The Goodness of the Law

The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul; the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple; the precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart; the commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes; the fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever; the rules of the Lord are true, and righteous altogether.  More to be desired are they than gold, even much fine gold; sweeter also than honey and drippings of the honeycomb. – Psalm 19:7-10

I have been reading my new Lewis book this week, mostly from Reflections of the Psalms.  One of the chapters is called “Sweeter Than Honey”, referring to the passage quoted above.  This kind of exultation over the Law is common in the Psalms, and Lewis explores it.  As he says, The Order of the Divine mind, embodied in the Divine Law is beautiful. 

The commandments are more than good rules for living or a means of getting to heaven.  By His statutes and precepts, in all their intricacies, God pulls back the veil and allows us to catch a glimpse of how He thinks, what is important, what offends Him, what He loves.  I remember walking around our old house after my mother passed away.   I was reminded at every turn how she looked at the world and what mattered to her.  Someone with an observant eye would come into my office and know all kinds of things about me by the books on the shelves, the pictures and things displayed.  Possibly this would cause them to run from the room screaming.  But they’d know.

The Law is sweet because it is a revelation of the Divine nature, but also because through it, we see how a man might please God.  This is how we know God is not a goddess:  He just comes out and tells us what He wants.  We may not find obedience easy, but we can be certain of what is being asked of us. 

Beyond that, and this goes to the quote above about the beauty of the Divine Law, just as there is elegance in a mathematical equation and the laws of physics, there is a delightful rightness about the Law of God.  When we see, not just the wisdom of the commandment, but the truth that is unveiled by it, we may well experience the joy expressed by those ancient poets. 

It is true, as Lewis points out, that God’s rules are good but not just because God says so.  God can’t just make anything be the Law and still be God.  This is a view taken by what Lewis describes as some “terrible theologians” back in the eighteenth century who insisted that “God did not command certain things because they are right, but certain things are right because God commanded them.” That’s a misunderstanding better suited to Islam.  God’s commands are consistent with who He is – the Good, as well as with – for want of a better way to say it – the way things are. 

Thus, if a person pores over the Law, he begins to see the solid reality that underlies, shapes, and supports all of existence, the cosmos, and especially human life.  It was a distinct contrast to the warped theology and ethics of Israel’s pagan neighbors.  Here’s how Lewis caps it:

In so far as this idea of the Law’s beauty, sweetness, or preciousness, arose from the contrast of the surrounding Paganisms, we may soon find occasion to recover it.  Christians increasingly live on a spiritual island; new and rival ways of life surround it in all directions and their tides come further up the beach every time.  None of those new ways is yet so filthy or cruel as some Semitic Paganism.  But many of them ignore all individual rights and are already cruel enough.  Some give morality a wholly new meaning which we cannot accept, some deny its possibility.  Perhaps we shall all learn, sharply enough, to value the clean air and “sweet reasonableness” of the Christian ethics which in a more Christian age we might have taken for granted.  (From Reflections of the Psalms)    

I wonder what Jack would say today?

Split Decision

And he said to them, Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill? But they were silent. -- Mark 3:4

To save life or … To do good or … 

We are like the religious people gathered in the synagogue that Sabbath.  We are silent before God’s questions, the questions of life and death, good and evil, truth and illusion.  It is always lawful to heal, to save,  to do good.  Or is it?  Should we always be able to make the decision of who should live, who should die?  Are the issues of life ever beyond us?

Sometimes something or someone must die that another might live.  Sometimes good arises from what appears to be great harm.  If I keep everything carefully cut and separated, if I do not allow the elements to mingle, if I do not let my thoughts go too far, I can make judgments.  If it all comes down to heads or tails, I can decide.  Much of the time there is no reason to be indecisive.  Good and evil seem clear, in focus and obvious. 

Isaiah 38 tells a story of Hezekiah, a good and righteous king who fell ill.  The prophet was sent to the king to tell him to set his house in order for his death had been ordained, and he would not recover.  Hezekiah, receiving the news, turned his face to the wall and wept out a plea for mercy.  As Isaiah walked away from the king’s house, the Lord stopped him, turned him around, and sent him back to Hezekiah with a reprieve – he would be healed and given fifteen more years of life.  During that fifteen year period, a son was born to Hezekiah.  His name was Manasseh.  Hezekiah died when Manasseh was twelve years old, and the boy became king, reigning then for fifty-five years.  He was possibly the most wicked and idolatrous ruler ever in Jerusalem.  The reign of Manasseh sealed the fate of the kingdom and doomed Judah to destruction and exile.  If God had not shown mercy to Hezekiah, Manasseh would never have been born.  Would that have changed the ultimate outcome?  We cannot know.    

