Head and Heart

The casual Bible reader does not easily grasp that God changed the world’s orientation at Pentecost.  The story is told, beginning with the Second Chapter of the Book of Acts. in the birth of the Church. The culture of western mankind was changed in the miracle of Pentecost. The culture was moved on this date from the former human culture of tribal (social) and patriarchal (personal) context to world (social) and private (context).  From this point God addressed the whole world with the gospel of Christ, not just the former accent through Israel’s tribal/national order, nor the patriarchal representative of the personal order.  The patriarchal assignments were made for purpose, related to male and female, to children and aged, to authority and obedience, to duty and privilege, and so the story may be extended into law.  It was a good plan for society that did not have the controls related to emerging and growing populations.  That emerging was more and more related to power.  That gained authority in warfare that conquered and decimated social groupings and their wealth so to reduce or destroy their cultures.  That pattern included centuries earlier but over the centuries after Christ became world standard so to secularism and various overlays. 

So began competing systems.  All persons were to understand that in the church all persons, no matter the age, the gender, or status were equal and to be perceived as equal.  God would no longer offer the priesthood only to Aaron’s descendants but to all who would qualify for their choices as servants of God.  He would provide the assistance to men and women, to young and old, to servants (employees) and authorities (managers/owners).  The list offered by the Apostle Paul in Romans Sixteen includes equality for persons as lowly as slaves and as important as members of Caesar’s household.  This approach was noted in the reference to Philip’s daughters who prophesied.  The verse seems almost as an aside so to emphasize the unusual change in tradition.  They were women, preachers, and activists.  In the former system women were given voice through their marriages/families.  In the Church they all had a level playing field for life.  They were expected to take self-accountability, and could manage in proper response to Scripture, prayer, conscience, and participation with one another without regard to culture orientation. It was likely that human beings in the general social order could adopt the equality of mankind in the mind of God to become the order of secular society.  The development of that world context has been under way for two thousand years and continues in our time.  It advances and falls back, has fits and starts, is varied in interpretations, but continues as the challenge of God that began in this sense at Pentecost for the Church.  By extension the pattern is world fare.  We now fuss with multiple minority cultures and their divisions.

We leap forward 2,000 years to current life.  The Church (spiritual) has achieved some of the biblical ideal in the mission program of the church (institutional).  That the local church membership (institutional) may have resisted making African persons to full citizenship and divided their denominations on the freedom of slaves in the United States, offering rationalization (presumed to be inferior) demonstrates the failure of the institutional church in areas, and in freedom principles that God has given to all mankind, mankind of whatever identification.  A similar, but different context has attended the cultivation of equality for genders, which is a current matter in national concerns related to equality.  The matter is lengthy in analysis, but the treatments toward resolution have also been different.  The gender gap has been reviewed in a peaceful context referring the issues to social pressure and appeal, both cerebral and emotional in nature.  The racial problem has been so overlaid with terror, warfare, degradation of God’s creation of some of the subdivisions of all mankind that the issues continue in ugly confrontation.  God tends to assist us in the problems we encounter if we use the tools he gave rather than those we invent.  Isaiah informs us: Come let us reason together, saith the Lord.  The solutions to our social problems relate to forgiveness of any mistreatment we face, even to forgiveness without request for it, and then set forth to solve the issues, not by victimization, guilt, human reason, or any other contrived system, but through the graces of God.