Wrongness
barriers have been established throughout our lives and
for good cause. Many of those barriers were taught to us
from youth by parents and teachers who were looking out
for our welfare. They said, “Don’t be foolish, so
don’t do this, because if you do this, here is what
will happen to you.” So we grew up learning
not to do certain things as well as to do certain other
things. The biblical version of this type of instruction
is epitomized in the book of Proverbs.
For
those of us who have grown up in the Lord a long time,
many other wrongness barriers have been instituted. We
have been informed of these wrongnesses by the
scriptures themselves, not to mention the host of
teachers the Lord has brought into our lives since our
conversion to Christ.
There
are things Moses said not to do, Jesus said not to do,
and the apostles said not to do as matters of a-personal
practice, behavior and deportment. From these sayings
have come numerous other principles by our pastors,
teachers, prophets and apostles in faith over the
generations since. And the truth remains that much of
these foundational teachings and their derivatives are
full of the wisdom of God.
In
their most refined degree, wrongness barriers are
instituted in our lives directly from the Holy Spirit’s
conviction---or as we might say, the leading and Voice
of the Spirit. Over the course of our growing in Christ,
the Holy Spirit Himself teaches us not to do certain
things. He knows the temptations to which we are most
subject at various times and so He tells us “Taste
not, handle not, don’t do this” as to how we
conduct our daily lives. Some of these leadings may be
long term for us, and others more seasonal.
Wrongness
barriers are disciplinary and have been so instituted
for our good at whatever level.
But
what we must come to see as people of real faith in a
Living Indwelling Lord, is that the righteousness of
faith exceeds the principles of wrongness barriers.
Faith in Christ by the Spirit exceeds in authority the
a-personal principles of righteousness first taught us
in youth. Faith also exceeds the wrongness barriers
established in scripture, and those taught by our
spiritual teachers in the centuries since. Faith even
exceeds the wrongness barriers that the Spirit Himself
may have spoken to us at a given earlier time in our
lives, whether for the long or short term.
How
do we know all this is true? We know this is true
objectively by watching the life of Christ Himself, and
we know it is true subjectively by the prevailing
witness of the Holy Spirit at those critical times of
challenge to break through wrongness barriers.
Let’s
start with the objective demonstration of this in the
life of Christ.
Christ’s
Challenge to Wrongness Barriers
When
you read the story of Jesus across the gospels, perhaps
the most outstanding “hidden in plain sight” truth about
His ministry is that, as the express image of the
Indwelling Father, Jesus was constantly breaking the
wrongness barriers established in the hearts and
minds of those among whom He dwelt. He was constantly
accused of “breaking the Law of Moses” (though in
reality He was actually fulfilling the Law). In our
parlance, we would say He was guilty of living an
“unscriptural life.”
-
Challenging
Scriptural Wrongness Barriers
In
Jesus’ day, there were actually two prevailing forms of
wrongness barriers. The first set of barriers were those
established by the Law itself. These are the things
Moses directly said not to do. They included injunctions
against working on the Sabbath, the eating of unclean
foods, the drinking of blood and the absenting of
oneself from the feasts of Israel (Dt. 16:16).
It’s
at this point we receive our most vital understanding of
what it means when Jesus said “I came to fulfil the
Law, not destroy it,” because in fact, on the four
points of Lawful wrongness I just listed, Jesus could
naturally have been said to (and was in fact directly
charged with) “breaking the Law” or “destroying the
Law.” You must see this, and especially from the
point of view of the first witnesses:
Jesus
did truly “work” on the Sabbath. In defending one
Sabbath healing, He said so Himself, “Hitherto My
Father works, and I work also” (Jn. 5:16-17).
Jesus declared in effect that all foods are clean,
contrary to the Law (Mk. 7:19 > Acts 10:13). Jesus
exhorted people to “eat His flesh and drink His blood”
contrary to the Law (Jn. 6:54). And Jesus did absent
Himself at times from certain feasts. At one point He
specifically told His family, “I am not going up to
this feast,” though afterward the Father directed
His mind otherwise about going (Jn. 7:8-10).
