God and Violence (1)
In the Old Testament, God seems to be a warring God, but that is an earthly perspective. God will not impose his authority on humans. He does not want his people on earth using war to accomplish his purposes. He wants his followers on earth to be people of peace.
In the Old Testament age, God had only a few people who walked in the Spirit, because the Holy Spirit could not be released in fullness until after the cross. However, there is a massive battle going on in the spiritual realms. God does not use imposed authority and power to constrain the evil spiritual powers. He uses his authority in the spiritual realms to release his angels to manipulate the struggles between the evil spiritual powers to accomplish his purposes. God does not start wars. He manipulates the outcomes of the wars that have been started by evil spiritual powers.
The powers of evil are not united. They often fight against each other to get better positions in the hierarchy of evil. The Prince of Persia and his followers fought against the Assyrian Spirit and his cohorts.
God mostly accomplished his purposes by sending his angels to fight against the principalities and powers and not letting a different one win. He fought against the spiritual power of Babylon, which allowed the spiritual Prince of Persia to defeat it. This allowed the Persian armies to conquer and destroy Babylon.
2 comments:
I worry about statements which appear to make God subject to time, even when the particular event you mention (the cross) did take place in time, because God is infinite, so He shall effect time rather than be subject to it.
In other words, it is more likely that the fullness of the Holy Spirit very well could have been released before the cross, for the divine sacrifice redeems all of time rather than being a slave to time's apparent flow (an appearance that could well have more to do with the limitations of the human observer than anything innate to time)- and the reason you've just got a few running around in the Spirit is the same as today- not that many people actually say yes to Him.
August
Once God created a finite world and finite people to live within it, and committed himself to working with them, he constrained himself to working within time. He can still move across time, but if he intervened outside the order of time, his interventions would not make sense to those living within time.
So the Holy Spirit was not as active on earth during the Old Testament age. He was much freer after the cross. That is the way God chose to operate, so he could relate to us. It was not a limitation on his freedom or power.
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