It’s Personal
And one of them, an expert in religious law, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” Jesus said to him, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. The second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.” (Matthew 22:35-40 NET)
Perhaps the most damnable folly is the Western concept of objectivity.
The notion that we could conceptualize an idea as an ideal apart from the very people who give it life is evil on the face of it. Pure logic is a direct rejection of the Creator. Love cannot be described or quantified.
It’s bad enough we insist on using one English word for a host differing, and sometimes contrasting, notions regarding how people interact. Western use of language is inherently false, in that it seeks to immobilize life in the airy, nonexistent space above human souls. Labels are necessary for communication, but unless a label carries a living characterization, it isn’t real and means nothing. The hideously clumsy translation of Jesus’ words into English, from a Greek rendering of His distinctly Hebrew comments, leads a world of evil.
We cannot change the world. The solution to this problem is for readers and hearers to rise above the limits of their own world and stand, not in the fevered imagination of Greek philosophers, but in the very real space of the Spirit Realm — more real than the space we occupy in our human existence. Morality is inherently personal in nature.
Stated another way, truth is not on objective body of ideals out there in rational space, waiting to be discerned by reasoning minds. Truth is an aspect of God’s Person, another name for Him and His work in this universe. It’s our name for the high value we place on knowing Him. All truth is God’s truth; reality is whatever God says it is, and is subject entirely to His whims. He could change everything, the very fundamental nature of reality itself, and it would remain His prerogative to tell us or not.
If it would help to copy and paste that paragraph a few times, or a million times, we should do it until it has burned into our minds and turned our souls in the right direction. The only proper way to conceive intellectually of reality is to think in terms of persons. Evil human minds demand something they can control, and the mythology of objectivity is the answer to that demand. It is a blasphemous lie from Hell. No attack on that deception is disproportionate. Crush it.
Reality is personal. It depends entirely on the thoughts and direct purposeful maintaining attention of God. The moment He lets go, the whole thing dissolves back into His imagination. It would be as if it never happened. Our very existence rests individually upon His attention to us. We can’t conceive of that, but it’s what the Bible says. It seems very real to us and we generally act accordingly, but never let go of that background realization that everything is whatever He makes of it.
In one sense, the entire rest of this book is simply sketching out the implications of this one truth: Reality is personal in nature. This is the Hebrew assumption and is written into the very fabric of Creation and Scripture. You cannot read the Bible objectively. You cannot learn the teachings of Jesus objectively.
The phrasing Jesus uses in answering the Scribe demands a return to the Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) conception of power and authority among men. If you hang on the words themselves, you will miss everything He says. These words have no meaning at all outside the context of ANE feudalism and tribal living. God consistently portrays Himself as a sheikh. It so happens He rules far more than this universe, which is rightly viewed as a fairly minor project in His greater affairs.
Unlike the cold and distant monarch of Western tradition, our God is the loving shepherd father of all He holds. It is precious to Him; not the stuff, but the people. Western monarchs owned land and stuff — the people came with it. ANE sheikhs own the people as their very blood kin. Wealth to a sheikh is his people, their vast collection of talents, along with whatever stuff they carry and whatever land they occupy on His behalf.
Because of His commitment to your welfare, your duty to Him is as reciprocal as you can make it. Hebrew thinking spits on the notion your emotional feelings of warmth mean anything. They come and go with the wind, utterly untrustworthy. No, you are fully capable of deciding you will hold someone as your highest value, and will exert all possible effort to please Him. Wipe away the absolutist nonsense of high productivity; think in terms of pleasing Him with your whole being. There are times when His greatest pleasure is letting you rest and rebuild for the next mission. He is not in a hurry, and only at His specific command do you hurry along with anything in particular. It’s a relationship, not a performance.
He can read whether you care as you ought.
He it is who instructs you to love the rest of His Creation the way He does. But more to the point, He says you must love your neighbor with the same commitment to their welfare as you would yourself. You conceive of your life as His to command, and theirs the same. There is no possible way to objectify any of this. Love is commensurate with the context; your requirement is only what He gives you. Love is properly defined as a commitment to the welfare of another.
Biblical morality is defined in our minds as this whole matrix of commitment to the welfare of God’s affairs as He personally requires of you.
