The Disquieted Earth

Post 284

Desert: (dez’ert), noun [Old French., fr. Late Latin desertum, from Latin. desertus solitary, desert, past part. Old French deserere to desert, from de + serere to join together.] 1. A desert region; a region left unoccupied. 2. An arid region lacking moisture to support vegetation.
Synonym Desert, wilderness. A desert is not only relatively uninhabited, but commonly uninhabitable, through barrenness. A wilderness is an unrecliamed, but not necessarily irreclaimable, tract of land; it often suggests pathlessness.
- adjective 1. (pronounced de zurt) Archaic. Deserted; forsaken. 2. Of or pertaining to a desert; waste; barren; wild.
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In the previous section; The Uncommon Christian Walk, we left the failed Hebrew people, led by Moses, to wander the desert until they all died off, which was prophesied to be 40 years.
But isn’t it curious that they never just picked a spot to settle and call home? Why not? What motivated them to keep wandering year after year? Clearly it was not a false hope that they would one-day return to cross the Jordan and claim their land… or was it?

As you wrestle with the perpetual vacillation between Law and Grace; first convinced that “this is the way” and then equally convinced; “No, that is the way,” How is it that the internal war never ends? I believe it is because of a foundational knowledge that you do not belong here in this desert!
To set up a home in the desert is to “put down roots” and choose to belong, it is to give up the hope, the dream, the promise. And although the people failed to achieve when their time came, there is the next generation that has not yet failed. There is still hope. This is the reason why their leader Moses would not allow them to settle in; the children were their future.

But jumping ahead a bit to understand a present condition: what was the first thing commanded when that next generation actually got across the river?

“And it came to pass, when all the kings (west of the Jordan) heard that the LORD had dried up the waters of Jordan from before the children of Israel, until we were passed over, that their heart melted, neither was their spirit in them any more, because of the children of Israel.
At that time the LORD said unto Joshua,
Make thee sharp knives, and circumcise again the children of Israel the second time… and this is the cause why Joshua did circumcise: All the people that came out of Egypt, that were males, even all the men of war, died in the wilderness by the way, after they came out of Egypt. Now all the people that came out were circumcised: but all the people that were born in the wilderness by the way as they came forth out of Egypt, them they had not circumcised” Joshua 5:1-5.

So here is the problem:
How did these uncircumcised Hebrews get across the Jordan in disobedience?
Remember the law:

“And he that is eight days old shall be circumcised among you, every man child in your generations, he that is born in the house, or bought with money of any stranger, which is not of thy seed. He that is born in thy house, and he that is bought with money, must needs be circumcised: and my covenant shall be in your flesh for an everlasting covenant. And the uncircumcised man child whose flesh of his foreskin is not circumcised, that soul shall be cut off from his people; he hath broken my covenant” Genesis 17:12-14.

Yet there they stood in the Promised Land on the other side of the Jordan with the blessing of God…Uncircumcised!
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Moses; The Unorthodox Jew:
Before we explore how such a thing is even possible, let’s first consider that Moses-- who led them for these 40 additional years-- right at the start seemed to immediately abandon this covenant that God gave them as a people! Moses; the Type of Christ! What is going on here?
We see the answer emerge way back at the beginning of the adventure when God called him back to finish the job that he started 40 years before they started out (Exodus 2:15+23-25+3:8):

“And Moses spake before the LORD (in reply), saying, Behold, the children of Israel have not hearkened unto me; how then shall Pharaoh hear me, who am of uncircumcised lips?” Exodus 6:12.

What did Moses, the Type of Christ, mean by declaring he had uncircumcised lips? Well, that answer seems to emerge by his previous statement about the Hebrews not hearkening (8085) to him as their savior.

Hearkened 8085 shama’; a primitive root; to hear intelligently (often with implication of attention, obedience, etc.; causatively, to tell, etc.):-- X attentively, call (gather) together, X carefully, X certainly, consent, consider, be content, declare, X diligently, discern, give ear, (cause to, let, make to) hear(-ken, tell), X indeed, listen, make (a) noise, (be) obedient, obey, perceive, (make a) proclaim(-ation), publish, regard, report, shew (forth), (make a) sound, X surely, tell, understand, whosoever [heareth], witness.

