open a world of interdependent supply and demand systems that grow to meet every need of those who Love God and Keep His commandments.

God’s law is the Character of the individuals of the Trinity from the heart wrapping every exchange with each other in never harming the innocent, never breaking their word, never taking what is not freely given and always communicating Truth.

Ethics for Us in that Image are not merely a personal moral code. They are, to take a modern metaphor, the prime source code of creation itself and of God’s Image in you. They define fruitful or unfruitful. They make possible a future or if violated guarantee the sterility of a desert or a pox. They are the foundation of the Biblical philosophy of History found in the revelation of God’s Name Himself.

This is why the Trinity is central not only to abstract theological dogma, but to the nature of a people made in God’s image and anything they plan to do alone or together. When the Postmillennialist envisions the future and sees a world of beatific harmony without need of external constraints to force people to harmonize externally, what they are envisioning is the historical outworking of the Trinity as the pattern Creation was designed to follow fruitfully when applied by those God made to reflect His Trinitarian reality and being.

The Christian understanding of history, social order, government, family etc. should reflect a self-conscious understanding that the Individual is of one essence with all other individuals, as Adam put it, “Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh.” As God put it, “In the Image of God He made him, male and female He made them.” And finally in response to Adam’s more graphic description of their one essence he said, Logos said He made them “One Flesh.” And then as Jesus Christ who became one with that flesh he repeated Himself in respect to the Creation order of marriage, liberating the wife from the dominion (authority to control) sin had given her husband over herremoving the codependency which was the fruit of their sin. This is to say the basis of human order is that whatever it is to be Human is possessed by everyone to whom the term Human applies. Those of you with a theological exposure recognize this as an application of the Ontological Oneness of God being whatever can be said of divinity for one of the persons of the Trinity can be said of all of them. Humanity, Image, and dominion over creation not each other can be said of every son of Adam and Daughter of Eve . . . until sin.

Yet the Trinity is not merely an ontological Oneness, it is an indissoluble and simultaneous Personal individuality in Three Persons. We in His Image bear that same mystery. We are indissolubly individual, yet we are of the same substance and image, and we are to live in harmonious unity or oneness with each other without that unity dissolving our individuality, indeed in a unity made more powerful every growing year by that individuality.

It is this Trinitarian reality of our person, our community and of a creation designed to reward it with fruitful plenty that should inform a Postmillennial understanding of all issues from the interpersonal to the international, and not end in simplistic speculation of how to order the events of the “last days”. And if I could refer back to my original comment about Jay Rogers and this FB page, their purpose is to reorient our thinking from a Pre and A millennial stagnation in order to use Scripture to enlighten like Issachar the understanding of our times.

Part III will address how Biblical History refracting the rainbow of the Trinity into space and Time illuminates the future of nations and movements in any given era.

The Future and How We Get There. PART III.

“I am the Lord your God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the sons to the third and fourth generation, but showing covenant loving kindness (Chesed) to thousands of generations of those who love me and keep My commandments.” God’s Name reveals His purpose in history, that a person and a people’s ethics determine where their line extends or is cut off as He moves all events toward the fulfillment of Genesis 1:27-28 – a place of fruitful peace, purpose and plenty the result of ethical fulfillment of the Character and moral purpose of God.

What is the ethical fulfillment of the Trinity?

Fruitfulness, a creation that the more ethical the exchanges, the more it fruitfully keeps on giving in sustainable plenty.

Breaking our relationship with the Deity as well as violating the details of the rules based structure which makes human relationships possible inevitably results in scarcity becoming the baseline of economic theory and practice as it has been throughout history to this day. Each person to survive seeks their own advantage so as not to lose out on what little there is. This scarcity is assumed to be intrinsic to a finite world. In reality it is intrinsic only to a people not characterized by ethical self-control — personal and corporate lives characterized by God’s Trinitarian ethics which are the foundation of God’s government among His Three Persons — each foundationally building on the next they become the only possible foundation for any coordinated human social order.

• Don’t harm the innocent — It is the seduction of Murder.
• Don’t Break your word — it is the seduction of Adultery.
• Don’t take what isn’t freely given to you — It’s the seduction of stealing.
• Don’t distort your story so as to harm others — It is the seduction of lying..
• Don’t break these internally where none see them broken —it is the seduction of Coveting.