What
this tells us---if we are graced enough in the Holy
Spirit to receive it---is that Jesus’ fulfilling of the
Law was not about fulfilling the LETTER
of the Law, but fulfilling the righteousness of
the Law behind the LETTER
and to which the LETTER
pointed. And this He said Himself,
Mt.
12:3 …“Have
you not read what David did when he became hungry, he
and his companions, 4 how he entered
the house of God, and they ate
the consecrated bread, which was not lawful
for him to eat nor for those with him, but for
the priests alone? 5 Or have you not
read in the Law, that on the Sabbath the priests
in the temple break the Sabbath and are
innocent? 6 But I say to you
that something greater than the temple is
here. 7 But if you had known what
this means, ‘I desire compassion, and not a
sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the innocent.
-
Fulfilling
the Law vs. Keeping the
Law
What
is Jesus saying? He is saying that “fulfilling” the Law
is not about “keeping” the Law. It is about something
far greater.
Fulfilling
the Law is in fact about coming to the Life
of which the Law speaks and to which it points, which
otherwise might cause the occasion of a natural breaking
of the law. The fulfillment of the Law is through
entrance into the Life behind the Law, not
keeping the Law itself. And I hope you got that,
because again, this is critical. Let’s say it one more
time:
The
fulfillment of the Law is not through the keeping of
the Law but through entrance into the Life
behind the Law.
The
Law is not Life, but leads to Life. And Jesus was and is
the Life behind the Law. As He said,
Jn.
5:39 You
search the Scriptures because you think that in them
you have eternal life; it is these that testify
about Me; 40 and you are unwilling to
come to Me so that you may have life.
By
perfectly—not keeping the Law, but--- fulfilling
the Will of the Father, Jesus perfectly fulfilled all
that the Law required. And that by the way is how we
fulfill the Law to this very day,
Rom.
8:4 so
that the requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in
us, who do not walk according to the flesh but
according to the Spirit.
Living
by the Spirit’s authority oneness and leading into the
Father---not by “keeping the Law” of the scriptures in
any age---is how we fulfill the Law. Yet most people
today who come to the scriptures never come to the Lord,
and most believers who initially do come to the Lord
through the scriptures, fail to keep coming into
the Lord past the scriptures to find their life. We are
stopped at the wrongness barriers.
o
“His”
Law or “Our” Law?
To
accent this point about Jesus’ fulfillment of the Law by
doing only His Father’s Will, we want to note that Jesus
almost never referred to the Law as “God’s Law.” He
never called it “my Father’s law.” He never called it
“my law.” He never took ownership or claimed
authorship of it. He always referred to it
as “the Law, “your Law,” or “their Law,” that is, Israel’s
Law. Jesus critically distinguished between what
the Law was and Who God IS. For it was a
distinction that Israel could not make for itself.
Today,
in the Second Age of Unbelief,
we too fail to discern between what the Scriptures are
and Who God IS. If Jesus walked among us now, and we
objected to a point at which He appeared to break a
command of Paul, He would say, “Is it not written in
your scriptures….?”
&&&&&&&&&&
But
now we want to get back on point about wrongness
barriers and how Jesus demonstrated their breaking. To
reiterate one more time, breaking perceptional
scriptural wrongness barriers and actually fulfilling
the scriptures according to the Life behind them are
of one and the same heart and Mind in Christ. They
are not contrary. Conversely, “keeping” the scriptures
under the conscience of wrongness barriers and
“fulfilling” the scriptures are not the same.
You can keep the whole law and yet never fulfil it.
So
this is the first way Jesus demonstrated the
transcension of wrongness barriers, namely, relative to
scripture. And in conformity to His image, so also
it must be by the Holy Spirit with us.
The
hardest of the tests of extreme faith come at those
points where the Holy Spirit leads us on a path that
squeezes us into having to break scriptural wrongness
barriers by failing to “keep” the scriptures with
respect to a-personal commands, injunctions and
principles. This involves a process that requires both
the informing of the conscience by the Spirit and the
mediating of this out with our brethren, which we will
get into further down.
