Are you on the 7 Mountains path of goats or 7 Matthew sheep
situated by Jesus' sermon?
Rev. Douglas Olds
17 September 2023
I. Mark 6:39 and Ps 23:2--the seekers are seated by the messiah in
green pastures. In Matt 5:1 Jesus goes
up the mountain to find a crowd. He sits down to deliver his Sermon on the
Mount, modeling, instructing, and habituating how these mountain seekers may
become his sheep by returning meekly to the sheepfold, through the sheep's gate (Matt 7:13-14), and the green pasturelands prepared by his Father.
II. Goats ignore this sermon to keep climbing the (“7”) Mountains to win the high places.
Where they learn the gait of demons: 2 Chronicles 11:15; Isa. 13:21. Goats render
and activate (march for) the state (Prov. 30: 29-31). Goats serve the state--a coercive and hegemonic social order--not the people individually and severally in civilizing caregiving.
III. The activated essence of OT beauty is the hair of the loved one which
resembles goats streaming down Mount Gilead (Song 4.1; 6:5) to where there are
good pasturelands (Nu. 32.1;26) and healing balm (Jer 8:22; 46:11)—where the
people are restored (Jer 50:19; Zech 10:10).
IV. The kinesthetics of beauty are the goats leaving their
upwards chases of transcendence where are found only demons, to return to earth where they
find and serve grace and learn new, gentling and virtuous ways.
V. Those presented with the Sermon on the Mount are posed with a choice: to keep climbing, marching toward a pipe dream of transcendence or, like the prodigal son, to return to the plains and pastures prepared by the Father and tended by the immanent Christ.
VI. At the Father-determined terminus of the age there is a fixation of moral essence--a Christological judgement: one is
separated from the other (Ezek 34:17; Matt 25:31–46).
To enclose and sustain power, inner circle culture is an entropy-spreading system that climbs mountains on the backs of subordinates and is thus the palette of the prophetically goat-doomed. As David French notes (NYT 12/7/23), its religious forms are marked by certainty, ad hominem “ferocity, and solidarity (loyalty + confidentiality)” to maintain an elite’s control of narratives, especially those that privilege their “power” at the expense of enemy outsiders, esp. traitors to this culture.
Instead as we come to recognize, by the Spirit of Pentecost, that an ethnos/nation is a language group (Acts 2:1-12), we discern political lies & propaganda function as ethnic “treason.” Beware the ad hominem sleight, redirecting questions of intent (logos) into disputes about “numbers.” And the “spirit of perpetual, unrepentant, anger-filled derision towards dissent:” revilement of the Kingdom of God, to be avoided. (1 Cor 5:11, 6:10). Concocting enemies is the Machiavellian proclivity, mode, and ploy of [Schmittian] religious politics to warrant strong man saviors and justify their violence and hegemony-seeking.
https://douglasolds.blogspot.com/2024/03/short-note-on-theoretical-physics-of.html
Dostoevsky’s great artistry poses “Three questions that all societies must ask: [https://twitter.com/oldbooksguy/status/1723346796511146436]
"Whom can we now consider our best people?
Most important, where shall we find them?
Who will take the responsibility for proclaiming them the best, and on what basis?"”