Genesis 1:28, “fruitful” “multiply” “fill the earth” makes clear that ethical exchange is the only way sustainable growth that flowers all creation, it is the image of God in His creatures. “Fruitful” indicates that people are not a threat to what an ethical world is capable of producing spiritually and physically. “Multiply” indicates the exponential potential of dominion. “Fill” indicates there is no short fall. The ethically united purposes of individuals is a Trinitarian concept and the ethics of the Trinity are what all individuals were designed to reflect so that it is possible unite in their purposes. At this point there is no need of a power based, or coercive hierarchy to enforce this ethical network encompassing all relationships.

This power based hierarchy of coercive leadership — Executive Authority — only appears after the ethical possibility of free union is made impossible. It is pronounced as the apex of the fruit of their of a relationship with YHWH at the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil as if they could be the source themselves of their own ethical supremacy.

Their alternative is Executive ethics. This is the first pronouncement of the limited codependent unity that violating our source code makes inevitable and 6,000 years of recorded history have documented. It is an external unity created by authorizing a leader or leadership group to externally coerce the members of the group to function together according to this Trinitarian ethic which is inescapable, yet unattainable because of sin

People were created to make ethical decisions that would enable them to take control of creation and use it to meet their needs. When you read Genesis 1, you must get beyond utilitarian minimalism of survival maximalists. Our needs include art, justice, beauty, drama, peace, quiet, trust, fellowship, love and that list extends as far as you wish. Our needs go far beyond simple survival or security. Very quickly humanity discovered that there were more things you could do with creation than any one or a hundred or a million people could do effectively. So, they exchanged the things each did best with each other to meet each other’s needs, creating redundant supply lines for every aspect of this exchange.

It is this interactive ethical exchange of individuals focusing together on an array of purposes producing a level of productivity that reflects the economic unity of the Trinity. Today that unity has grown to encompass Eight Billion people spending every hour of every day meeting each other’s needs. It is the laws governing this exchange as we reflect the Trinity, that give us the only insight into the success or failure of any individual or organization including nations and empires. But it also gives us the key to optimism in the structure of how God built his creation. Every person by staying alive through exchange with others strengthens the web of civilized order.

The ethics of this order so far from being neutral actively push the core of humanity toward honoring them and seeing to it that those around them honor them or they will stop exchanging with them. This is an incredibly ignored force for order and decency along with productivity.

Let’s review these simple rules of exchange—

The greater the lack of self-control by these Trinitarian Ethics on the part of the people the more necessary the executive government is to give them security from each other in order to control them. The more authority a central government needs to exert to maintain control the further that people is from reflecting the Trinitarian Ethics as reflected from God’s Character.

Oh I know you will say this is just the one and the many dilemma, or mystery. And in part you are right. But the Trinity was not arrived at by philosophers speculating on Greek Philosophical Dilemmas. They were pastors of Churches who had a long history of persecution and preaching and discipling their flocks who took Scripture with the utmost seriousness.

There they found God, YHWH who above all was One.

There they found that the Name of the Lord was in others as well who were referred to as YHWH and Angel of the Lord.

There they found that Jesus Christ was referred to as Fully Man on the one hand and Fully God on the other, but not a Demigod of Greek Philosophy and Mythology.

There also they found that the Holy Spirit was separated out as a Person, not just a Divine life force of some sort, you know, what God looked like when he was doing stuff in Creation, but a personality who could be grieved, rejoice, spoken to, would answer as His own person.

When wrapping the collective mind of the Church around these things, they did not turn to the Greek One and Many, Or the Eastern One, or the Roman Many as a solution to their exegetical problem. But rather birthed the idea that God was Himself fully Three and fully One even as Jesus was fully God and Fully Human. Not to solve the problem of the East or West, but because He is both qualitatively different as well as able to reflect His image in Creation.

Optimism PART III: The Future and How We Get There Full Preterism No Future

Full Preterism has no optimistic future at all. Which is where it breaks company with the Ecclesia of God on this point because it breaks with the simple statements of Scripture some of which I’ve listed below. If there is no future, then these are fulfilled in AD 70. If Scripture points to a future, then the preterist has something unfulfilled in AD 70.