Did God do harm or good by extending a righteous man’s life?  God is good, and what He does is good, but, honestly, I am silent.  I trust God.  Not, just trust.  Not, only trust.  Not, I have no choice except to trust.  Trust.

Very recently I found myself laying out a problem before the Lord.  I could see an obvious and quite common solution to the problem.  There were steps I could take to resolve the situation, and, from my perspective, I would benefit or at least find a measure of peace by taking those steps.  But I think it would be wrong.  I know it would be wrong.  If I really trust God, I have to close the door on the natural man’s solution, endure the uncertainty, and continue on doing what I know is right.   

It is the Sabbath for us; we must rest in Him, even while doing the lawful good that is before us.  We can work and strive and struggle up to a point -- the six days of man, but the seventh day belongs to the Lord alone.  

The Inverters

Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! -- Isaiah 5:20

You have wearied the LORD with your words. But you say, How have we wearied him? By saying, Everyone who does evil is good in the sight of the LORD, and he delights in them. Or by asking, Where is the God of justice?  -- Malachi 2:17

They shall teach my people the difference between the holy and the common, and show them how to distinguish between the unclean and the clean. -- Ezekiel 44:23

Right and wrong.  It seems simple enough, yet there seems to be much disagreement about the distinction.  The proverb says that there is a way that seems right to a man but it ends in death.  We are told that a man’s ways seem right in his own eyes.  The satanic admonition is, “Do what you will”, and it is being embraced by more people as the deck of the world tilts, perhaps disastrously past the point of recovery. 

Elements of Islam exult in blood, death, and mayhem and call it “holiness” and “righteousness”.  People seem to have lost the seemingly obvious understanding that, if it right to resist oppression, it is wrong to oppress others.  Even here in America, we have segments of the population voluntarily shackling themselves to the state because others who looked a little like them were shackled involuntarily in the past.   

Not to say that I am speaking for God, but I am certainly wearied by the constant whining about justice from the unjust.  How is it just to get more than you give?  How is it justice to demand from another what you are not willing to do for another?  Here’s a word for all the complainers out there – a man rejoices in overcoming a disadvantage.  A man looks for the heavy end and the hard row.  Knock a man down and all you do is make him tougher to knock down the next time.  I am more than a little tired of racists telling me I’m racist, of the intolerant telling me I’m intolerant.  Get the beam out of your own eye before you tell me about the speck of dust in mine. 

Guess what?  Darkness and evil are dark and evil.  Filth is filthy.  Stupidity is stupid.  Bad is, simply, bad.  You want somebody to wake up, get yourself an alarm clock.  You want “respect” while you think you have a right to shock, offend, and insult others?  It is not going to happen.  Those intent on bringing down the edifices of western civilization and free market capitalism for alleged sins, past and present, will find their positions, power, and privileges fallen among the ruins.  When you have picked clean the bones of the goose, it is rather foolish to expect more eggs.  

But what is true of the slackers, lackers, and whackers, is true also of the exploiters.  Greed is a sin and an ugliness that looks just as bad on the clingers as the graspers.  A thug with a computer and a government mandate devaluing the dollars in my bank account is no different in essence or effect from a thug with a knife stealing my watch.  Impoverishing the working citizens of a nation or group of nations for the sake of too-big-to-fail financial institutions is a crime.  Governments do it because those financiers are their partners in buying the votes of the slothful who prefer a life of meager leisure and self-pity to responsibility and effort. 

It is a shame that Romney walked back on his “47%” statement.  I don’t know if it is actually 47%, but there are a whole bunch of people who think the world owes them a living, who think it is clever to eat the seed corn, to live only for today.  When Jesus tells us to take no thought for the morrow, it is in the context of seeking the kingdom of God and the righteousness of God, of living a life of goodness, wholeness, and self-forgetfulness.  The Lord gives no endorsement to waste, to wantonness, to extravagance, irresponsibility, and self-indulgence.