-
Challenging
Traditional Wrongness Barriers
But
there is a second way in which Jesus constantly broke
wrongness barriers. This is with respect to the
innumerable ordinances that the scribes, Pharisees and
the teachers of the Law had added as “safeguards” to the
Law for about 500 years since the time of Ezra. These
ordinances Jesus referred to as the “doctrines and
commandments of men” (Mt. 15:9).
The
initial perspective on these ordinances is important.
The rabbinic ordinances given to safeguard the Law were
originally instituted for a very well intentioned
reason. At the time Ezra and the people came back from
Babylon, the psyche of the Hebrew nation was reeling
under the wounding of their 70 year captivity and the
awareness that it was because of their numerous sins in
deliberate indifference to the Mosaic Law that their
captivity had befallen them.
So
these people had a fresh godly zeal to see to it that
this would never happen again and that they would never
forsake the Law. To “insure” that this would be the
case, the new rabbinic class added “principles” that
would spell out “exactly” just what it did mean in
specific situations to “keep the Law.”
And
so over the generations these rules were added to all
the more until Christ appeared. The adding of all
these regulations naturally added a tremendous burden on
the conscience of the people, and it also bred
hypocrisy, since not even those who proposed all these
ordinances could keep them.
Importantly,
a whole nation had been inculcated with a heavy guilt
conscience in regard to all these ordinances over those
five centuries, erecting hundreds of non-divine
wrongness barriers in the hearts and minds of the
people. It was from these barriers that the Lord came to
set His people free, and is the primary context for the
meaning of freedom as Jesus used it in His preaching to
the people at that time.
It
was because of this manmade burden that Jesus openly,
repeatedly and flauntingly broke the wrongness barriers
related to all these ordinances. Unlike the Law, whose
principles were at least given to point to Life, the
minute doctrines and commandments of the rabbis competed
with and directly blocked access to the Life to be found
in the Father through Messiah.
&&&&&&&&&&
So
this is what we see at the core of Jesus’
confrontational ministry with the religious leadership
and the people. We find a continual clashing with and
smashing of wrongness barriers, both scriptural and
non-scriptural, in order to bring the people into the
transcendent Life available only through Christ Jesus as
the way, the truth and the Life, the express image of
the Living Father among us, and One who is intent on
reproducing that same barrier breaking Life in all of
those to become reborn into the Father’s family.
The
Spirit’s Subjective Witness to Challenging Wrongness
Barriers
This
brings us now to consider our own subjective witness
from the Holy Spirit over the breaking of wrongness
barriers. Remember that we are answering the
question, How do we know that the righteousness of
faith exceeds the wrongness barriers of the a-personal
principles first taught us in youth, those established
in scripture, those by our spiritual teachers since
and those previously spoken to us by the Spirit
Himself?
When
we talk about having a subjective witness from the
Spirit, we are making a statement to the effect that
when all is said and done, it is our spirit knowing of
the Holy Spirit---the Spirit of Truth---that forms our ultimate reference point
for all truth, faith and action. John Himself
teaches us this in the scripture:
I
Jn. 2:27 As
for you, the anointing which you received from
Him abides in you, and you have no need for anyone to
teach you; but as His anointing teaches you about
all things, and is true and is not a lie,
and just as it has taught you, you abide in
Him….3:24… We know by this
that He abides in us, by the Spirit whom He
has given us…5:10 The one who
believes in the Son of God has the testimony
in himself;…11 And the testimony is
this, that God has given us eternal life,
and this life is in His Son…. 20 And we
know that the Son of God has come, and has given
us understanding so that we may know Him who is
true; and we are in Him who is true, in His
Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God
and eternal life.
This
is the “epistemology of John,”
that is, John’s testimony to “how we ultimately know
what we know” about eternal life and all reality
relative to it. It is how we finally know truth
from error at every level. It is by Spirit revelation
and impartation. And what John outlines here is merely
an elaboration on what Jesus had told His disciples that
final night together before the cross:
Jn.
14:16 I
will ask the Father, and He will give you
another Helper, that He may be with you
forever; 17 that is the Spirit
of truth….you know Him because He abides with you
and will be in you….20 In that day you
will know that I am in My Father, and you in
Me, and I in you. … 26 …The
Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will
send in My name, He will teach you all things,
and bring to your remembrance all that I said to
you….16:13 …When He, the Spirit of truth,
comes, He will guide you into all the truth;
for He will not speak on His own initiative, but
whatever He hears, He will speak; and He will
disclose to you what is to come. 14 He
will glorify Me, for He will take of Mine and
will disclose it to
you.