I start with Full Preterism because by rejecting futurism they reject the future whether optimistic or pessimistic. But this series is not about them. The FP pose a greater question to those who believe that Postmillennialism is the Eschatology of Optimism — What makes you think you are optimistic? Is there an objective standard? Or are you just more optimistic than the other eschatologist?

What we all agree on, whether Pre, A, or Post, is an optimistic future:

• The earth will be filled with the Glory of the knowledge of God as the water covers the sea.
• Swords will be beat into plowshares and spears to pruning hooks.
• A child will safely play over the hole of an asp and the Lion will lie down with the lamb.
• No one will need to be told to know the Lord they will all know Him from least to greatest.
• No one will make them afraid in my Holy Mountain.
• A Kingdom-of-God-Mountain crushing the nations (an idol) and filling the earth.
• A political estate ruled by the cross not the sword.

This is the Biblical Legacy to the world — Hope creates history. History moving by God’s sovereign hand into a world defined and shaped by faithful Image bearers in fellowship with God and each other. They characterize that optimism. Eschatologists, don’t dispute a good future. What the world must go through to get there; whether our current history must end for it to exist; and what the future has to do with today; these things define our optimism and of course are the points we dispute with each other world without end. But we agree that God wins.

I have many friends with whom I spent 2 years trying to make Full Preterism fit Biblically. But this is the point where Scripture required that I abandon it — they have no future. It all happened back in 70 AD including any Scriptures which might tell us about a coming future after that. All the other solutions agree to some form of the belief that “The Kingdom of God is Established but we don’t see its fullness yet.” D-Day, Omaha Beach gave us the inevitability of the end which was Unconditional Surrender in Berlin and the immolation of that Beast. But the Full Preterit insists, there is no “not yet.” The Surrender and Immolation of the Beast in Berlin happened on D-Day. By analogy the 2nd coming and all things expected to attend that event happened in 70 AD. Not an Aristotelian teleology like “the tree is contained in the seed.” That’s it, the last day, done, over. That’s the hope Scripture looked to as far as they are concerned. I’ll get straw manned here, they will say I intentionally misrepresent their position. But I’m not playing that game. Scripture makes the dividing line simple, and it’s not a philosophy of History or a theology of covenant or history that requires much thought and speculation to master. It is the text of Scripture itself: Is there a future hope or not that things will be better than AD 90 or AD 2024 than in AD 70? If things get better, (a scriptural base for optimism such as the verses I alluded to above) then there is a future not yet realized in AD 70 which Scripture describes and so things must not have ended with the fall of Jerusalem. End of discussion. If things don’t get better, then like pagans they have abandoned hope along with all who entered that door, and they must pin those verses of glorious hope to the world of AD 70.

But let me be clear, a philosophy or theology of the Future does not tell us how to read Scripture or resolve our dispute as to what that future is. It must be Scripture that resolves that there is a good future characterized by the presence of Jesus Christ in a way He is not present now, using terms and pictures like, warfare, cleansing, purging, burning away dross and base elements, appearing, resurrection, perfection in holiness, etc. All of these are “last days” or “end times” or “sweet bye and bye” terms. But they are also used to describe the normal Christian life in Scriptures and also in any age or era. This is why Preterism and Perfectionism (though quite different issues and not related to each other except in how they finalize Scripture in the past) can gain a prima facia credibility, but not if they reject a future fulfillment at the very least.

So I recommend they quit arguing with the rest of us, sit down with themselves for as many generations as it takes to work out their Doctrines of No Future in the context of the rest of orthodoxy that they say they do not dispute, and come back when there is something of a reliable comprehensive canon of their position so it is possible to have a conversation that doesn’t keep slip sliding away by a constant redefinition of the terms of the discussion.

Most striking about the nature of intelligent purpose (knowledge) of persons, is that it is ethical-judicial. Life and death hang in the balance of ethically defined judgments. Productive, creative exchange is only possible if there is a prime ethical directive in each human being. Replacing the personal, mature, self-controlled, ethical judgment of the individual (the symbol/reality of the cross) with an “expert” governor to control by sword-enforced goodness is doomed to failure every time. Its failure since Genesis 3 causes us to doubt God’s Kingdom coming in history because we cannot imagine governing without political sword-based control of human elites interpreting God’s law and forcing that interpretation on others at sword point. The optimists among us believe that these human elites will be godly and their interpretation of the law in substantial agreement with ours. The pessimists see in history and current events no such basis for hope in this world for such elite executives who are not God. But pessimist or optimist, they put the fulfillment of God’s Kingdom Rule off into another age. This is why almost every depiction of Christian theology has a section called “Eschatology” which is a discussion of the last days of the history begun in Genesis 1-3 and its transition into whatever follows the end or climax of time called the Second Coming or Final Judgment. In other words, Eschatology is the road map of the end of one world and the beginning of another to take place in the future whether near or far away.

