The Twin Poles of Error 2: "Law" and "Grace"

When it comes to the Law of God, and by this I mean the moral core of the thing, not the sacrificial ordinances which were fulfilled at Calvary, nor the acted parables for holiness, such as not mixing fabrics in one's dress, nor the food laws, when it comes to the Law as summarised in the Ten Commandments and then in Two Greatest commandments there are, it seems to me, two and only two responses that the carnal minds of us carnal Christians can make.

The first is to deny the law outright, to claim it has been abolished. This is not true for Jesus said the Law will never pass away. Those who deny the Law call this grace, but it is nothing of the kind. This is the heresy of the easy believist and is not even faith

The second is to try by force of will to keep the Law, to become legalists, thus feeling obliged to try by force of will to obey the commandments which the Bible clearly says are utterly impossible. This  those legalists,  so endeavouring,  call obedience to God, but this too is nothing of the kind. However neither is it Law for the Love of God and neighbour is lost in the preoccupation   with detail that is the heresy which is legalism.

The thing is both sides will cling to their understandings and resort to brutal name calling to any who dare contradict them, who may have learned the hard way that neither of these two are proper responses to the Law of God and that grace is something else.

So easy believists live like pagans and legalists  are dead set on showing that the Christian faith is everything the atheists think it is, namely a mind control death cult.

And no one really cares that the name of God is being blasphemed among the nations by the fact that we are one of the two errors I mention here. Moreover we are blind to the fact that if we are not one of the two it is because we have been led to repent of being one of the two and can testify to the living Grace of Christ which led to this.

I see that the greatest enemies of the gospel are in fact within the House of God and often the delusion is so powerful that not even the Holy Spirit will be heeded, and this to the perdition of those who flatly refuse the still small voice who still says "Come to Me you who are heavy laden [ either with Law for the legalist or  with  the common cares of life  for the easy believist]  and I will give you rest."

Alas, how we have fallen, how we have defiled the Oracles of God, and how we sanctimoniously deny that we even have; and how stubbornly we cling to our defilement  of these as if the muck of this ( the defilement of the Oracles, not the Oracles themselves) is all the spiritual food we can ever know.

Ontological Soup

One of my metaphorical fancies, for the making of an albeit serious point, mark you well, is to liken all of reality to a soup; and then to compare the differing cosmologies and ontologies to the differing consistencies of soup.

To clarify, an ontology is merely a view as to what exists and what not. Some people's ontology, for example, allows for such entities as spirits and others not

The thinnest of all these soups, IMO, is atheist materialism. It is just matter ( the basic stock) with a little salt thrown in. It is clear, but without nourishment.

To make my point I go to the extreme other end of the spectrum where entities are multiplied excessively, giving the soup the consistency of wet concrete and the digestibility (ie rational coherence) of the same. I speak of extreme pentecostal religion. There is the stock; there are personalities; there is God; there are morals.

So far so good, a good healthy nourishing meal. But then they multiply entities beyond all reason. words become reified essences that have "power" not because of their meaning but by intrinsic supernatural endowment. Curses float round in the ether also sharing such reified essence. And they attach themselves to family lines like they do in bad horror movies. Faith also shares this reified existence, for some say it s a substance, indeed even the substance reality is made of. But some of these people have seen the atmosphere infested thick with billions of demons, one for every sin that every person has ever been temped with and also the source for every evil thought and doubt that any person comes up with - the classic "devil made me do it" excuse. Some also hold that demons infest amulets and books. Where all these unemployed demons hung out when the population of the earth was about 100 million and printing was non existent is a question they never considered. So demons are summoned where none exist and the wild imagination of the undisciplined thinker is taken to be divine revelation.

And the soup gets thicker and thicker

So that which exists, this soup, is thick with unnecessary entities, all invoked by bible verses misused to the extent of ignoring those passages that give prosaic explanations of such things as doubt and fear.

Such thick, dense and stinking slop I could not digest, rationally or even emotionally.
It made me sick, and when I finally crawled out from the cheap joint where they served this  they cursed me

It has taken me years for this nonsense to be expelled from the relevant orifice.

I cannot live on salt and water but it turns out the Bible describes a reality that is more rational than the crazed claims of the charismaniacs