There
is a knowing that transcends knowledge. It is an
internal knowing beyond the mind. It is the knowing of spirit
touching Spirit. It is known by internal
revelation, not by study. The truth is not finally known
by hermeneutical principles behind interpretations of
scripture taught in rabbinic colleges and seminaries,
however initially helpful to general understanding of
author meanings and intents. In the end, such principles
do, as the early rabbinics encountered, create their own
wrongness barriers to entry into faith.
So
then. Where this spirit to Spirit intersect
takes place imparting ultimate knowing beyond the
wrongness barrier, the promised Life is encountered
toward which all scripture points, and liberty is
released in our lives.
But
there is a problem to getting through that barrier. That
problem is Conscience!
The
Holy Spirit and Conscience
Conscience
is the moral sentry of the soul. It is planted there by
God, given to all men and intended by God to be
obeyed. Conscience is the bulwark against outright
lawlessness in the human heart, and stands as the final
arbiter of the knowledge of moral good and evil at
the human level.
Conscience
is the divinely ordained protector, police presence,
judge and the jury in the heart over moral issues.
As such, and most importantly here, Conscience is
the establisher and guardian of the very wrongness
barriers that must be overcome in our hearts to enter
the Life of true faith.
Conscience,
as the law of the soul is sensitive to every and any
transgression of what it perceives to be wrong and evil.
“To him that knows to do good and does it not, to him
it is sin.” That is the knowledge of Conscience
and its purpose as a convictor of morality.
-
The
Human Limitation of Conscience
However,
and this is critical, the conscience is not divinely
revelatory of ultimate truth. Though appointed by
God as the guardian of the heart, yet because Conscience
is only informed at a level of human revelation, Conscience
is not completely or even necessarily accurately
informed on what God approves or what constitutes His
Will and Righteousness. As a minister of human
moral revelation only, Conscience is an agent of
unbelief, not of divine faith.
Because
Conscience is subject to human training, it may also be
misinformed through false training. People of
difference cultures can in fact have opposite moral
sensitivity regarding the same practices. Additionally,
the conscience is
-
subject
to ignorance,
-
can
be “bought off” by the self-deceitful heart that
ultimately does not want to hear what Conscience has to
say (leading to a “seared conscience”), and
-
can
be demonically manipulated and oppressed by
religious spirits.
For
all these reasons, Conscience cannot be taken as the
final arbiter of moral truth or the will of God in a
situation. It is definitely limited.
What
does this mean for the relationship between Conscience
and the Holy Spirit?
Conscience
is present in all moral instruction out of which it
creates protective wrongness barriers to govern
behavior. It erects these barriers regardless of whether
or not the Holy Spirit is involved in the instruction.
In other words, the presence of the Holy Spirit to give
us instructions does not displace or preempt the
operation of Conscience.
Where
the Holy Spirit is involved in the instruction,
Conscience is yet always present to assimilate and codify
the morality associated with the Spirit’s
instruction, to then stand as a “human-prophetic voice”
against any lawless thought and impulse that would seek
to challenge that instruction. The sounding of that
human prophetic “voice” is the definition of a
wrongness barrier.
Nevertheless,
as we have already seen, Conscience may be misinformed
from God’s point of view regarding what it believes to
be wrong. Moreover, where the Holy Spirit is involved,
His leading and guidance over a-personal behaviors is
not “set in stone” as written by Conscience, but is
dynamic, surpassing all human conception of
righteousness held to by Conscience.
This
means that the Spirit may give instruction against some
behavior or practice in one season of life to be
codified by Conscience, but in another season, the
Spirit may reverse Himself and approve
of it, and in the process, the Voice of the Spirit
crosses the voice of Conscience that remains in force
from the former instruction.
-
“How
Can it Be Right When It ‘Feels’ So Wrong?”