Appendix A – Anarchy and Egalitarianism.

Both of these titles and concepts are inadequate to contain Truth in their Name which we represent.

Anarchy means no ruler, no starting point, no authority. Why would you call the purpose and goal of all creation by a name that is the epitome of the empty promises of Hell.

Egalitarianism means that there are no significant differences between particulars. Why would anyone want to title a Cosmology and its History as something that has no parts, or if it does they are not significantly different. Why not just say, life has no consequences.

Those who embrace these two ideas immediately say, “No you do not understand the history of the word. . . .”

Stop right there. Who cares what they thought the word meant 100 years ago, or even 70 years ago. If it is literally a horrific term, describing the polar opposite of what we believe then abandon it. It’s as stupid to identify with those words as it would be to For a pro life group to name itself “Pedophiles for Life”!

But wait, these people would say, “Ped” means child and Philo means brotherly or familial care and love. What is wrong with that for a prolife organization? Indeed. What is wrong with calling yourself one committed to no authority if what you really mean is one committed to no authority but God’s?

Well there is a title for that sort of person: Trinitarian. It grasps every aspect of our ideal and roots it in the being of God.

The alternative? You may as well call yourselves Idiots for Life, or Morons for Political Equality or Shit for Brains.

Look, we submit to the authority of a sovereign God who rules heaven and earth and Has made us in His Image. We recognize true diversity and that Justice makes a difference as does Sin and Righteousness. We recognize the ideal of people remade in the image of that God whose social order is for all members to build each other up. To Trust and be lit by the fire of Faith Hope and Love.

Now, you want to go back to the dirt eating snake and simply say “No Authority?” or “Equal”? Why?

If there were no other term and this is as close as we could get, I would still say do not name yourself with the opposite of what you stand for. Better to be nameless.

But we do have a name: we are Trinitarian. We recognize genuine distinctions, and we recognize the Unity God creates out of them. We recognize genuine authority and we reject the sinner’s need of a Great One with a sword to maintain righteous authority.

We are Trinitarian.

Appendix B – Know the Cross Know the Trinity; Matthew 16

When Peter first recognized who and what Jesus was and is, Peter was someone who could build the Kingdom of God. He could lay the foundation that could not be moved.

A few minutes later when he rebuked Jesus for insisting on the cross, Peter was called Satan. The stone which was to be the foundation suddenly became in Peter’s hands the stumbling stone that would cast Christ down. He was identified with the figure at the dawn of time who caused the human race to stumble right out of the starting gate. Peter was identified with the one who did everything within his power to cause Job to stumble and curse God. He was identified with the one who tried to cause Jesus to stumble out in the desert. And here he was attacking the very center of the dynamic that holds the Trinity together.

We think of the Cross as the difference maker between salvation and damnation. But it goes much farther than that to encompass not only creation but its creator.

The Cross was the difference between there being a Trinity and their not being a Trinity. By extension, anything that Trinitarian God could offer.

The Cross is the pattern of how the members of the Trinity minister to each other creating Unity out of their Diversity. It is not just a way to save a sinner. It is the symbol and reality of who it is God is, and of the unique dynamic that we call life.

The Cross is the road God had to walk, the Person He had to be in order not merely to create a moral universe that is good, but to be the definition of what Goodness is. Even for one who is Omnipotent, Alpha and Omaga Creator and Sustainer of all that is. Apart from a commitment within the persons of the Trinity to minister to every aspect of one another in love there could be no unity in their diversity. To create a moral universe outside themselves required that they would have to do for the creatures of that creation what they do willingly for each other.

