The Niceness Lie

It’s peculiar to Western social mythology that we are supposed to be “nice.”

While the actual definition is contextual and all over the map, we all have learned to recognize that undertone — “you’re supposed to be nice” — in much of today’s verbal noise. It’s not the same as civility, by the way. The majority of Western commentators wouldn’t recognize the difference. Okay, maybe they would, but they are committed to redefining civility to mean the prissy middle-class materialistic “niceness” often used as a verbal whip.

The Bible does not require you to be nice. It doesn’t teach being nice at all. It teaches compassion, which is hardly the same thing.

First, it requires that you understand divine justice, not Western social justice mythology. Divine justice is that moral discernment of God’s character that I rant about on this blog all the time. If your heart is not sensing and processing as the master of your soul, and your mind (with all the reason and logic) fails to serve your heart, you cannot possibly understand divine justice. Do you recall the vast complexity of the Law of Moses and all its prophetic applications? That was just one peculiar context for the manifestation of divine justice. We can summarize it, but we cannot pretend to capture something that requires the active participation of some higher capacity above your mere intellect.

On top of that, you have to exercise the power of your will to implement that divine justice. You must have a sense of divine calling in which to frame your response to every context. That means that the precise same provocation from precisely the same person might call for a different response in different contexts. You are obliged to sense through your heart what best fits God’s glory in that moment. Whatever brings Him glory in your life is, by definition, in everyone’s best interest. Compassion is giving someone as much justice as you have power to bring against some previous injustice. It’s a concern first for divine justice as the definition of “love.”

It could also mean completely ignoring what the victim claims they want or need. The controlling factor is not their need, but what God has given you to pass along. Nothing in the Bible requires that you reshape yourself to meet some expert’s prescription for what others need in any given context. Offer what God tells you to offer; otherwise walk away and stop wasting resources God has given you for a divine calling.

It’s not really a female thing, but it is a heathen feminist thing to demand control over every element of human consciousness by the bogus unrecognized mommies of our postmodern society. If you understand that feminism is not necessarily a feminine trait, but is a damned social construct, you realize that a lot of the bullshit over this issue is simply feminism as a mythology. It is a brand of morality that isn’t morally right. By the way, the mythical Western masculinity is wholly and utterly dependent on the mythical Western feminism because Western culture as a whole makes men into little boys who must do what their mommies tell them. People read this shit back into the Bible and are shocked when you tell them it’s not actually there. In fact, they are shocked when you use the word “shit” in moral and religious conversation. They refuse to recognize that God calls it that, because English Bible translators tend to be wusses.

The biblical masculinity is first self-controlled under the heading of divine calling and divine justice. That doesn’t mean a rule-bound behavior pattern, but a determination to not let our human nature take a majority vote on how we act. We place the heart in command because that’s our best hope of knowing God’s will. Then we make the mind serve the heart, and drag the flesh along behind. When the mind rules, we are back outside Eden facing that Flaming Sword, because the Fall was essentially placing human reason on the throne of moral decision making. We seek to walk back through that Flaming Sword to place everything back in proper order.

Having turned that Sword on our own hearts, we stand ready to use it when others attack our calling and mission for His glory. We naturally hope for lesser measures of authority, but we stand ready to exercise the full range of divine defense. Not so much in the physical sense, but something more encompassing, where we learn the boundaries of our dominion under God’s authority. But whatever it is we do, “niceness” as typically defined is always wrong because of where it starts. Nor is it somehow redemptive to use rough language just for its own sake. Rather, it has to fit the context. The New Testament prohibition is against senseless rough language as a reflex of the old sinful life. It takes a perverted mind to see speech codes and niceness in the Bible.

So, yeah — I’m ready if necessary to tell you to go screw yourself with some certainty that God will back it up.