Pattern Recognition

and do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect. Romans 12:2

Conformed – Let’s go to visit the blacksmith. Of course, today you might have to travel a long way to find one. Most of the operations of a blacksmith have been given to machines. But we all know what a blacksmith does. He takes metal and shapes it into something useable. He heats, bends and pounds on the metal until he produces a sword, a plow or a horseshoe. That takes real effort and a lot of beating. And that’s what Paul has in mind with the Greek word suschematizo. Literally, it means to shape according to a pattern. It is “to fashion with.” The verb implies a schematic. This is constructing by blueprint.

Paul instructs us not to be shaped with the pattern of this age. But we wont’ be able to identify the pattern without adopting Paul’s worldview. Why didn’t Paul spell out the pattern to avoid? Why isn’t the next verse something like this: “Don’t smoke, drink or go to wild parties?” Why did Paul feel confident that his readers would know what he meant without mentioning the details?

The answer is built into the culture of the early church. When I became a Messianic believer in the first century, I entered into the commonwealth of Israel. As James points out in Acts 15, I heard Moses taught every week. My culture was the culture of Torah. The people of my congregation were practicing Torah. I prayed, learned and lived Torah. And Torah was radically different from the patterns of behavior in the surrounding world. My conversion brought me in touch with an entirely different way of living, a way that challenged my previous patterns at home, at work and at worship. Paul doesn’t have to spell it out because the ways of the “new” man were an obvious part of the community.

But things changed. The “church” adopted a Greek worldview. In the process, it moved from a Torah-oriented culture of radical difference to a culture that embraced, accommodated and, in some cases, even promoted patterns that would have been considered anathema in previous centuries. That syncretization is still going on today. Now we are so far removed from the culture of Torah that we no longer know the difference between the patterns of this age and God’s point of view. Because the “church” has adopted the world’s ways a little at a time over nineteen centuries, we have moved away from God’s worldview in incremental steps. We are like the proverbial frog in the heated pot. Since the change is only one degree at a time, we don’t notice the difference until it kills us.

You can get your cold slap in the face by reading Deuteronomy seriously. Any reading shows us the dramatic contrast between Paul’s view of godly patterns and our view of syncretism. It is impossible to read the exhortations in the New Testament for godly living if we remove those exhortations from the culture of Torah. That is why the church today has nothing really radical to say to the world. The church is the world, wrapped in God-language. It is not radically different. It does not compete with the culture of the world. It does not offer a completely different way of life. No wonder we are so confused and impotent. We can’t be transformed because we are trying to tweak the world’s blueprints instead of throwing them in the trash.

So, what can we do? Well, we can start by changing what we are able to change, right now. We can stop trying to accommodate to the world’s timetable, expectations and attitudes. We can start with one step from Deuteronomy today, and add another tomorrow. We can be willing to be different. The patterns of this age are no friends to the righteous no matter how well they have been shaped to fit the pew.

Topical Index: syncretism, suschematizo, fashion, conform, Romans 12:2, worldview