Why didn’t they understand that he was their savior? Because although he was born as one of them he did not present himself as one of them; in essence he was seen as the son of the persecutor! (Matthew 12:24). He was an enigma to them, what he had to say was a threat to their slave mind. They were captives under harsh oppression and he was actually answering their cry for God’s rescue, but Moses didn’t come to them in the way their “Jewish” mindframe was looking for; “That is not how God does things.”
Jesus was rejected by the “Hebrews” for the same reason (I have reversed these labels; Jews and Hebrews on purpose for aiding the cross link). He did not come to them with the speech of the Sanhedrin or the Pharisees; he came with uncircumcised lips to speak to them of their faith in a non-orthodox way!
I hope to later address who Pharaoh types, and this strange deep meaning as Moses was concerned that if God’s own people didn’t comprehend who he was and what he would do, how much less influence might he have with Pharaoh himself! (Exodus 6:29-30).

So now, after having received the confirmed command of the Abrahamic covenant by circumcision, on the very day they departed Egypt (Exodus 12:43-51, confirmed in Leviticus 12:3), Moses somehow never got around to circumcising any of the children born along the way after leaving Egypt:

“Now all the people that came out were circumcised: but all the people that were born in the wilderness by the way as they came forth out of Egypt, them they had not circumcised” Joshua 5:5.

Yet we never see God confront Moses about this. Not from the very first day of the Exodus until after Joshua takes them across the Jordan into the Promised Land! (*1)

So what was the point of the sign of the covenant in the first place?!
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The How and Why:
Do you suppose that God determined to destroy every living thing on the Earth with a flood because they had ChristmasTrees in the temple, or ate pork, or honored the Sabbath on Sunday…or never got around to circumcising their sons?
Let’s do a refresher and see God’s declared reason:

“And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them (all flesh)…” Genesis 6:13.

The question of importance then becomes; “How did that violence come to happen?”

The seed of violence begins when we hold God’s declared rules as so insignificant that we push our own agendas and desires into them and thereby “adjust” them to better suit our own ideas while thinking we are still obedient to God (Romans 1:18). The results are quasi-rules under Color Of Law (*2) that appear to be God’s but are not (II Corinthians 11:13), just like prophets that appear to speak for God but don’t, or Congressional laws that don’t conform to the U.S. Constitution. Then the next generation feels confused and restricted by those quasi-rules and so changes them too, long forgetting the meaning and importance of the original and actual Law of establishment that safeguarded against such things, and in so doing they think to improve the original by “fixing” the rules now in place that masquerade as honest representations of their failures (II Corinthians 11:14-15).
Eventually we are passing laws legalizing drugs that alter our personalities, as well as move us to murder our unborn children and feel no guilt whatsoever because it’s legal. So the next obvious step of progression is to legalize and start killing those not unborn. Ta-da! Violence-in-a-can!

So, First off: Why did Moses not circumcise the children as they were born on the way,
and secondly: Why did God not confront him about it?

We don’t find that answer in the Old Testament; we find it in Jesus Christ’s fulfillment of that Type. And by identifying it in Christ we can then go back and overlay in onto the Old Testament to see Grace was extended to them even before the New Testament.
The Children of those who refused to enter in, did not succeed because they “toed the line.” And just to make sure we really get that point, Moses did not circumcise a single child along the way. Circumcision of all things; This was the singular sign of covenant that made them God’s people!

So HOW is it possible that they found themselves standing on the other side of that river where their circumcised parents could not go?

There is only ONE possible answer; A circumcised heart:

“Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart, and be no more stiffnecked” Deuteronomy 10:16, as a result of understanding 10:12-15 and 17-20;

“And now, Israel (People of God), what doth the LORD thy God require of thee, but to fear the LORD thy God, to walk in all his ways, and to love him, and to serve the LORD thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul, to keep the commandments of the LORD, and his statutes, which I command thee this day for thy good?
Behold, the heaven and the heaven of heavens is the LORD’S thy God, the earth also, with all that therein is. Only the LORD had a delight in thy fathers to love them, and he chose their seed after them, even you above all people, as it is this day.

Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart, and be no more stiffnecked.

For the LORD your God is God of gods, and Lord of lords, a great God, a mighty, and a terrible, which regardeth not persons, nor taketh reward: He doth execute the judgment of the fatherless and widow, and loveth the stranger, in giving him food and raiment. Love ye therefore the stranger: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt. Thou shalt fear the LORD thy God; him shalt thou serve, and to him shalt thou cleave, and swear by his name” Deuteronomy 10:12-20.

