In the Kingdom of Heaven, good and evil are determined by the Spirit of God.
That means we cannot rely on mere utility. It’s not in the nature of the thing, but in whether it serves the purpose of God’s glory in that moment. For you as a fallen human, you cannot pretend to discern that in terms of absolutes, but only whether you find peace in conscience. So long as there are unsettled feelings, you need to pursue the feelings to their source until you can untangle your own confusion. Meanwhile, you can do only what you know best in that moment, so your primary guide is seeking a clear conscience. If your conscience relies too much on mere obvious utility, you will be wrong.
Drinking straight tap water exposes you to significant health risk in the long term. Some water sources are worse than others, obviously. If you can, you should avoid it. Then again, the calling and mission from God might nix completely such concerns. Either God intends you to suffer from the effects, or He will protect you miraculously, or maybe some of both with a measure or mitigation. Obedience is the issue, not the utility of the choice.
Impinging yourself on the comfort and convenience of other folks is generally wrong, not to mention risky business with the way some folks take offense. People kill strangers over the silliest things. But if your noise and inconvenience of others is the result of obeying God, you’ll have to take that risk. Now on this, the biggest problem is people misreading what it means to obey God. Most of Western Christianity is deeply stained with a nasty mythology on this point, as often discussed here on this blog. Still, you have to go with your conscience where you are at the moment.
There are a whole range of things by which people attempt to discern good and evil through “common sense.” Unfortunately, some of the content of “common sense” varies widely across any given population, particularly in Western Civilization. The problem is that Western epistemology, in the very act of proclaiming objectivity, lends itself to a vast array of personalized analysis. Since there really is no such thing as objective truth, what folks imagine it ought to be is subject to all manner of personal bias. It’s a wonder we can get any three people to ever agree on whether the sky is blue. Since most folks don’t bother to analyze very much more than what their narrow tunnel vision includes, we have do have a functional consensus on lots of things. In other words, Western Civilization would have never happened if it didn’t appeal directly to fallen human nature. Common sense becomes little more than the broad consensus over things nobody really bothers to consider, very fuzzy in some areas, but still not too hard to identify.
Thus, we end up with a bunch of nosy nannies insisting you are doing something wrong because your actions don’t match their personal value system of utility. The most insidious part of this is the unconscious assumption that they have an interest in results that have zero effect on their lives. It’s this faux charitable outreach that masks unconscionable arrogance that we encounter every day. This is the direct result of conditioning trickling down from plutocrats. The social elite live in fear that someone somewhere is acting without their expert advice. You’ll find this in every stripe of political philosophy. Each of the binary issues of popular debate finds all sides agree on one thing: We have to make everybody conform. Never mind what it is they demand conformity to; people must conform to what their betters decree. When you reject the intrusion of a nosy SOB, you are the one who is wrong.
Even when the actions of one person do have an effect on you, God says it may not be yours to object. For example, one of the greatest injustices is how public school administrations use the excuse that, since certain social factor affect how satisfied they are with the results of the schooling process, they have an inherent right to try manipulating those social factors. “We can’t have those kids being individual humans, and the education gods forbid we should allow parents full parental freedom to be themselves!” As if their so-called expertise can somehow set the world aright. Sometimes you have to absorb the folly of others because God didn’t place a certain amount of reality into your hands to control. Trying to control all the factors that affect your human occupation is arrogance beyond comprehension.
All of this is a blatant denial of the Fall and denying the Spirit Realm itself. This is hard-wired; we aren’t going to change it by even the most extreme efforts or even the use of overwhelming force. You would at best merely defend your mission, and rare are those contexts where God will support a violent defense. It’s one thing to note the Law Covenants grant you license to kill another person for a limited range of causes; it’s another to realize it might not glorify God in a given context.
The human mind cannot conceive rules that fit all occasions. God Himself warned it requires His divine wisdom infused into the human soul over decades just to begin coming even close, and at that, it requires understanding in the first place that objectivity is utterly impossible.