And that is the Cross. Death on behalf of each other was not necessary because of the perfection of their love, care and affection. There was nothing needing repair, healing, fixing, resurrection among themselves. But when they step out of that Glory and create a reflection, an Image, through whom they would create a history that can sustain the glory of their creation, then for that moral world to ever be more than a nightmare of failure and Justice to imperfectly try to fix that failure; for God to be more than either an impotent monster or an all powerful monster, God would have to commit themselves to do for their creatures what they would do for each other— love that world enough to die in order to bring about the goodness they had created the world to be.

Appendix C – The Story God Tells

As you read, you’ll find the following out about Him — and You.

• This Three Persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit and Yet One in Being God, Is the Time-Defining, Space-Defining Good-Defining who told us to call Him, YHWH — I AM.
• This uncreated God who created everything is personal. He is separate from Creation and yet present in all of it.
• The story that unfolds reveals the Law of His Being which is the rule of goodness by which each member of His Being Father, Son and Holy Spirit loves the others and Trusts them completely to love back. It is this Law that in the created order defines how creatures in His likeness sustain a unity in our diversity that fulfills and radiates the Glory He shares with us. Without that unity in diversity the glory does not fail to manifest, it crushes us, as promised from the beginning.
• “The day you eat of it you will die.” is the promise beginning God’s intro to Faith and Love-sustaining all relationships. What attacks that Unity in Diversity of His Being and creation must be removed as the Evil that makes the future impossible. That removal is called Death. The Unity in Diversity of Faith, Hope and Love is called Eternal Life and Glory.
• The story is about this God who knows you, is known by you and communicates. He created a world where knowable symbol and meaning are in union with the things symbolized each sharing a world-growing reality with the other. In His image you understand Him and He you and therefore you and I can understand each other. This understanding and relationship shares in the Glory that knowing and being known radiate.
• The dynamic reality of history is that Right and Good, are God’s Being, not concepts or rules to which He and we aspire. Good and Right are how the three Persons treat each other so that they can be One God radiating Glory. They are Who and What He is. Evil and Bad are not a person or a thing created or uncreated that has “being” in contrast to Him. Evil is the relatively small short-lived domain where one person’s treatment of another prevents that unity and destroys the future it would build. Good is the person and things of a world of infinite possibility flowing out of the infinite ways we Love and trust each other and so build it. Glory is what God promises will crush the serpent and His seed. For evil to be sustained by life, would make a good future impossible.. Building the future, Glory, is a life or death matter. Only the Law of God’s being enables one to exist at all as an individual in harmony with others.
• The story is about the growing awareness throughout history of this God, a knowledge that is not based on manipulation and control, but on love and meeting needs. The failure which enters the story early on is a failure that if not removed makes the future impossible. The reason there are so few ways of treating people that destroy the future is because they are crushed relatively quickly, “Visiting the iniquity of the Fathers upon the sons to the third and fourth generation.” Is the other half of YHWH’s name.
• By contrast the story is about the infinite ways to build a good future when built in line with the Being of God.
• Bearing the weight of Glory is not an option, but the design BIOS of a universe which no one can bear if the ethical love and trust of God and therefore our ethical trust of each other is broken. In time the breaking breaks us.
• The reason God is considered either impotent (Free Will) or evil (Determinism) is because a moral world cannot heal its own evil which even Christian thinkers forget. The story turns on the impossible moral dilemma that if the world cannot fix itself with its own justice, rule itself with its own executives, or heal itself with its own doctors then apparently its “Almighty” Creator must be either impotently helpless to change things if our choices are final (Free Will), or worse, a God crafting its evil if His control is complete (Determinism). And perhaps the worst is the bastard stepchild of the two, God who can only foresee the future means he is History’s story, History is not His story. None of these is what the Bible presents.
• Human justice or kindness can go only so far. Where successful, justice when it is administered by those limited to the created order however balanced, at best results in a blind world, as Gandhi pointed out. “An eye for an eye and soon the whole world is blind.” Or as Jesus warned His People, “Put away your sword Peter, who lives by the sord dies by the sword.” A kind world cut off from its source outside itself, results in peaceful coexistence with the evil that devours it.
• To be a Just or Moral world, if its narrative is about fixing what is wrong with it, it must reach outside of what those within the created order are able to do on their own. This is why some foresee a day when Jesus or someone can be the executive enforcer. Yes, if there is to be an executive, only God can fill that office. But an executive Father needing power to keep the Son and Holy Spirit in line, or a Father manipulated by the things asked of Him by the Son and Spirit is entirely alien to the unity and diversity of the Trinity. This sort of executive control is what those within the story expected then, and what many expect today. Then God did something completely unexpected — spoiler alert — God took that evil and its judgment upon Himself, and endured whatever the death he promised meant. He went far beyond the limits of created justice or kindness. He went far beyond what any judge, or executive King could do. YHWH, the I AM made healing and wholeness a reality by willingly bearing the futureless consequences of evil which the good world He had created was fallen to. God created it; God defines Good and Evil in reference to His own being; God defines judgment as something He brings; therefore only God can fix the evil personally by removing it in His own person. There is no other basis for a new heart, a new creature, a new creation, a new birth, a new family, a new civilization — a new creation. He has written it down in the story about what He, is building with us. God and what he makes, in this case a Moral Universe, can only be Good being Himself — His Save-Restore-Rescue-Heal-Justify-make whole Self. No created person is sufficient. No single facet describes that atoning grace, Chesid, חָ֫סֶד, — Covenant love, kindness, grace, care protection provision, help ezer, עֵ֖זֶר, and atoning purification כִּפּוּר, kippur. It is the river of life that flows from the essence of the Trinity Himself.
• God’s dominion is not static in His creation. It is growing to fruitful fullness as is the nature of each recreated person in it. The History He writes down is the story of this growth — the unleashing of God’s Glory among a people who can bear life because they have been resurrected to it with Him: “Father, glorify your name.” Then a voice came from heaven: “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.”
• This is the Gospel you have heard trivialized as an inner garden, or a series of behavior exercises, or as mindfulness. All your life you always suspected that there must be more.
• All History and the story of your life is that “more” contained in His work to Transform the Earth by transforming each one of us generationally.
• The story of the Bible is the story of History, is the story of God’s growing presence in the earth and in his people.