If the heart is circumcised unto God, then who needs a circumcision of the flesh to convince them they are the people of God by covenant? Do you understand what this means? God’s covenant is with the heart and not the flesh even though the command is “specifically” to the flesh. But if the heart is circumcised then what will the rest of the body do but what it loves, even though it is uncircumcised? Who needs the Law? Only those who’s hearts are not yet in love with God because of the uncircumcised foreskin of the heart. Was God mad at Moses for not circumcising the people? NO! Was he mad at the people for not being circumcised? NO!
And if the orthodox Jew cannot please God without the actual wearing of the phylacteries because the law “specifically commands it,” why then do they not go to the surgeon to have him cut off some of their heart too as it is also specifically commanded?

God’s full concern for the Jew in the desert, as well as in the Promised Land, is their heart exclusively toward God, and really God couldn’t care less about the circumcision of their flesh…at that point.
So why then did God command Joshua to circumcise them after they entered the Land? For the very reason that nothing of the actual flesh of the heart is actually circumcised. In affect, the circumcised flesh of the heart can “grow back” quite quickly with a forgetful change of mind:

“Ye shall make you no idols nor graven image, neither rear you up a standing image, neither shall ye set up any image of stone in your land, to bow down unto it: for I am the LORD your God. Ye shall keep my Sabbaths, and reverence my sanctuary: I am the LORD…

But if ye will not hearken unto me, and will not do all these commandments; if ye shall despise my statutes, or if your soul abhor my judgments, so that ye will not do all my commandments but that ye break my covenant: I also will do this unto you;…(you really need to read it)...
If they (who are left of your children after I have destroyed you for turning away) shall confess their iniquity, and the iniquity of their fathers, with their trespasses which they trespassed against me…if then their uncircumcised hearts be humbled, and they then accept of the punishment of their iniquity: then will I remember my covenant with Jacob, and also my covenant with Isaac, and also my covenant with Abraham will I remember; and I will remember the land” Leviticus 26:1-42.

This is a pre-instruction of God for when they eventually get into their Promised Land as a repeating pattern. This is for AFTER they successfully cross the Jordan River. So does it apply to them on the way? Yes, but only as a secondary application regarding their heart.
By circumcising the flesh that does not grow back, God sees that as a permanent covenant of ownership like a marriage, but the Jew (and the Christian) sees it as a one-time “I did that” event, that because it cannot be rescinded they feel no further obligation to maintain.
The circumcision of the heart is not like that. It takes careful maintenance to keep current, much as the engaged girl not yet married is careful to maintain her desirability lest she loose what seems secure. But after marriage she lets herself go because she is now secure in “half ownership” of everything and cannot be so easily cast off. This is the same mindframe of Hezekiah in his “bonus life” (II Kings 20:11-19).
The wedding ring in this case is the Type of the physically binding circumcision, while the heart no longer in love with her husband is the real circumcised/uncircumcised part that matters to the marriage.
Somewhere between the happy wedding ring and the painful divorce there is quite a variable slide of “re-growth” while still married, until you find yourself suddenly on the street Divorced and Uncircumcised wondering; “How did that happen?”
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First Quiet, then Disquieted, then Violent:
If the world ends in violence as described in Genesis 6:13 and Typed in Ezekiel 7:11-27, Habakkuk 1:6-10, 2:8, Zephaniah 1:9, etc., then we can understand that before global violence comes a disquieted Earth:

“For three things the earth is disquieted, and for four which it cannot bear:
1. For a servant when he reigneth;
2. and a fool when he is filled with meat;
3. For an odious woman when she is married;
4. and an handmaid that is heir to her mistress” Proverbs 30:21-23.

• The unfaithful servant who does not have the heart of a son, makes for a very obnoxious lord (Matthew 24:45-50, Mark 13:34, vs. Galatians 4:7).
• A fool has no restraint to his boisterous proclamations of confidence, when everything is going his way.
• I have just described the prophetic odious woman who makes her husband sorry he married her.
• And as was so strikingly made clear by Sarah’s handmaid with Abraham’s only child, the suffering of her inappropriate glorying cannot be endured (Genesis 16:4-6).

So speaking of Sarah’s handmade; the mother of the Arab nations through Ishmael (Genesis 17:20), Where do you suppose all the world’s wealth has gone? As the economy of the globe comes crashing down nation by nation, who do you suppose has all those global funds able to rescue the planet, (with stipulations of course). The world has been sending all our money to the oil rich nations of the Middle East for decades and the handmaid is about to become heir in place of the odious woman who has killed her only Son (Issac on the mountain as a sacrifice: Genesis 2:22).

