I keep hearing about this Covenant of Works that Adam failed in. It was part of the reason why I started writing about our relationship to Adam (here, here and here). But I want to examine this: Is there a Covenant of Works or a Covenant of Creation in the Biblical record?
Category: human
I’ve arrived at the point of this series where I’m expected (of myself, of course) to systematize all I’ve covered and come up with immigration reform in America. I’ve looked at the subject about every which way: I’ve examined the problems; I’ve worked through a thought model based on the Old Testament; I’ve looked at reasons for civil disobedience; the reality of Christians under rulers and the further reality of Christians as rulers; I’ve explained the importance of conscience; and finally I looked at the reality of living in a world where sin still reigns—so a solution is expected, right? In this post I’m going to first explain what I think would be an ideal situation with immigration reform, then I’ll follow with something more realistic on the national level, and then I’ll end with what I think Christians should be realistically doing now.
I like to look at situation and, no matter how rough, consider what would be ideal. I think that’s important. In circles with friends or family I have convincingly argued for The Ideal and then stood there as someone asks “That’s awesome; how do we get there?” only to shake my head and respond “I don’t know.” Now the fact is that I do know that the impending ideal of a dawning future reality will establish a system that we, of our own power, can’t possibly implement. But people don’t get that so I want to talk about why that’s important.
Categories
Embracing Human Conscience
Conscience is important, everyone agrees, but we’re not sure about how important. Those sticky internal motivations are confusing and put us in an epistemological tailspin. If this was an episode of Star Trek, would both be part of the Federation but grumbling about their internal motivations from different sides of the room.
My thought model sort of worked. It allowed me to see the driving principles that ran through Israel’s treatment of immigrants while yielding some information about how those principles might be applied today; but it kept catching one snag. Our problem isn’t immigration—it’s illegal immigration.
Because of that, I had to reflect on human laws, authority and a Christian’s responsibility.