The Moral Precipice
The Christian Call to Adventure
By guest contributor Jack Milton.
In ancient literature, the hero engaged in an epic quest is a universal archetype. We are acquainted with heroes like Hercules, who in the course of his Twelve Labors kills or captures beasts, accomplishes mighty tasks, and obtains symbolic trophies. There have since been others, like Frodo and Sam in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, whose quest awakens them to noble character and wisdom.
The Patriarchs also had tests that were epic in nature. Their quests were transformative and sacrificial, in which God was revealed more deeply to them. Abraham was called to take Isaac to Mount Moriah to make a terrible oblation. Jacob wrestled an angel, and his character was forever changed. The ancient Hebrews were called to the smoking Mount Sinai amid blasts of thunder and lightning, to receive the moral law by the Voice of God Himself.
Through the lens of our present circumstances we may feel insignificant; yet we too are engaged in an epic struggle. Our struggle is to establish multi-generational Christian communities and to seek the rebirth of Christian culture. There will be tests through which will come purification of motive and character. The first step on this path can be the hardest, because each of us must be taken to a moral precipice.
In Frank Herbert’s Dune, Paul Atreides is given a life-or-death examination. He must keep his hand in a box that simulates extreme pain while a Bene Gesserit nun holds the Gom Jabbar, a needle tipped with meta-cyanide poison, to his throat. Atreides must demonstrate absolute self-control and, thus, his humanity by defying both pain and needle. In the real world, there is a greater struggle than self-control: the recognition of personal sin and its consequences. I refer you to Acts 24:24–26.
While under arrest, the Apostle Paul was invited by the Roman procurator of Judea to discuss his case. Hoping to receive a bribe from Paul, procurator Antonius Felix was familiar with the controversies surrounding Christianity thanks to his Jewish wife. According to Acts, “[A]s [Paul] reasoned of righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come, Felix trembled.” It is curious that a man who killed his political rivals should be shaken by Paul’s discourse on divine judgment. After Felix assumed the office of governor, he crushed a bandit crime wave in the Judean countryside. He then used bandits to assassinate Jonathan, the sitting high priest of the Temple in Jerusalem, and a critic of Felix. But at the word judgment, Felix was so disturbed that he tells Paul, “Come back later.” No bribe received.
So it is with each of us. There is the part of us that, like Felix, shrinks away from inward confrontation with divine judgment, as if avoidance would somehow negate the pressure that heaps upon us. When God gave the Commandments to the ancient Hebrews, the people similarly stepped back from His audible Voice upon the mountain. That peak was veiled in smoke, thunder, and lightning. God had called them to the foot of the mountain, and it was there that Man was confronted by moral law. Sinful humanity met the Holy God in Exodus 19.
Everyone understands why the memory of personal sin is a place you retreat from. You do not allow your mind to reminisce in that space. Any normal person wants to avoid the sick feeling waiting there, the feeling of uncontrolled compulsions, the place where barely acknowledged feelings of indebtedness and guilt reside. It’s the same place where a Voice was speaking, and the Hebrews begged Moses not to let them hear that Voice again. Now that awful sound is one of a clock ticking, a sound heard in your conscience. In some mythical lumberyard, you are cutting trees. Logs are piling up, one upon another, stack after stack, in volumes that can’t be sold, can’t be traded, and never stop coming. They are large, obvious, and immovable. The longer those Hebrew tribes stayed by that mountain, the more exposed they felt, even to death. The Holy God saw them down to the meanest, smallest thought in all its pathetic glory. And your clock, the one that keeps ticking cavernously in your conscience, measures the time, keeps track, and accumulates over a lifetime. This is the moral precipice, the high and secret place that the Holy God, the righteous Judge, the eternal Father must take us to, if we are willing.
Establishing Christian nations with heirs to follow us requires an examination by God. Be willing to look the beast in the eye. Whether you are a great man or a lesser man is irrelevant. You crave an unyielding set of spiritual convictions to be planted in you as the ultimate motivation to perpetuate family, culture, and nation. You must covet the purifying force of truth that is continually revealed to generation after generation to be at work in you. The protective boundaries of national identity — Christian tradition and heroes of the faith — have as their headwaters the spiritual intimate: a personal, penetrating knowledge of God as Father and Christ as Savior.
These are things you must want. You cannot merely assent to them.
If we are willing to go up with Him, where personal visions for new Christendoms are being kindled in men, the trial of faith and character will judge us. It will determine who will be the father of Puritans and who produces bastard litters of Robespierres. Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us.
This is just the beginning. To go up with Him is to glimpse what is beyond, to see the landscape of the other side. A Promised Land whose topography is that of Joshua and Judges, of Reconquistas and Crusades.
The spiritual Bosporus you navigate will offer continued challenges. They throw down their gauntlets and make demands. Young men’s contests are slaying dragons with their bare hands. Lions, bears, and giants are the bread of the warrior in his physical prime. But ordeals do not stop with age; they merely take on subtlety. The tests of the mature are at the city gates.
Respectability becomes the temptation. The idol that burns with a demon fire is the idol of acceptance. You will think to yourself that you’re finally in. You have seen the plagues, crossed the sea, the desert, and the river, and you’re there. Since you have ascended as a pillar of society, all that’s left to do now is rub elbows and sign contracts. You are in the Promised Land where everybody knows your name. It must be Divine Providence the way the people who once fought you now strain to schedule appointments with your office. What were once fiery darts, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, are now business propositions. They offer lucrative, well-connected, clever machinations that cause the money to roll right in.
Now that you have clearly arrived at the destination, to Mount Sion, and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels, to the general assembly and church of the firstborn, you are offered a deal. A deal so fantastic that you can’t describe it, not to your wife, not to your lawyer, not to anyone. You’ll be set for more generations than you can count, the deal is that good. And you’ll finally have financial security. Why, you’ve been walking in the desert all this time by comparison. Maybe this can be real sustenance for you, and you won’t have to deal with tiresome situations anymore: “Just sign here… we can fix the details on the back side… it’s no problem.” Surely the Lord has elevated you, right? Let someone else deal with the day-to-day operations. Others can defend your interests. Can’t they see you have something to protect now?
Yes, something to protect.
This is the warfare you find yourself knee-deep in. The culmination of years of sweat and blood and long journeys brings you face to face with the black magic of success. For years you’ve felt like the rug was about to be yanked out from under you, going from desert oasis to desert oasis with opposition on every side. Finally you get a break. Your secretary calls to say: “The people over the mountain are excited to do business with you; they only request that you accept one of their tiny figurines for your home. Think of it as a rustic symbol of good faith.”
This is why you hunger for things that are permanent, for “a kingdom which cannot be moved.” You yourself can be moved over time without realizing it.
“See that ye refuse not him that speaketh” (Hebrews 12:25).
Felix was ambushed by God when he was looking for a bribe and ran away. That meeting should have been to Felix’s salvation. Moses was startled by God also, but he engaged the burning bush that came into his view. As a result, the existing political, social, and spiritual order was shaken to its foundation. Moses became the instrument for judgment of Egypt, which brought about its collapse. Thus the moral precipice: we go there to become grounded and rooted in truth because the structures we’ve built upon are being rattled. The long years of rot are being exposed. Corruption is being ripped out.
[B]ut now he hath promised, saying, Yet once more I shake not the earth only, but also heaven. And this word, Yet once more, signifieth the removing of those things that are shaken, as of things that are made, that those things which cannot be shaken may remain.
Accept the challenge. Be willing to sacrifice it all, like Abraham on Moriah, and you will come down the mountain with something greater. You will have a future.
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