But, before this unbearable disquieting occurs there must first be a quiet to disquiet.

“And they answered the angel of the LORD that stood among the myrtle trees, and said, We have walked to and fro through the earth, and, behold, all the earth sitteth still, and is at rest” Zechariah 1:11.

“Then the angel of the LORD answered and said, O LORD of hosts, how long wilt thou not have mercy on Jerusalem and on the cities of Judah…?” Zechariah 1:12a.

Yes, this is on the surface layer a prophesy regarding the 70 years in Babylonian captivity long ago, but on another more complete Hypercube layer, since WWII the earth has been reasonably at rest but though the nation of Israel has been reestablished in that time of rest, the cities of Judah along with Jerusalem have failed to experience it though they have long tried.

The disquieting is about the break out in the most unbearable “fourth” way.
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High Places, “Degrees” of God, and an Unhappy Marriage:
The first three phases of disquiet have already long been growing and building up to the fourth. But how do you “grow” such a disfavor with God? Christians have long assumed, like the permanent circumcision or the legally binding wedding ring attaching all her husbands goods; that “we now got it” and it can’t be “Un-got.” But it wasn’t the circumcised people who crossed…though they didn’t end up in hell. Without the loving heart, the ring means little to God but a sorrowful burden. As long as you don’t care what God feels and are only in this for what you can get, then by all means; “you’re in”… but that doesn’t mean God cannot make you wish you weren’t!
It usually starts by letting you have what your self-centered heart wants, and goes worse from there.

The books of the Kings and the Chronicles are all very good reads that outline the condition of the Israeli nation based wholly on the relationship their kings had with God. Some kings were fully devoted to God and God blessed them, some were fully turned away from God and the consequences were severe, but between these two types there are far more kings that were neither fully devoted or fully adulterous, and the blessings and consequences were proportional.
Does that mean that you can be “mostly” a Christian or “hardly” a Christian? No. You either are or you aren’t; you can’t be mostly married. But what the narration of these books does show is a great variation in the conditions of the marriage and the extenuating consequences to far more than just the king Typed as the wife, by condition you can in fact be mostly or hardly married.
In this Typology the people of the nation are the children and the nation itself often depicted as the city Jerusalem is the family home and community, the temple is the Church and the surrounding nations are neighbors and business associates. All of them are greatly affected by the relationship between the husband (God) and the wife (the king). Each successive king represents the next generation daughters growing up and marrying, and what their mothers and societies passed down in raising them often compounded in their own marriage to God. Yet some broke out of the trend and took another course.

God provided the many kings, and the many various approaches, to give us a great menu to choose from; “How will your personal marriage to God go?” If you have ever wondered “what if?” you can actually know by finding it written in the history of these books; There are relationships that start off good and go bad, there are those that start off bad and turn good, there are those that start off neutral and go either way, etc., etc.
Because of our present day condition the ones I find very interesting are the bad relationships committed to becoming better. Among the many variations of these, there comes a point at which the little things that irritate in a good marriage can break the back of the proverbial camel in a bad one.

Something fascinatingly curious is how long God tolerates the High Places in spite of how often he condemns them through his prophets.
There are quite a few example marriages where the kings, that in every other way served God admirably, nonetheless failed to tear down the high places; Asa being one of the best that surely must have tried:

“Asa did that which was right in the eyes of the LORD, as did (King) David his (George Washington type fore-)father. And he took away the sodomites out of the land, and removed all the idols that his fathers made. And also Maachah his mother, even her he removed from being queen, because she had made an idol in a grove; and Asa destroyed her idol, and burnt it by the brook Kidron. But the high places were not removed: nevertheless Asa’s heart was perfect with the LORD all his days” I Kings 15:11-14.

Many other pretty good kings also failed to remove the high places, and some even set them up, while still admirable in most every other way. And while each generation grades their king’s admirability based on other king’s conducts, God holds David; their first king, as the standard of comparison. So how did George Bush compare to Bill Clinton? Great! But how did he compare to George Washington? Pathetic! Are you seeing the idea Aim high; achieve high. Aim higher…
In sports we hold these kinds of goals as obvious; Track Record, State Record, Nation Record, World Record, but somehow we erase these kinds of goals in our personal lives when evaluating our success in relationships and personal moral conduct; There it becomes; “we’re only human.”