It
is here with Conscience’s inherited moral
misinformations from men and its inability to easily
adapt to the changing approvals of the Holy Spirit that
the deepest crisis of faith is engendered in
the heart.
Some
things that faith calls us to do are circumstantially or
even relationally hard. But nothing is harder than when
the Holy Spirit calls us or leads us to break wrongness
barriers established by Conscience, and especially those
from scripture! The two are at loggerheads, and we
don’t know how to cope with what seems somehow
internally right to our hearts yet feels so internally
wrong to our souls at the same time.
It
is at this point of crisis between Conscience and the
Spirit, that faith either will or will not overcome the
wrongness barriers previously erected by Conscience. It
is here that determines how we answer the question, “Will
ye also go away?”
---whether
we remain in the camp of the Pharisees to retain the
burden of the protective wrongness barriers,
or
whether we can overcome to follow the Lamb “whithersoever
He goes”
---
following Him into the transcending righteousness marked
by inner peace beyond conscientious turmoil---the peace
that comes with liberation from one more internal
barrier that has outlived its time.
Do
you see this?
&&&&&&&&&&
People,
this is how deep the challenge of ever increasing faith
goes. Faith goes to the core of challenging humanly
apprehended maxims of Conscience. And all our lives as
believers, the Spirit has to confront us with His “more
perfect” ways and truth in the matters of Life that
require us to let go of and that “violate” what
Conscience has previously held to as the divine
standard.
So
how does this happen? What does this struggle between
Conscience and the Spirit look like? The perennial
question always arises,
“But
this thing I’m being led to do or believe feels so
wrong! It’s against scripture as far as I can see it.
It’s even against what the Holy Spirit told me how not
to live before. How do I know that this is really a
leading and command of the Spirit to let go of my
conscientious objection past its time, and not rather
that I am being deceived by some lawless spirit to
give up this righteous standard of belief and
practice?”
Isn’t
that the question? Yes, it’s always the question of
advanced faith. It is the question every Pharisee and
commoner must answer. You know it is. You’ve been there
yourself. I’m not telling you something you don’t
already know (most of you out there!).
A
Courtroom Drama
In
the crosshairs between the Holy Spirit and Conscience,
my answer always comes back to the ultimate reference
point above. The Holy Spirit Himself is the final
declarer and prover of the Truth before the
court of our hearts, not Conscience.
Some
translations use the word “Advocate” and
“Counselor” instead of “Helper” to describe the
Holy Spirit. What is an advocate? What is a counselor,
such as a counselor-at-law? What do they do?
An
advocate-counselor argues a case before a court.
It is the job of our “Counselor at Divine Law” to make
His superior case before our hearts against the case of
previous Conscience. The Advocate brings witnesses
and evidence before the court of the heart. And
it is by the superior argumentation of Spirit to our
spirit that we become convinced that the Spirit is
indeed leading us beyond Conscience in our walk of
faith, requiring a submission of Conscience to a new
higher conformity.
We
become equally convinced by the Spirit that we are not
being deceived by a false spirit seeking to illegally
overthrow Conscience in the justification of some pet
sin. In fact, in this same courtroom of the heart, the
Spirit also prosecutes demonic spirits hiding
behind the “convictions” of Conscience.
Yet
again in the courtroom, the devil is also present to
prosecute us, shouting out accusations and condemnation
upon us from the gallery in the midst of this entire
drama. Indeed, in the heat of the crisis, there is
cacophony between the Advocacy of the Spirit, the
objections of Conscience resting on previous knowledge,
and the cat-calling of the Accuser.
But
in the end, the still steady small Voice of the heavenly
Advocate wins His judgment from us in favor of the
Father’s case to a higher faith and obedience,
overpowering the unbelieving, condemning voices of both
Conscience and the Accuser. John describes the Spirit’s
courtroom victory this way,
I
Jn. 5:19 We
will know by this that we are of the truth, and
will assure our heart before Him 20 in
whatever our heart condemns us; for God is greater
than our heart and knows all things.
-
Jesus
At Court
Again,
Jesus sets the pattern for us. Everything we experience
in the court of our hearts over breaking wrongness
barriers, He experienced in the courts of open
contention on the floor of the temple.
