Accurately Handling the Truth

Let’s review. I’ve published several books aimed at helping people see the difference between Western moral assumptions and reasoning versus what God revealed through Scripture. Recently I’ve been writing about how Western self-deception has run its course and the moral fabric of Creation is now crushing this gigantic shadowy lie. This is fully consistent with what I wrote about the most ancient standards of morality in business and government. All the way back to my earliest prophetic blathering I’ve warned that this was coming and quite specifically what we could do better. I’d like to refresh some of that, not to say, “I told you so,” but to show that faith carries its own logical consistency in the heart.

That consistency is visible only from the moral plane and requires the faculty of your heart. Your intellect won’t take you there, though it can function well enough as a servant along for the ride.

In one sense, the single greatest sin of Western Civilization has been dehumanizing people. This is the fundamental flaw in materialism. It seeks to trump individual significance by reducing our uniqueness against broad generalities. It’s not that generalities are inherently wrong, but that Western thinking has made them the excuse for ignoring moral imperatives. It requires monumental arrogance to imagine that the endless variation of humanity can be ignored by imposing a ruthless conformity to whatever it is the ruling minds are willing to consider.

Once more we should remind ourselves: The Curse of the Fall is the doctrine that our human minds are sufficient to answer all the questions. We imagine that we can appeal to rules of logic and reason to arrive at some objective reality, but however much we might agree on those rules, no two of us ends up with quite the same “objective reality.” That’s because this pretense to objective reason is a lie; it’s a cover for a very human lust for power. Not just blunt power, but a driving lust to control all the factors and inputs to our daily existence to arrive at some impossible Utopia of happiness. “Who could reasonably want anything different from what I want?” Utopia is never quite the same between any two people because it’s just a word for the common human sin of arrogance. Reason is the cheap robe we use to hide that, sometimes hiding it from ourselves. We all agree to this mythology, fiercely defending it as the shortest path to quenching our lusts.

So this pursuit of faux learned discussion about what is good and right that relies on some imaginary objective reason is so very thrilling because it panders to human lust. Falling on our faces before God — who made all things and explained quite lavishly how it all works — requires pulling our reason off the throne of moral decision. It requires subjecting our intellect to some higher faculty that God controls. That faculty is the heart-mind, and it has totally different answers to moral decisions because it alone is capable of reading the design of Creation.

The chore left for me is doing my best to tell the story of what I’ve seen with the eyes of my heart. What I’ve seen consistently since decades ago is that God calls us to share what we have as a unique individual. We are under no obligation to man’s reason about what is profitable and worthy of pursuit. We are obliged to build our lives within the boundaries of divine truth, not because it will crush us forthwith — it’s not that simple. We are obliged to remain sensitive and practice a moral self-restraint that cooperates with Creation and the moral fabric of the cosmos as a living thing. It will always have a few surprises no matter how much we manage to grasp, so we are obliged to keep paying attention. We can’t afford to chisel our broader general perceptions into stone as immutable law, but regard them instead as personality traits of someone we have to follow and obey.

This business of a debt-frozen global economy is the result of serving Mammon, Jesus’ nickname for materialism. He never said material wealth was dirty or evil, but that it was a pretty sorry excuse for a deity. Materialism is not a character trait of our Creator. Human social stability is. Not some harsh lock-down under tight controls, but He promotes stability as the result of a broad freedom that He was at pains to define in detail for us in multiple Law Covenants. It’s not in the precise legalistic copying of details, but the whole point was to read how those things portrayed His moral character in various contexts. His character is the point, not the manifestations. It is not consistent with His character that we should pursue material wealth by the shortest logical path, but that we harvest material goods as a benefit of serving His glory.

Don’t reduce human need down to some algorithm of the market. That’s dehumanizing. It serves to excuse compelling folks to take what you feel like offering. Your human logic will propose a solution that just happens to answer precisely your peculiar combination hedonistic desires (Lust of the Flesh, Lust of the Eyes and Boastful Pride of Life). Instead, back up and see with your heart so that you simply offer what you have with as much tolerance for variation as you can muster, all the while keeping a firm grip on humility. The goal is not profit, but serving a moral social stability, participating in making God’s shalom a reality. If you can’t see the difference between these two approaches, nothing I write will help you.

By extension, you cannot stamp out with a cookie cutter some mass franchising plan that you push into every corner of the world. Nor can you govern that way as person with political authority. Nothing in the Bible condemns building empires if you do it in keeping with God’s moral character. This has nothing to do with imposing some imaginary reading of Moses’ Covenant on everyone. Exactly the opposite, notice how that Covenant was so very highly individualized for this one particular context — that people, that time in that place.

Why do you suppose Daniel would tell Nebuchadnezzar that the Babylonian Empire represented the golden head of that statue in the Emperor’s dream? What was so “golden” about Babylon? We know that the prophets castigated the policy of brutal conquest and mass displacement. Yet there was something about how Babylon ruled her empire that was nonetheless godly in Daniel’s eyes. If you can read between the lines, I submit that it was a collection of things Western minds would never notice. For example, the Emperor was largely hands off with the minor details of administration in daily routine life of the many little kingdoms he ruled. He didn’t stick his nose into their religions or customs; he had a powerful sense of limits as to what was justly his business. He did have administrative satraps over different regions, but it wasn’t a bureaucracy as we think of it. What the satraps kept eyes on was social stability and paying tribute — the former enabled the latter. The satraps were specialists in understanding the tributary kingdoms and keeping a realistic expectation. I assure you that the basic level of tribute was generally tolerable. The satraps passed along the bulk while keeping enough to fund their operations. It was feudalism at it’s finest, an emphasis on people as the means to wealth.

You’ll notice that the moral fabric makes little distinction between commerce and government in that respect. This shapes our critique of both in this current context. It also shapes our response to this ongoing collapse, as we seek to drag our context into submission before the God who calls us.