In many cases it is very hard to identify the reason why the high places were not removed by a good king, but in Asa’s case it seems obvious that he gave it an earnest try but the people would not allow it:

“And the children of Israel did secretly those things that were not right against the LORD their God, and they built them high places in all their cities, from the tower of the watchmen to the fenced city” II Kings 17:9.

So if Asa removed from the land all that he did, what could a high place actually be that was so much a part of the people it couldn’t be also removed without a rebellion? I’m going to be clear; I don’t actually know. But it seems evident that they are in the same class as the groves and the altars:

“But the high places were not taken away: the people still sacrificed and burnt incense in the high places” II Kings 12:3.
“And he sacrificed and burnt incense in the high places, and on the hills, and under every green tree” II Kings 16:4.

Now if a king is going to be known for successfully removing the idols from the land, it would seem that he would also be able to remove altars upon which the people sacrificed, it just makes sense.
But when the people in mass get in their heads that something is not going to stop even if the government declares it unlawful, there is just nothing that the government can do to eradicate it, much like drugs and porn today. Every TV, every computer, every cell phone, is a potential alter where innocence is sacrificed secretly. I humbly propose that America’s High Places are our Televisions and Movies. And though the government might successfully remove Manger Scenes and even ChristmasTrees from public view by the demands of a few, once rooted, drugs and porn will not be stopped outside of a civil war…or a totalitarian dictatorship of blood, such as Islam. But TV? Don’t Even Ask! Asa was a totally committed king to God’s way, but he couldn’t uproot the TV.

A nation’s government is as dynamic as a family, and the complexities of actual power are many. Here in America (at least until Obama) the “family” selected the “mother” they wanted, and gave him the authority to represent them before God the Father as a whole.
Let me just say: “In order to conclude that Obama is the best guy to make that representation; That is one very dysfunctional family!”
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I was born in the year 1963 when our national “family” formally chose to remove God from our institutions of education and governance. In the wake of that pivotal decision came the Congressionally charted dramatic increase in all things violent from that moment forward.
It has been 50 years. And now another landmark choice has been made by the “mother” that we have stood by even after he formally ejected Christ from our land with the public words;

“Whatever we once were, we are no longer a Christian nation...” - Obama.

And as a recently self-declared single parent family, we seem to be confident that we can overpower our dispossessed Father to get our way. The funny thing is that He will indeed let us have it:

“How long will thou go about, O thou backsliding daughter? for the LORD hath created a new thing in the earth, A woman shall compass a man” Jeremiah 31:22.

You just better be sure that you really do want to make your home in the Desert as a whore rather than cross that Jordan River into the Kingdom of Heaven (see Zechariah 5:5-11).
But the actual wonderful part of this story is that you don’t get across the River by toeing the line! You get there by trusting God in the devotion of love with a circumcised heart. We call it Faith (Joshua 1:16-17).

“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. For by it the elders obtained a good report…by faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, by which he obtained witness that he was righteous, God testifying of his gifts: and by it he being dead yet speaketh” Hebrews 11:1,4.

What does your faith do?
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(*1) Did Moses Misunderstand?
In case you might think that Moses just didn’t comprehend the importance of circumcision for God’s people, The scriptures provide positive proof that he understood it quite personally before he got to Egypt: Exodus 4:24-26.

(*2) Color Of Law:
“The appearance or semblance, without substance, of legal right.
Misuse of power, possessed by virtue of state law and made possible only because wrong doer is clothed with authority of state, is action taken under “color of law.”
As used in Civil Rights Act means same thing as “state action”, and means pretense of law and includes actions of officers who undertake to perform their official duties.
Acts “under color of law” of a State include not only acts done by State officials within the bounds or limits of their lawful authority, but also acts done without and beyond the bounds of their lawful authority; provided that, in order for unlawful acts of an official to be done “under color of law”, the unlawful acts must be done while such official is purporting or pretending to act in the performance of his official duty; that is to say, the unlawful acts must consist in an abuse or misuse of power which is possessed by the official only because he is an official; and the unlawful acts must be of such a nature or character, and be committed under such circumstances, that they would not have occurred but for the fact that the person committing them was an official then and there exercising his official powers outside the bounds of lawful authority.” - Blacks Law 5th addition p. 241.
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