Current working title is Biblical Law: Divine Justice (acronym for future reference: BLDJ). I’m serializing the chapter drafts here, so today I’m posting what would be the first chapter.
1. Biblical Logic
God is Creator. He does not reside within Creation, but His existence is rooted outside of it in a separate higher dimension. Nonetheless, Creation is infused with His divine character. In other words, our reality reflects His personality. This includes our human nature. By design we would naturally act on His moral character while living within His Creation.
This means that we have within us a faculty for connecting to that higher dimension of existence. With such faculty in bloom, we would naturally perceive what constitutes a proper course of action that conforms to His will and satisfies the demands of His glory. Our purpose for existing in this realm of Creation is to glorify Him.
The path to His glory is claiming His promises for our lives. We gain the leverage for this by allowing that higher faculty to reign in our souls. The Fall was, in essence, a decision to place human reason on that throne of our souls, a faculty much weaker and far less capable of discerning God’s character in the various opportunities confronting us in His Creation. Indeed, human reason is wholly incapable of discerning His character, and thus unfit to rule human conduct. If all we have is our intellect, we will only by accident ever do what is just and right in the eyes of God. Indeed, we would remain in our sins for the very reason of silencing that higher divine faculty for seeing His truth.
The intellect exists solely as the organizer and implementer of truth leaking down into our consciousness from a higher faculty. The Bible refers to this higher faculty as the heart. It is considered the seat of the will, the part of us capable of interfacing with the Spirit Realm. The Bible describes it as a sensory organ all its own, a superior faculty that was designed to rule the intellect. The will is not a part of the mind, but is an element in the conscious soul when we allow it to rule. If it does not rule, it says mostly nothing at all. This leaves moral character to random guessing.
Western Civilization presumes there is nothing higher than the intellect, enslaves the heart to the reason, and is primarily man-centered, in contrast to the Hebrew God-centered thinking. Thus, it hardly surprises anyone that the entire range of Western thinking about law and justice is man-centered. Insofar as there is anything higher than man, it is nothing more than human-derived ideals, a disembodied myth of objective truth. In the Bible, all truth is a direct reflection of God’s Person and character. It is wholly dependent on Him as a living Person in dynamic interaction with His Creation. If something does not reflect His divine nature, it cannot be “truth.”
Thus, we come to the realization that man does not have some noble task of reasoning his way to some objective truth about reality. Justice is not some human effort to abstract a reasonable set of controls that would be realistic when tested analytically by wise minds. Divine justice is revealed. While an active ruling heart could reasonably hope to discern some measure of His divine truth in Creation, mere intellect would utterly miss the point for lack of capability. Intellectual development matters, but moral development of the heart is far more important.
More importantly, Biblical logic finds ludicrous the notion that what is generally reasonable is reasonable in all contexts. That is, it is downright silly to assume that justice can be objectified and formulated as a universal guide. Divine justice is intensely personal in nature, and always contextual. The underlying fabric of truth cannot be stated objectively or formulated in convenient human language. It is living and active and morphs with the context, so that it requires a developed heart that senses the moral priority within the current situation. The Bible characterizes Creation itself as a living being, and divine justice is simply the Person of God manifested in proper moral choices consistent with His personality.
Nobody imagines that any Western government would pretend to understand such an approach, much less bend itself to the demands of revelation. By the same token, no one who has a living and active heart will ever imagine any Western democratic government is in any way supported and actively protected by God on moral grounds. All human political activity is passively permitted or actively guided by God, but not a single human authority under current secular state assumptions pleases God. They ignore Him and He uses them indirectly. They are all illegitimate under His revelation.
