You’re in a car. You’re in a car that you love. You’re enjoying your drive. Your thoughts are free, you feel one with the road; every journey in this car is the hallmark of your day. But there’s an issue. The car, from under the hood, is making all kinds of violent rattling noises. The car, when it shouldn’t be driven, is driving, and you are ignoring every sign that it needs to be fixed.
Who would do this? Why would anyone do this? Having a car that is, at any time, clearly about to break down, who would risk further damaging their car, ignoring the fact that it needs to be taken to a shop?
We have our reasons. One reason could be that we love our car and want to, until it kicks the bucket, get every last moment with it. Another reason could be that we don’t have the money to get it fixed, and are therefore, until the car decides to stop working, forced to carry on. Yet another reason could be that we just don’t care, or that we have too much going on in our life to worry about it.
This is how we naturally treat our devotional conversation. To us, our conversation is divine. To us, our conversation is naturally entitled. And, when you think about the belief our conversation either adopts or inherits when conceived within the religious world, this is the only condition our conversation can have. Herein a, “Thus saith the living God,” is needed:
“I hate, I despise your feast days, and I will not smell in your solemn assemblies. Though ye offer me burnt offerings and your meat offerings, I will not accept them: neither will I regard the peace offerings of your fat beasts. Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols. But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream,” Amos 5:21-24.
Notice that what is quoted is in present tense. That means the voice and the mind that is speaking is not ultimately sectioning out a particular or a specific group of people, but is calling out every group and individual fulfilling the saying, “O house of Jacob, which are called by the name of Israel, and are come forth out of the waters of Judah, which swear by the name of the LORD, and make mention of the God of Israel,” Isaiah 48:1.
The Bible isn’t a book commending worship and service. The Bible isn’t a book coddling the ego of one’s religious conversation. Once passed the lore of the scriptures and are found beneath its surface, one will understand the Bible to be a book giving counsel, correction, and advice to the personal devotional conversation.
Our belief is birthed out of the religious world. While birthed out of the religious world, our belief is first conceived, although not by any act of self, within our self, where there is no trace of the philosophy within the religious world. Once we take what is conceived within us and bring it into the religious world, our belief becomes a violent vehicle. Because we are too lazy to either notice or care, or are too attached to what it has become within the religious world, we ignore the fact that our conversation is sick.
The Bible is a book whose philosophy informs its careful student of the condition of their conversation. It doesn’t matter what we denominate our conversation to be, if we are saying the “God” of Israel is our “God,” then we naturally possess a damaged and a damaging conversation. Maybe we don’t know this, but the Bible is not shy to tell us.
Why is our conversation damaged and damaging? Religious theory keeps our spiritual thoughts flesh-based or confined to the “box” of religion and theology. We don’t know it, but this “box” of religion and of theology is the “curse” or “plague” given to the religious world. The book of Ecclesiastes, chapter three and verses ten and eleven make this quite plain, which is why it is so hard to truly hear how and why it says, “For ever, O LORD, thy word is settled in heaven,” Psalm 119:89.
The philosophy within the Bible is about our conversation’s justification. If something must be justified, or cleansed, or purified, that means its natural or original condition is filthy and broken. The sooner we accept that justification is firstly for the conversation, the sooner we can begin to correctly understand what to spiritually or philosophical revere.