The Spirit of Covenant in a World of Law

Video of my talk in Aspen, plus summary in text

It was a pleasure to be able to talk on law and spirituality yesterday evening at the Mollie hotel in Aspen, including to an online audience of over 500 people. The video recording of the first half was done impromptu via a cell phone, so don’t have high hopes for professional audiovisual quality. This is a “prototype” of a talk I suspect I will be giving many times over in the coming months and years.

I ran my speaker notes through ChatGPT and it did a great job of turning them into a readable essay, in many ways better and more succinct than anything I could write myself. I have lightly edited the results, and they are below. I also talked after about my experience of being in America at this time, as well as a high-level overview of my own spiritual journey. There are some candid things that are best said in private; you had to be there!

---

A Tale of Two Gatherings: Contrasting Spirits in Action

In recent GOP meetings, I noticed something remarkable yet formulaic. The meetings commenced with a prayer for political victory, primarily for Trump, and sought an outcome that will affirm the group's power and influence. The approach is generally straightforward: pray for success and safety of one’s own team, not reconciliation or salvation of those who see differently. This gathering of familiar faces, in their structured way, contrasts starkly with a private church gathering I attended in someone’s home. Here, people genuinely supported each other—a gathering of individuals embodying what I call a "spiritual insurgency," a rebellion not against government but against the misuse of power within our society. In this intimate setting, the prayer was based on Ephesians and asked God to guide all present invoking spiritual armour.

This difference stems from a simple concept: spirit. Many people overlook how profoundly the spirit of our actions shapes outcomes, and how the spirit is distinct from the act. For instance, "Volunteering has a spirit of compassion," "Advocacy has a spirit of justice," and "Acknowledgment has a spirit of appreciation." Likewise, gossip carries a spirit of murder—it seeks to destroy reputations through character assassination, even if nobody physically died. Understanding these distinctions of spirit is essential because they guide us in choosing between two approaches: a law-based paradigm rooted in competition and self-interest or a covenant-based paradigm, where love, duty, and mutual responsibility guide our actions.

The Role of Spirit in Our Lives

Reflecting on my time in America, I've come to view much of our political, social, and even legal battles as a spiritual battlefield. Through a series of vignettes and personal experiences, I’ve witnessed firsthand how people operate in what I call the "3D" paradigm—one dominated by self-interest, materialism, and transactional relationships. This is exemplified in what Richard Shockey humorously refers to as "Shockey's Law": "The answer is ‘money.’ Now, what is your question?" In this world, everything is reconciled by the law, which serves as the ultimate arbiter in conflicts over resources, rights, and, often, truth. Yet, the law here reflects a spirit of competition, where each side fights for its version of truth and morality, often at the expense of justice.

In contrast, the "5D" paradigm offers a different answer, which I call “God’s Promise” or covenant: "The answer is ‘covenant.’ Now, what is your question?" Here, the answer lies not in transactions but in submission to divine will. It’s a surrender of self-interest in favour of alignment with eternal principles, where justice is not bought or won through debate but born out of spiritual truth. Our concepts of war and peace (and thus victory and defeat) vary depending on whether we view life through the lens of 3D or 5D—the temporal or the eternal.

The Tyranny and Purpose of Law

The "aha moment" for me came through numerous experiences of corruption in courts, in government, and even within community circles. It isn’t simply a "deep state" or flawed maritime laws—no, the issue is far more profound. The problem lies in how the legal system inherently functions. We are "spiritually dead" until we choose to awaken as "children of God." Until then, the system treats us as mere "live cargo," channeled through laws that mitigate conflicts of self-will rather than align to divine will.

Laws resolve conflicts over self-interest, over the finite, and operate under a competitive spirit that seeks finality over justice. Legal systems do not aim for moral truth but for findings of fact that satisfy material interests. The presence of jury trials offers a rare glimpse of conscience within this system, yet it is pragmatic and, by necessity, limited in use. Ultimately, the only true escape from the domination of the law is to submit to divine will, extinguishing self-will in favour of covenant. Through covenant, we align ourselves with an eternal peace rather than a transient legal order.

Covenant: Beyond the Law and Its Limits

Covenant represents a promise that transcends the transactional nature of the law. In covenant, peace is not imposed through law or contracts but is achieved through mutual alignment and submission to divine principles. Unlike contracts, which are built on material transactions and often lack love, covenants involve deep bonds that hold people accountable to a higher authority and a shared set of sacred principles. While contracts focus on self-interest and are enforceable by law, covenants foster trust, collective well-being, and a commitment to serve each other. In covenant-based societies, accountability is rooted in love and duty rather than legal compulsion.

