Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God Or the Speck in your brother’s eye

For not knowing about God’s righteousness and seeking to establish their own, they did not subject themselves to the righteousness of God.1

We make our sin too small and too large. We make so little of it that we can’t understand why it would be so offensive to God – he should just get over it, what’s with eternal damnation – the gospel is unnecessary. And we make so much of it that it becomes unforgivable – letting our shame convince us that no one could, or should, accept us if they knew the real us – the gospel is not strong enough. The depravity of sin is rooted in the holiness of God. When we make little of our sin, we make little of God.2

I do not intend to offer a systematic theory of morality. No categorical imperative. Rather, I intend to offer a few thoughts on morality because each person is a moral agent, accountable for their actions; and because a philosophy of parenting is part of a moral philosophy. We are exploring moral questions: what does it mean to be a good parent, what ought to be the goals of a parent, and what methods are allowed in pursuit of those goals. The following sections will unpack these claims:

Morality is objective not subjective. I don’t get to define good and evil for myself, they are defined by a God who is beyond me.

Morality is pervasive. No action is amoral. No choice is gray. Every action is either good or evil.

Morality is personal. Because God is a person and he will judge each person. What a particular person ought to do in a particular situation cannot be fully derived from abstract principles applicable to every person in every situation. TODO: Moral hierarchy.

Morality is about relationships, not rules. Righteousness is being right with others. Justice is about restoring broken relationships. Obedience is a secondary effect of relationship – if you love me you will obey me. Rules are guides towards relationships.

Morality involves the soul, not merely the deeds of the body. Most actions are not in themselves sinful, but rather are judged based upon the nature of the soul that bore those actions as fruit.

Behold the Kindness and Severity of God

So too it is impossible for there to be propositions of ethics. Propositions can express nothing that is higher. … It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words. Ethics is transcendental. … Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.3

There is a chasm between is and ought that can only be crossed by the gods. Questions about good and evil are not questions about what is but rather about what ought to be done. Morality is not discoverable through science or philosophy, because those can, at their highest, only describe the world as it is. There is no way to logically derive what ought to be done from what is. We can devise clever sounding ethical systems – treat other people like you want to be treated – but it is not possible to logically prove an ethical claim or the validity of an ethical system.

Tigers are orange with black stripes, but they hunt in environments that are primarily green rather than orange. So tigers ought4 to be green (with dark brown stripes). Through study, we can discover reasons why orange may provide a camouflaging effect for tigers, and why mammals may lack the ability to produce green fur. But no amount of study will reveal that it is evil for tigers to be green, or morally good for tigers to be vegetarian. So, likewise, we can discover that an action will knowingly cause the unjustified death of a person, but we cannot discover that such an act is evil. We can construct an hypothesis about how orange may help camouflage tigers and then devise experiments to measure how effectively the most common prey of tigers are able to distinguish orange from the surrounding environment. But there is not an experiment we can conduct or a phenomena we can measure to affirm or disprove a claim that murder is evil.

Science and logic silently fail when applied to good and evil. We can talk about good and evil in ways that sound sensible – just like we can say sensible sounding things about the golden mountain. But once we start talking about ought, we stop talking about what is. And when we stop talking about what is, the rules of science and logic go out the window. It is nonsense to apply the law of non-contradiction to claims about good and evil. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

We know that our inner (innate) sense of Justice is warped, because it does not sufficiently condemn us.

I know that his command is eternal life, so the things that I speak, I speak just as the father has told me.5

We want morality to be grounded in something other than arbitrary divine command. Oughts ought to flow out the underlying unchanging character of God. Or out of a design for human flourishing – God created us so he must know what is best for us, and his commands must be for our good. It feels offensive to simply say it is evil because God commands thou shalt not. Bacon is unclean because poorly cooked pork posed health risks in the ancient world – so this apparently arbitrary command was actually directed towards human well-being. And, implicitly, God decided they were too dumb to understand if he were to explain how and why they needed to cook pork well. But after Peter saw pigs in a blanket, it was clear we had learned how to cure meat well enough to deserve bacon.