There are people who get down and need help getting back up.  There are a few people who are born weaker, physically or mentally, that need someone stronger to come alongside.  Oddly enough, we often see those people with handicaps and disabilities working in appropriate positions, living lives of service and productivity with few complaints and very little self-pity.  There are those, as noted in my previous post, for whom we ought to do good when it is possible for us.  But we should be guided by the absolute principles of right and wrong, of light and darkness rather than the inverted and perverted systems that so often control the world. 

I was reading an article the last couple of days on the decline of organized religion in America.  This is celebrated by some.  The comments on the article were generally along the lines of such a decline being inevitable and a good thing lest the nation be taken over by raging Christian fundamentalist theocrats dedicated to the eradication of pink oxfords and back-waxing.  Some said that religion is for those too weak to endure the thought of death being an ultimate and permanent end, that life just is – a meaningless whorl in the cosmic chaos.   We as humans ought to be “brave” enough to face that fact without crutches.  We leave aside the question of how one is supposed to know this is true since truth in such a system could not exist, not even the truth that there is no truth.   We see minds that are lost in the most basic sense.  Not only do they not know how to get to the destination, they deny there is a destination. 

The human mind and human senses seek a pattern.  It is instinctive and irresistible.  We see a face in the shadows on Mars.  Does that mean that we are drawing a god, a creator, a pattern out of what is actually randomness?  It could be.  But every hunter knows the eye occasionally mistaking a rock or a stump for a deer does not mean there are no deer in the woods.  We are looking for something that is there.  The evidence of its existence is the human mind itself.  Deep calling to deep.  We are looking for a reflection of ourselves in nature, in the mountains, in the seas, in the stars. 

Of course, we can use our amazing pattern-recognition skills to find processes in nature -- the machine within the god.  There is nothing wrong with that unless we deceive ourselves into believing it is an ultimate truth rather than a derived one.  We can impose our own pattern.  That is an idol.  It is an unclean thing, an image of bitterness and emptiness.   

Or, we can accept the revelation of God beyond our images after Whom we ourselves are patterned.  Those who reject revelation are trapped in an inversion of values, forever bound to the temporal and the transitory, enslaved to their shadows.  Freedom, eternity, truth, good, light – they are One, and this we seek.

The Problem of Good

I am the Lord, and there is no other, besides me there is no God; I equip you, though you do not know me, that people may know, from the rising of the sun and from the west, that there is none besides me; I am the Lord, and there is no other.  I form light and create darkness, I make well-being and create calamity, I am the Lord, who does all these things. – Isaiah 45:5-7

Why is there good in the world?  Why should there be good in the world?  We agonize over how a good God could allow evil in the world, the so-called problem of evil, but why is it we can celebrate things like heroism and charity and self-sacrifice?  Why are there people who think it is better to feed starving children in Africa than to mercifully put them out of their misery?  I know the theory is that we evolved as social animals, that we slowly came to understand individual survival was less important than group survival, that we put the tribe above self and identified self with the group, and we have gradually expanded our tribal thinking to include the entire human race, and, even, among our more enlightened thinkers, to include all the creatures and the earth itself. 

Lions are social creatures, too, and yet when a new lion takes over the pride, he will kill all the cubs of the old male.  The law of nature is the law of tooth and claw and competition.  Anything one predator gets is something another won’t.  Up until a few centuries ago, human conquerors routinely killed off all the males and many of the older females in a defeated population.  The merciless slaughter of entire populations is even a part of the biblical narrative as the tribes of Israel invaded Canaan.  Nothing has changed genetically in the last few thousand years, not to mention the fact that we have had numerous modern efforts at genocide and a plethora of tribal conflicts around the world.  One might even be led to think that humanity’s attempts at altruism and peace are really struggles to rise above our material instincts and genetic programming.    

The message of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, from the Creation to the Cross is God calling man to something higher and better than an animal existence, than blood and death, violence and vengeance. 

God has no competition.  He is not struggling against other gods or even the devil for some kind of divine kingship or supremacy.  The God who speaks to Isaiah not only has no equal, He has no challenger.  He’s not seeking to run the universe; He created it.  He’s not begging for our attention or our devotion or our worship.  In the end, He will receive it when every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus is Lord to the glory of God the Father. 