This difference between contract and covenant is crucial. A society rooted in covenant does not reject the law but operates beyond it. When the church maintains this covenantal space, it limits the reach of the state and keeps the law from overstepping its role. The church, in essence, holds back the corporate state's encroachment on sacred bonds, maintaining a balance that allows for divine alignment rather than legalistic control.

The Problem of Institutional and Legal Capture

However, our current institutions are captive to the spirit of the law rather than the spirit of covenant. Many of these systems—marriage, government, even churches—have succumbed to contractual interests. Narcissistic leaders, often operating within a legalistic, self-willed paradigm, manipulate the law to shift blame and avoid accountability, sometimes even employing Satanic, false accusations to invert righteousness and truth. This creates a cycle of scapegoating, where the weak, the innocent, and often children are sacrificed to uphold a false moral and legal order.

In totalitarian systems, this false morality replaces true righteousness, while the state enforces a twisted form of "peace." To break this cycle, we must remove the space in which competition operates. We cannot vote or legislate our way out of this; we must embrace covenant by fully submitting to divine will. Ending the cycle of sacrifice, as Jesus did spiritually, requires our own symbolic surrender of self-will.

Covenant and True Peace

If I were to speak at West Point about peace, I would emphasize that all true peace begins in the heart and the home. Our concepts of war and peace should not be limited to material battles; true peace requires a spirit of covenant. Military strategy is valuable, but without covenant, it risks becoming militarism for its own sake. In a covenantal world, success in war is not measured by material victory but by the extent to which it brings us closer to divine alignment.

The ultimate choice we face, then, is whether to structure society around competition or covenant. In a covenant society, we recognise that peace is an internal, spiritual alignment rather than an external imposition. This means creating bonds that reflect eternal values, moving away from material contracts and into relationships governed by mutual love and divine purpose. A covenant-based world may seem idealistic, yet it is the only sustainable path to lasting peace and justice.

In the end, our calling is clear: to put on Christ, deny evil any ground for compromise, and seek peace through covenant rather than competition. This journey is multi-generational and challenging, but it is one that we must undertake if we are to transcend the limitations of law and build a society rooted in true righteousness.

Epilogue by Martin

If I had to add a few words on what ChatGPT missed, it is this: the law presents us with a compromise choice of peace under the tyranny of legislators, lawyers, and judges; the alternative being chaos as people fight to assert their own personal interest. While anarchy in its original sense does not automatically imply chaos, the inevitable battle of wills will eventually result in the reinvention of law to resolve the competition. Covenant is what breaks the tradeoff between peace and freedom, allowing you to have both, but at the price of extinguishing your self-will through submission to divine will.

What this specifically requires is a church that holds the state (and hence the realm of positive law) to account against sacred principles. Where the state operates within its godly remit, the church supports it, at it should. Where the state overreaches its remit, then it has to be vigorously opposed. There will always be those who refuse to submit to divine will and follow materialist values, so complaining that the state seeks more power and extends its remit is pointless; the law will always grow without bounds if left unchecked by the church. It is the failure of the church as a whole that needs to be highlighted.

The fulcrum on which everything appears to revolve is marriage. What God joins together, man cannot set asunder; but what man joins together can be undone in a court of law via a divorce. But we have chosen to put ourselves under the law by operating in self-will, not divine will. You can see this from the terms we use:

• Legal matrimony (i.e. legislative law) — “I do” meaning “I intend to under my own will”, this being a corporate merger plus a fornication license (which lasts until renegotiation under a divorce). The title assumes authority to marry exists in a man acting on behalf of the state or church.

• Lawful marriage (i.e. common law) — “We have and we will”, where a history of behaviour establishes the fact of marriage; this lasts a lifetime as soul mates. It assumes authority to marry exists in those who come together, without the need for an external legitimising body.

• Divine union (i.e. covenant, not law) — “We are joined, and always have been, and always will be”, where you are united in spirit before mind and body, which leads to an eternal and dynastic outlook. Only God can join two together as one; it is a spiritual status. A state license, expensive party, sex, living together in shared property, even having children: none of those things make you married.

That this war is “all about the children” is an almost trite quip at this point. But it is too limiting to restrict this to victims of trafficking, paedophilia, torture, experimentation, or genocide. The enemy wants your children, not your guns, and the weapon of choice is the law (and family courts plus medical procedures), not bullets or bombs.

The war can only be won by putting covenant marriage back at the heart of society, so that fathers and mothers are spiritually aligned, and children grow up in a church that has the appropriate “checks and balances” relationship to the state. The spiritual war cannot be won by the military; mums are closer to the battlefront than missile technicians.

Sunday morning walk at Maroon Bells, Colorado