Thinking
back to all the barriers He challenged, Jesus did not
just expect people to accept His say so about the things
He was calling them to radically break past. He
produced witnesses and evidence. He had John. He
had His Father’s Voice. He had the Father’s miraculous
works—including the regular casting out of religious
demons (even as He was being attacked by the merciless
accusations of demonically possessed men). He had of
course His own testimony in consort with these. But He
also at times could get direct support from Moses and
the prophets.
In
Christ’s mind, this total panel of witnesses and
evidences left the people and Pharisees without
excuse for continuing to hold onto their wrongness
barriers about what He was saying and doing (Jn.
15:22,24). He expected that they should have been able
to pass judgment in favor of faith in Him. And He held
the populace totally accountable for failing to enter
into the faith Life beyond the traditions of elders and
the Law of Moses (Mt. 11:20-24).
All
this drama is true today in the spirit before the bar of
the church and of the individual believer’s heart,
especially when it comes to matters of obedience over
scriptural issues. Continual trial continues in all of
us over the call of the Spirit past the naturally
misinformed and previously well informed scriptural
wrongness barriers of Conscience.
Mercy:
The Remaining Challenge of Lawlessness and the
Weakness of Men
Because
of the nature and intensity of the battle over wrongness
barriers, we as a body have to walk with great humility
and mercy toward ourselves and others as the call to
Living Faith gets worked out.
First,
we must remember that we are all still mortal and the
battle with world lawlessness still swirls fiercely
around us. This means the role of mortal
Conscience as a bulwark against lawlessness remains with
us and must be absolutely respected. We never want to
press into faith or coax others to enter faith beyond
Conscience without the Holy Spirit’s thoroughly
informed persuasion of advocacy in force.
Wrongness barriers exist for a good reason, as we have
seen. And the worse the world gets, the more important
the initial role of Conscience in enforcing standards of
humanly righteous behavior is.
So
it is absolutely imperative we make clear here: this
article is not advocating for immediate wholesale
abandonment of wrongness barriers! Those barriers have
to be respected in each of us as long as and until the
Holy Spirit has timely made His appeal for their
transcension! To advocate otherwise is to indeed promote
lawlessness.
Additionally,
we have to remember that all men are at different
places in their crises over the transcending of
wrongness barriers, and we must show the mercy of
discernment in our dealings with others.
This
is the whole point of Paul’s instructions regarding food
offered to idols and similar social taboo issues.
We must “have mercy on some who are doubting” as
Jude says. If we are being raised in a prophetic
way at all to trumpet the call to
Conscience-transcending faith, we must have the Holy
Spirit’s discernment to know the difference between the
sincerely weak and the religiously stubborn.
We
must relent for the sake of the weak, not flaunting a
liberty we have obtained that others simply are not
ready for, while boldly challenging the stubbornness of
religious socialism that resists the call to surpass
wrongness barriers that have now passed their time, if
they ever had a legitimate place in the church to begin
with.
Like
Jesus therefore, we must discern between the weak but
sincere disciples who just couldn’t get out of the boat
like Peter, and the rigid Pharisees that continue to
weigh people down with all manner of scruples of
religious conscience having no place in the living Will
of the Father.
We
must remember that breaking wrongness barriers are the
hardest barriers to entrance into Living Faith that we
are called on to break, or rather over which to be
broken. This breaking is at the heart
of the message of the cross, as
we keep making the painful blood transfusion between
human moral righteousness and true eternal
righteousness.
Conclusion
I
have written today for the overcomers of the church—for
those who love the Lord and desire to press into His
righteousness at all costs, no matter how extreme those
moral costs of heart may become. I have not written for
anyone who is seeking a pre-mature out from obedience to
God-ordained disciplines of the conscience that might
offer some solace for retaining cherished pulls of lust
and lawlessness. If you are struggling with temptation
in any area, you are commanded to stay in the place of
Conscience until the Lord finishes His purging work from
your sin and releases your soul from His disciplines
upon you.
To
all the body, be edified as you work through this
crucible in the inner man over wrongness barriers unto a
more perfect faith, no matter where you are today on the
road toward final immortality!
Blessings
to all God’s faithful,