The call and the challenge is to us, to recognize not only who God is, but what reality is and who we are within it.  The benefit is not to God.  We are the ones who stand to gain from insight into the truth. 

There is good in the world because God loves us.  There is evil because there is freedom, because we are not puppets, not the bouncing billiard balls of deterministic physics, because we can choose to rise above the evolutionary miasma of human nature.  God even cuts the ground from under those who argue that we do not need Him to make correct moral choices:  I equip you, though you do not know me.  And He does that so that all may indeed know that He is, and there is no other. 

I Want to See the Manager

What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? -- Romans 8:31

Who, indeed? I have thought it was the devil, but the devil is merely a tool. He does nothing without God’s leave. He may be a mighty impressive creature, but he is a creature. He may be a roaring lion, but if the Lord says, “Scat”, the devil flees. James says, “Resist the devil and he will flee from you.” Such a thing could not be true of an omnipotent evil being.

“If God is for us” – but what if God is not for me? This is a question I have to settle. John’s first epistle tells us that God is love. The Gospel of John contains perhaps the best-known verse in the Bible which states that God loves the world so much that He gave His only and unique Son so that anyone who believes in Jesus might not perish but have everlasting life. David, in the other contender for best known passage, says, “The Lord is my Shepherd”. There should be no doubt that the Lord is for us in total and individually. This is the reason there is a Bible. A revelation is required for humanity to understand the Divine. Apart from revelation, we may get bits and pieces as mythologies show us, but we will also get a lot of things wrong. God reveals Himself to us so that we may know the truth of His love and care: Yahweh is for me.

The Lord is the Source, the Fountainhead of life. All things that come to me come by the hand of God. Normally we see intermediaries, agents, “second causes” for things that happen. If a cop pulls me over for speeding, I may blame the cop and the radar gun for my ticket. The officer is not acting as an independent agent. He has a system and laws behind him. We’ll ignore, for the moment, the fact that the cause of my ticket is my own heavy foot. A traffic cop is merely the agent of enforcement.

It’s the same when we have troubles and trials in life. If we focus on the immediate agent, we are only seeing the secondary cause. It is hard to accept some humiliating defeat from the hand of man. Fires, floods, and storms all seem unfair when they strike us or someone we love. Mechanical failures and glitches are frustrating. Diseases, physical handicaps and weaknesses may be hard for us to accept. As long as I am considering the second cause as the source, I am going to be unhappy and probably angry. I have trouble trusting God in my trial because I am not seeing it as ultimately from His hand. I may say, “Why did You let this happen?” What I may be thinking is that if God were really good and all-powerful, this wouldn’t have happened to me, or it wouldn’t have happened unless I “deserved it”. I wind up dealing with guilt – though I can’t see what I did wrong – or anger and frustration.

No, I need to forget the second cause. The virus, the cancer cell, the hurricane, the drunk driver, the Democrats, the economy, my wife, my neighbor, my kids – none of these are the Cause. I can surrender and fully accept what comes to me when I see that the Lord Himself has ordained and arranged it. My defeat is His will, and it will lead to my ultimate victory. I do not need to worry about revenge because vengeance belongs to the Lord; He will repay. All I need to do is accept the situation as being completely under God’s control. In weakness and loss, I can trust the Lord because these are according to His will. Whatever happens, whether I live or die, the Lord is for me and with me. I can trust Him.

Surrender is not passivity. I need to face my trials and troubles, fight through them and deal with them to the fullest extent possible. Nevertheless, I do all with the full assurance that the outcome is up to the Lord. I may witness a miracle or things may get much worse. Regardless, I still trust God because it is all from His hand. As the song says, God is good – all the time. God on the mountain is still God in the valley. Actually a miracle is guaranteed, even if it is only that I can still smile through tears. Surrender does not mean I won’t feel pain, or that I don’t need to grieve. Stoicism is not required. I will be much better able to deal with my emotions when I understand God’s place in my situation.

In a couple of weeks we will begin a new year, and it will be like no other for some of us. Some of us will see answers to prayers. Some will see troubles carry over from the past. Some will face unimagined challenges. Whatever comes, the Lord is in it. Look past the agents and focus on His hand. You will find that the all-powerful, the gentle hand of God holds your trial, and you are sheltered in His arms.