It’s environment, not outcomes.
The entire focus of revelation is the character of God. Because of our fallen nature, we can know only what He demands of us in terms of what our minds can handle. Thus, His revelation is a collection of narratives that focus on Law Covenants and divine initiative. From that narrative we are obliged to form an image of God as a Person. We aren’t merely learning His Laws, but learning Him through His requirements.
Stop and think: At what point does revelation emphasize outcomes? If your orientation is to think in terms of outcomes, your mind will supply all sorts of examples. But if you make an effort to understand the orientation of the people who lived and wrote this narrative, you’ll realize that the focus on outcomes is tied directly to the fallen nature. The call to a higher moral understanding means forsaking outcomes and operating in terms of the moral environment.
More pointedly, we are called to build a working environment that allows God to reveal His compassion.
He will most certainly reveal Himself, and it will be entirely on His own terms. If you ignore those terms, then what applies to your life is His wrath. In other words, you’ll be pounded into a pile of impotent insignificance. Thus, all that talk in the Bible of futility and how we all end up in the same place — the grave. That sort of language is aimed at folks who struggle to embrace reality in its fullness. Among rodeo folks around here, the expression goes like this: It’s you and the bull in that ring. You can try to ride the bull and hang on for dear life wherever it takes you, or you can let the bull chase you until it gores and tramples you. Ignoring the bull is not an option. God speaks through the bull in this case.
The options we have for building an environment are limited. The Law Covenants allow us to see God’s intent for how we should live. Rodeo bull-riders don’t get it right the first time, so it does take some training to gain a working knowledge of how to ride. But try to imagine that God is bull who wants you to learn how to ride. The environment is rooted in yourself. The biggest task is changing your expectations and habits so that they match reality as God created it. It’s not just an 8-second trial run with a quick escape, but a lifetime commitment.
However, a conscious choice to commit means we can take away the image of bull-riding and it becomes any number of more sane contexts. You can color it any way you like, so long as you strive to match up with reality as God defines it. You have choices; they are seldom what fallen nature tells you. A large part of what I write here is aimed at correcting the myths humanity generates in pursuit of fallen lusts. This is not Burger King and you can’t have it your way. You have to discover God’s way, and it won’t be precisely the same for any two of us. God knows each of us as unique individuals and delivers to us a uniquely individual set of parameters for the environment He calls us to shape inside our hearts. You have a limited dominion over certain features of your existence.
And one of the biggest myths in our Western society is that specific outcomes matter. It’s not the results of what you do, but the discovery of what God has granted. Every time you uncover the next mystery in your life, there’s always more. You are obliged to organize as best you can, but your reason is the servant whose job is never finished. You can never stop and tell yourself you have it all worked out (Luke 12:16-21). You don’t lose everything you gain, but you don’t get hung up on what’s measurable to human senses. You wake up every day in a new world in terms of potential. You are called to bring His justice to a whole new range of moral failures.
It’s never finished until you leave this world.
