Inheriting Sonship
Unending Oceans of Timeless Liquid Love, Rolling and Bringing In God
Inheriting Sonship: Part 2 – Introduction to Ancient Hebrew Culture
Introduction
Corrective spectacles are prescribed by opticians to people with eye defects to help them to see clearly. They are not prescribed to people who can see clearly. For those who can see, wearing other people’s prescribed spectacles distorts their vision and can even cause side effects such as headache or stumbling and falling. The culture of religious tradition prescribes spectacles to its adherents and people are generally required to wear them in order for them to see in a prescribed and particularly religious way. Generation upon generation of religious practice adds more and more lenses to the traditional spectacles resulting in a view of what is considered to be true and yet becomes more and more distorted and further from the truth. Abraham left religious culture and tradition behind when he left to follow God. Jesus refused to wear the orthodox spectacles of the oral traditions of the fathers and was denounced as a “blasphemer” by the cultural religious institution of his day. God never prescribed religious tradition – religious tradition replaced the blessing of Abraham and the anointing of King David with something completely different which robbed the Israelites of their inheritance in God. It could rob us too. By temporarily laying aside the prescribed spectacles of our own religious culture and tradition and looking clearly at the culture of the ancient Hebrews we will have a much better understanding of God’s eternal purpose of inheriting sonship and what salvation really meant to the people of the Bible that actually experienced these things first hand. Most of the Bible was written in Hebrew. The culture of the Hebrews and their way of thinking was very different to ours. The words that they used are familiar to us, but to them they often meant something completely different. If we don’t understand this we can easily miss the point of what is really being said. Simple words like see, hear, know, touch and taste were far more significant to the Hebrews than to us. The Hebrews had little knowledge of abstract or conceptual thinking. The words that they used were practical and real. Anger is an abstract or conceptual word for us, but the Hebrews used the word nostril to denote anger – for them to flare the nostril was to be angry. They would say to the angry “why do you flare (your nostrils)?” We could actually say something similar when we use expressions such as “see red”, “blow your top” or “go white”. The Hebrew practical way of thinking can be seen in a partly literal interpretation of the first part of Psalm 51:
Bend in courtesy (have mercy) upon me, powers that be (O God ) according to your willingness to bow in courtesy (according to your lovingkindness), according to the casting together (multitude) of your womb embraces (mercies or love) stroke or rub (blot out) my breaking away (rebellion, sin). Trample and stamp your feet (wash) me increasingly with arrow shooting or projecting (thoroughly) from mine crookedness and bow-down twistedness (iniquity) and make me polished and shining (cleanse) me from my mark-missing (sin). For I fully eye (know) my breaking away (rebellion, sin) and my mark-missing (sin) is stretched out before my faces (ever before me).
Psalm 51
In our culture we can think practically. A thief can be called a “crook” and a reformed “crook” can be described as “going straight”. An honest person is “upright” in heart. The ancient Hebrews had little knowledge of concept, or ideology or abstract philosophy. Everything for them was practical and real. The “righteous” were called “straight following” because they kept a straight path or way through their walk of life and were happy doing what was right and true. Something true is something straight and it also meant happy or prosperous. The Hebrews would not have been able to understand or even communicate even the simplest of abstract and reasoned theoretical theological arguments or doctrine.
Inheriting Sonship 