by Miles H. Hodges – The Covenant Nation

We humans are most wonderfully-made creatures that love to pursue grand ideas.  Ideas not only give meaning and purpose to our individual lives, those ideas are what connect us to the larger world, especially the world of other people like ourselves.

But the world of ideas can be very, very tricky.  Children can be very imaginative creatures (as can be adults!).  Consequently, the family has been designed to help shape those childish ideas into something that will be useful for them when they grow up.  There ought to be no debate over the matter.  It is an unquestionable fact that those early, very formative years are extremely important in shaping how a person will turn out as an adult.

As adults, this matter of our world of ideas takes on a new importance ... for it is on the basis of ideas that we collectively move forward as a society.  This is what has made us humans the supreme creatures on this planet.  We are not the fastest creatures, nor physically the strongest, nor possessed of the greatest sense of sight, smell or hearing.  But we think way beyond what the other animals are capable of.  This is what made us to be the dominators of this planet.

We can thus be the most creative of creatures.  But we can also be the most dangerous of creatures.  The difference between those two qualities always comes down to the question of what our ideas actually look like.

Like children in a family, by some kind of necessity as adult humans we are disciplined by our larger world through its social order ... a massive realm of ideas – ideas that direct us towards certain social goals, discipline us so that we stay in line with those ideas, and come down hard on us when we wander from that discipline. 

But wandering off with new ideas that take us beyond that order is what we like to do.

Look at the ancient Israelites.  They went through periods of strong social action ... then fell into periods of wandering and social disintegration.  The strong periods were typically brought on by some new social crisis ... one that arose because, in their recent wandering ways, they had not been paying attention to life’s serious challenges and therefore the situation around them had gotten out of hand.  Thankfully, a leader would be brought forward to take command of the situation – a leader understood by the Israelites also to be a judge or prophet, someone who was not just a military leader but also one whose sense of ideas or social direction they knew well was shaped somehow by the very power of God himself.   And thus led to a renewed spiritual unity, they would prove powerful ... for a generation or two.

But it would not be long before rising generations saw those deeds of their ancestors as offering curious but unnecessary lessons in how to go at life.  These later, more comfortable generations would see themselves as following more “progressive” ideas on how to go at life, “progressive” because these ideas were so rational, so beautiful, so “ideal” that they therefore had to be perfect in design as to how they should go at life.  Like children, they preferred the world they designed at home or at their desks rather than face the harder world outside, with its complex challenges. 

Sadly, all societies tend at some point to head down that same road.

This is why God finally put in place among us his Son, Jesus.  He was sent to us to show us how God − our Heavenly Father − created us to go at life.  God did not create us to be mere puppets.  We were given the power, even the necessity, to make choices.  But those choices needed to be realistic, not idealistic.  God thus offered, in and through Jesus, heavenly guidance (like he did through the prophets) to bring us to truth ... God’s Truth.  That was pure realism.

The Idealists of Jesus’s days, the leaders of a carefully designed religious world, proved not to be very appreciative of Jesus’s intervention in life.  In his teachings and ministry, Jesus proved to be not particularly interested in their well-designed world ... but was interested only in opening to those around him God’s higher realm.  Like the prophets of old, Jesus worked with them closely in going at life in very practical ways – summed up as God’s Way − day to day, event by event.

 Clearly, Jesus was sent to show the world this higher idea or way ... not that of some beautiful, human-designed social or religious plan.  He wanted us to understand that simply following the lead of heaven would bring us to a much better life. 

But that idea of following heaven seemed – to the “rational” minds of the day – to be pure nonsense ... dangerous nonsense.  But didn’t Jesus give them quite visible proof of the reality of that heavenly hand in the many “unnatural” miracles he performed as a demonstration of the power that comes when we simply follow God’s lead?  Didn’t he show that such power was available to us all ... despite our social status?  Yes.  But that was what made Jesus all the more infuriating to those following the “perfect” realm of human reason.  Thus they plotted to kill Jesus.

America was developed, since the early 1600s, by those who understood that a society could and should be built on just such Christ-like faith.  They chose to live by that very faith most realistically − and most successfully – in facing a very challenging world ... across many generations. 

But today, we seem to have progressed beyond such “religious nonsense.”  We are a more “rational” people.  Yet, look at how we are doing today socially and spiritually.  Is this the reality that we actually wanted to achieve with our highly Idealistic post-Christian social designs?

Miles Hodges is a writer, historian and political analyst who explores the question of why societies behave as they do ... especially in this matter of their rise and fall.