God is allowed to give commands that are arbitrary and contrary to human well-being. Take your son, your only son whom you love, and sacrifice him to me on the mountain where I show you. Now go and strike Amalek and utterly destroy all that he has, and do not spare him; but put to death both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.6 The appearance of arbitrariness is not an appearance that needs to be saved.7 It is the reality. God may command what he wants. His commands do not become enforceable only when we find them reasonable. And his purposes ought not be human well-being but rather his pleasure and glory. Our well-being is always a derived consideration – does he find pleasure in our well-being, or pleasure in our destruction: what if he endures with great patience the objects of his wrath.8

Gods may cross the chasm between is and ought for several reasons. 1) Because in their nature they transcend what is. The existence of all other beings is dependent, created. For us there is but one God, the Father, from whom are all things, and we exist for him.9 Whereas God must be self-existent – I am that I am.10 2) Because the ends pursued by commands from the gods transcend . 3) Because gods hold the final sword. I will tell you who you should fear, fear him who after he has killed has the authority to cast into hell.11

I am that I am

We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.12

Morality is objective, not subjective. Good and evil are not matters of private interpretation.13 We do not each have the freedom to do whatever seems right in our own eyes.14 Good and evil are determined outside of any individual’s perspective. It is not good because it makes you feel good. It is not good because you think it wise or best.

But can we all admit that even if you were permitted to make up your own moral standards, you would still fall short. That if you commanded yourself, you would disobey yourself. That I would break the covenant that was made between me, myself and I. I am not good enough for myself. I cannot keep my own promises. I cannot live up to my own ideals.

Morality is objective. Teleological and relational – Evil is acting against love and peace in relation with others; evil is acting against your true purpose/end/goal; evil is acting against rightly ordered values/truth/loves.

Morality is a hierarchy

every act is more or less an expression of love for God. God is at top of moral hierarchy - Experiencing and responding to His love. Discerning the voice of God. Knowing assignments each moment and doing

God is at the top of the hierarchy, his merit for being the point of all existence, is unearned – it is intrinsic in his nature. I am that I am.

There’s a tendency to ground secular morality in either power or competing freedoms. The argument from power is easy - an act is wrong because the person or group with the power to punish says it is. The argument from competing rights is more nuanced. You hear it in America’s founding documents. The right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The bill of rights. The authors of those documents understood themselves to be writing down rules that were built into nature, not just good ideas for a country. But none of those rights are absolute, they are always limited, because your unrestricted expression of your rights could interfere with mine. For example, freedom of speech and press can conflict with the right to a fair trial if the public is convinced of guilt before the evidence is weighed in court. But I think it’s hard to argue that the Bible talks about morality as being based on competing rights. And while I can point to passages that say “obey because God will punish disobedience”, the biblical ground for morality is ordered loves. I am the Lord your God, you shall have no other gods before me. It’s not, I get to do whatever I think will make me happy up to the limit set by whoever holds the hammer. Or I get to do whatever I want unless it interferes with you doing whatever you want. Biblical morality is relational. It is my job to love myself and God and this person and that group and this assigned piece of the garden in a way that properly prioritizes, rightly values, each.

Law is made for man, not man for the Law. New covenant

Beyond Good and Evil - The Law is not a list of rules defining morally good actions and morally evil actions. Principles that we are meant to see beyond – God did not kill Cain or Moses when they murdered, even though that was the punishment that was written. The odd placement of Jesus’ teachings on divorce. Paul’s application of muzzling an Ox to teachers. What about “sin is lawlessness”. Holiness (as otherness) as becoming like God. Jesus didn’t evaluate each moment whether a potential course of action was allowed by the Law (did He? what about in the temptation of Satan), even within the hierarchy of laws, but rather knew what He ought to do in that moment as it had been taught to Him by His Father.