Appendix D — The Doctrines that Create History

• Creation and Fall: God created the world, a place we could unite without losing the uniqueness of each person in union. Moral success means doing an infinite possibility of things that make others’ lives better. Moral failure means doing things that make unity impossible. These things produce shame, distrust and pervert love. This shame separates us from Him and others. The wage of sin is Death, loss of union, loss of the future. Because True unity is made impossible, executive unity, the Master/slave unity is substituted which has characterized human government ever since once the Trinitarian Unity we were created for is made out of our reach because of all we do to make it impossible. Our sin literally means, that which makes fellowship impossible.
• Incarnation: God became a flesh and blood human being as creation was designed to accommodate His doing.
• Atonement, Cross: The Logos, now Jesus the Anointed lived and taught then died on a Cross for our Sin, failure, shame and alienation so that sin, failure, shame and alienation could be swallowed up in righteousness, fellowship, success and union called the River of Life, the Tree of Life, and knowing God.
• Atonement, Resurrection: He arose from the dead and in His Resurrection and Baptism raises us from the dead by taking our death, guilt and shame on Himself and gives us a new life and History, personally and generationally establishing the future.
• Ascension: He Ascended into Heaven and rules the Earth through His People — “You are His workmanship created to walk in all He has prepared for you.”
• Pentecost: He came and lives in His people both personally and as a Congregation the same way He filled the Temple. With or without the fall into sin this was always His plan.
• His Return: to fulfill His rule of the world in climactic John 17 fullness.

Believers in this doctrine from infant to sage cannot help but be optimistic about and believe in the Future. Those who are not believers but live in a world shaped by this belief begin to construct alternative futures for us. No one can escape this infectious hope.

Appendix D – Two Blind Alleys titled, “Trinity”

A big deal was made of the fact that all the West either believed the Trinity or knew that Christians believed in the Trinity. Perhaps some of the most careful and exhaustively explored literature anywhere is the Discussion on the sort of God the Bible presents. It was a three or four generation discussion based not on a philosophical curiosity like a Treatise by Aristotle, or Plato, but on trying to see if the apparantly conflicting accounts of the nature of God presented from Genesis to Revelation

God is Three and One. OK now lets move on to important things.

Here is an illustration of how to picture the threeness and the oneness of God. And Egg has a shell a yoke and gooey wooker (That is the white stuff). Or H2O can exist as liquid solid or gas. Once depicted there’s not much to say, Three in Person, Father, Son and Spirit. One in Being each is Divine.

