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The Moral Nature of God (Part 3)
Divine Origination of Morality
Having established the moral nature of God guiding and constraining the heavens and the earth, I want to return to certain moral dilemmas posed by agnostics or atheists. God defines the moral existence of living things. They fit into His hierarchy of value. God oversees and determines the worth and right or orthodox treatment or administration of people, not vice versa.
God originates, discharges, or initiates morality. He, therefore, defines it too. Men do not sit in judgment upon God about morals. They have morals, because God created them in His image.
To consider a basic truth: all men die. They can protest that, but morally they deserve it. In the history of the world, men went from eternal life before the Fall, to eight hundred to nine hundred sixty-nine years before the Flood, and now men physically die in seventy to one hundred years more or less. Life on the way to death comes with many varied complications. Sin affected and continues to affect all of this, which relates everything to morality.
The Capacity of God in Moral Judgment
On His throne in His eternal throne room in His special presence and everywhere in His omnipresence, God upholds and watches over everything and everyone. He judges all things in every place at all times. Nothing escapes His judgment. He not only knows the present, but the entire past and future, including the secrets of men’s hearts. Always what He judges or determines is true.
If God requires Israel to kill every member of a tribe of people in the Old Testament, like the Amalekites or those in Jericho or Ai, that judgment is right. God doesn’t need to justify what He does or requires others to do, but He can justify it and often does. He bases this on superior knowledge and moral virtue.
Hitler and the Nazis of World War 2 Germany committed genocide against the Jews. God loves the Jews. More than any other being, God loved, loves, and shall love. His love is immutable. Still, He allowed the Jewish genocide, even predicted these hard times for future Israel in biblical prophecies. God chastised Israel through the siege of Jerusalem that Jeremiah explains in Lamentations.
When God does something, it is moral. If He tells Saul to kill all the Amalekites, that is just, not allowing them to live. Obedience to God is better than the alternative always. This is not wholesale invitation or promotion of genocide though.
The Unworthiness of Man to Judge God
After Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden of Eden in Genesis 3:1-7, God cursed man, woman, and earth. The other creation of God participates in that curse. Some might ask, why? And then they also might reject or repudiate God’s judgment in these matters.
Whether something is right or wrong, that is not up to people. They would have to start with a naturalistic explanation for why they’re in charge and able to make this determination. However, matter and motion can’t make judgments. If life is a mere accident, no one can be at fault for anything wrong or honored for anything right. The morals in God’s moral heaven and earth proceed from His moral nature. He is both Lawmaker and Judge.
Man’s depravity stops him from a successful moral judgment of God. He cannot see clearly through his lying eyes to know what is right and what is good. A man does not have the capacity to make a right judgment about what God does, causes, or allows.
Deserved Moral Judgment on All Men
By sin came death upon all men and death passed upon all men for all men sinned (Romans 5:12-19). Everything short of death is only by the work of the mercy of God by the grace of God. Salvation is of God (Jonah 2:9). It is a gift of God (Ephesians 2:8-9). God judges righteous judgment in the death of sinners. Animals also die as they do because of God’s moral purpose. The curse of sin touches all of His creation, reminding mankind of the detrimental effects of sin. His only escape is the salvation of the Lord.
God authors morality. True moral judgments come from God. He is the final infallible authority for what is right and good. All men defer to His will for His creation.
More to Come
Embracing An Unstoppable Advantage For Guaranteed Longstanding Victory
Supply Chains and Tripping Hazards
Something I never heard before 2020 were the two words, “supply chain.” I looked into those two words and didn’t find them used together before the last half of the twentieth century. Google books gives just one page of examples for the whole century and none in the nineteenth century. Examples explode in the last twenty years.
Now that people use “supply chain,” historians provide supply chain advantage as the primary reason for victory in World War Two. It was easier for the United States to get its supplies in Europe than for Germany to get theirs. The Americans, over two thousand miles from home, had more and better supplies than the Germans, only hundreds of miles away.
The success of the Viet Cong in the Vietnam War were short supply chains, essentially tunnels, jungle trails, and near limitless volunteers. Among an assortment of lesser causes, this led to their victory over a superior foe.
To achieve success in life requires eliminating as many possible factors that impede that success. Next week Monday, I’m supposed to have a hip replacement. The booklet to prepare for it explains certain fundamentals like removing threats of tripping from the walking surface of your floors. As you read that, it seems a bit of a “duh” moment. And yet, people leave tripping hazards all over their lives.
Supply Chain Dysfunction
Life became more difficult for many people beginning in 2020 because of “supply chain” dysfunction. The price of homes increased because it’s harder to get the supplies. It’s also more difficult to find the people to build the homes.
God in scripture points out factors comparable to a broken supply chain and a tripping hazard. Peter expresses one in 1 Peter 2:11:
Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul.
Paul begs and commands those traversing their life’s path on earth, “Abstain from fleshly lusts.” He didn’t say, “Stop sinning.” Saying “stop sinning” is like saying, “Win the war.” You want to win the war, but more basic than that is “build and sustain a supply chain.” Remove tripping hazards.
Professing Christianity today acts like an industrial complex for fleshly lusts. It isn’t abstaining. It riddles the floor with tripping hazards. If the goal is winning the war, not abstaining is a losing strategy. It creates a disadvantage so large that it guarantees failure. Fleshly lusts destroy the supply chain.
Winning the War
People might say they want to win the war. They might publish multitudes of magnificent war victory posters. Until they want to abstain from fleshly lusts and then abstain, they won’t. In fact, professing Christianity today campaigns for feeding fleshly lusts. It thinks its worst enemy is the command. Professing Christianity reacts most harsh to the threat of abstaining from fleshly lusts than the fleshly lusts.
A popular phrase, reaching cliche status, I will still use because of its appropriateness. Professing Christians shoot themselves in the foot when they do not abstain from fleshly lusts. They might not like the idea, but they are in a war, a war they should desire to win. Instead, they provide the way for their own defeat. They have multiple bullet holes in both feet. I think we should say that they want to lose. Losing must in fact be their goal. They are going to get tired of losing, they’ll lose so much.
“Dearly beloved” or “strangers and pilgrims” in this world find their interests in the world to come, not this one. They instead plan their lives around a future kingdom and a heavenly city. They invest for eternity.
Still, 1 Peter 2:11 expresses a command to believers, an unpopular mode of communication. True Christians still participate in fleshly lusts, so Peter commands them to abstain from them. Commands are not options. He also provides the consequence of not abstaining. Psychological problems, soul problems, are the worst ones people have. They obliterate people and families like Sherman’s march tore through the South at the end of the Civil War.
Fleshly Lusts and True Christianity
Fleshly lusts cannot characterize true Christianity. If fleshly lusts do, it isn’t Christianity. It’s something else, not Christianity. Someone who laps up fleshly lusts is not a Christian.
Biblical Christianity, true Christianity, is more than just a series of things someone doesn’t get to do that he might want to do. It is wanting to do what Christ wants Him to do and liking it. Loving it.
The soul that will operate in a godly manner will unhitch itself from fleshly lusts. A soul that continues in its pursuit of worldly pleasure is not “converted” or “restored” (Psalms 19:7, 23:3). God does not possess that soul. It remains in the realm of the wicked one. This is not a person who has lost his life (psuche, his soul) for Christ’s sake. He still loves the world and the love of the Father is not in Him.
More to Come
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