• An impersonal philosophical Trinty.
• Triadalism. The Trinity is not about finding interlocking groups of three in our experience. It is about finding how 3 inescapably equals 1 without fragmenting that unity; and about how 1 inescapably equals 3 without absorbing the uniques of each of the three.

Appendix E –

Lamb Slain From the Foundation of the World

God is the self-mediated Governor of all Human Relationships

Human Relationship revolve around what we give each other

Dominion is using what we figure out about Creation

To provide for and meet the needs of others.

Ethical Exchange is the Basis of Fruitful Human Order

The essence of Human Being in God’s Image is

Ethical — determine what is right

Judicial— Do what is right

TAKE DOMINION: ___________________ ____________________ NEEDS:

Ethically figure out What must be

& control creation ___________________ ____________________ supplied

Sacrifice to Control Creation TAKE DOMINION:

NEEDS: Sacrifice to use Control to meet needs Ethically figure out

What must be supplied and control creation

ETHICS

Don’t Harm the Innocent — it’s Murder

Don’t Break Faith — It’s Adultery

Don’t take what is not freely given — It’s Stealing

Don’t Lie about these things — It’s bearing false witness

FRUIT OF THE SPIRIT

Love, Joy, Peace, Long-suffering, Gentleness,

Goodness, Meekness Temperance Faith

Use what we figure out of how Creation works

Use any privilege, skill, advantage

To provide for and meet the needs of others.

Ethical Exchange is the Basis of Fruitful Human Order

To provide for and meet needs of others.

Voluntary Ethical Exchange Directly Creates:

Fruitful Exponential Multi layered Growth;

Indirectly Creates the Byproducts of:

Sustainable Value: exchanging resources with those who use them best

Paganism is an outdated term that can be more descriptively named, Any-god-But-God — the A-g-B-D challenge to YHWH is functionally the same whether it’s the Paganism of the Pre-Christian world or the open-minded agnosticism of the Enlightened modern world. In ancient times, the world was securely in the arms of this Freedom to Worship Any-god-But-God offered into which the Church poured the River of Life exposing the rootless, hopelessness of original Paganism. 1700 years later those who inherited the committment to AgBD Paganism realized they needed more firepower if their world view, philosophy and values were to compete with even the most simplistic forms of Biblical Christianity. They had been swept from the Western scene until today when we find vast drafts of Jesus and His Trusted Servant Moses without footnote, plagiarized and offered as enlightenment mindfulness.

And now the point of this footnote — The world today derides and convicts Christians for not living up to their own standards. Why? Because the world to compete could not help but absorb those standards and believe itself to be their origin. Take hope. The discipleship Jesus commanded is coming along. The world is holding Christians accountable to the standards God established not their own definitions of virtue. It is not a bad trend. You should be hopeful, optimistic both Jesus and His Trusted Servant Moses said this would happen . . . And look around they scold the Christian for failing to love his neighbor by worshipping their god, the state’s version of socialist love. They chide the Christian for holding to one way of salvation and not loving everyone equally. They didn’t get that idea from Rome, Greece or a Chinese Emperor. They condemn the Conservative Christian for wanting to take over the state and set up a theocracy (Christiana Nationalism) not realizing that it was Moses (Deuteronomy 17:18-20) and Jesus (Matthew 20:25) who commanded that we not govern ourselves by fascism, whether it’s the socialist version, or dear leader version of fascism. The Modern Liberal and Conservative alike empower the state to define right and wrong and kill or imprison people based on it. Along with the political forms of A-g-B-G the enlightened has abandoned the classical ideals of civil Virtue whether Roman, Greek, or Eastern in favor of the ethical ideals of Moses, and Jesus. Finally they have also adopted the uniquely Biblical idea that a good future can be built by Any-god-But-God or no god at all.

They are frustrated that when they look into it. They cannot find better alternatives and so we find that late modernity is not marked by the Pre-Christian worship of Any-god-But-God. It took 1600 years but those who worshipped Any-god-But-God (Ag-BG) finally realized that if they were to have attractive credibility a person in God’s image (meaning everyone) they needed to adopt both the ethics of YHWH and the optimistic hope for the future that that is the story found in every line of Scripture and the beliefs that summarize them. The faith and love of Jesus Christ is a hope for the future that no philosophy or religion has yet matched, and now imitate to gain any traction at all.