Not just that laws are “fuzzy” (as in it’s hard to define murder). The “why of an action matters: I killed on accident, I killed to prevent worse, I killed because I hated. The”how” of an action matters: I killed in a way that caused suffering, I killed publicly, he sought to divorce her quietly.

Between Good and Evil. Morality is pervasive.

Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant’s truce between virtue and vice. – Thoreau Walden p. 194

Every moment I have to choose what to do. At each moment, the set of alternative actions from which to choose is practically infinite. God in His transcendence wills precisely that action which I will have chosen. God in His immanence wills precisely that action which I ought to choose. “Ought” as in that action which is morally perfect - that singular action that is fully obedient to God’s revelation generally and specifically to me; fully expresses affection for (worships) God, myself and all other beings in proportion to their true worth; and fully reflects the truth of who I am and the gifts I have been given. My work is to pursue the understanding, wisdom and self-control required to see, choose and act as I ought. When I fail to choose/act as I ought, God in His transcendent immanence effectually acts to fully redeem my failures and accomplishes an end that is morally perfect.

Every action is either sin or not sin, there is no gray, no sliding scale. But the line between sin and not sin is not down at thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not lie. The line is far up at love God (fully know and fully express the truth in worship) with everything I am, and love my neighbor as myself. Which means that my every action is sin. I can sin in ways that move me and people around me towards God, or ways that move us away from Him. And regardless of which way I’m currently sinning, I have the relentless power of the blood redeeming all to His glory. There aren’t better or worse sins. There are better or worse ways to sin each sin. Are we excused from choosing the better because it still falls short? May it never be. The call is to perfection, to be holy as God is holy. We are freed from the delusion that our righteousnesses are ever more than filthy rags. Freed to show grace, patience and perseverance to others and to ourselves. Freed to forget what lies behind and press on towards the upward call. Chandler – Grace does not make sin safe

Breaking his law is not simply a foolish mistake, a minor character flaw. By our words and actions we lie against the truth of who he is.

Fallen Angels

Only the lost are saved. Only the sinner is justified. Only the dead can rise from the dead… Some men are only virtuous enough to forget that they are sinners without being wretched enough to remember how much they need the mercy of God.15

When you are enslaved, every action you take, no matter how strongly logic claims it will lead you to freedom, serves only to entangle you more in your chains. You must be made free. And only then can the chains be loosed. The chains of our captivity become comfortable. We cling to them even after being freed – how often did the Israelites beg to return to Egypt while they wandered in freedom. … While you are enchained, what hope can you have of freeing your child. Your actions entangle your chains and their own. You can’t see clearly enough to distinguish between the chains they wear and the ones you wear and have wrapped around them. The blind leading the blind.

If sin is simply lawlessness, breaking the rules of the latest Baal, then I don’t have a sin problem or need of redemption. If the motivation offered for following the rules is the hope that death won’t be the end of this life, then we are too be most pitied. Our fear is not that this life will end, but that, whether it ends or not, it is meaningless and empty. An eternal, hopeless, unsatisfied existence is infinitely terrifying. No law has been given that is able to impart life.16 The rules are not the fullness. The letter is not the spirit. The rules are a teacher that guide us to Christ.17 The point of the law is the person of God. Sin is not breaking a rule – it is breaking a relationship. Sin severs our connection with the only person in the universe who can bring us life and satisfaction.

God does not demand that every man attain to what is theoretically highest and best.18

Obedience produces joy and peace. John’s love - knowledge - obedience. If you love me you will obey me.

There is a difference between morally perfect and morally blameless/acceptable, between a choice which doesn’t merit condemnation and a choice which is good. There is a force of ought behind moral perfection – I ought to always and only do that which is best. From the set of available choices, I am capable of identifying some as my best – the best I can do right now, given what I know about myself, God, others, my assignments. But rarely does my best narrow the field of choice to a single option. How to choose between my bests. Is there a larger set of acceptable options around my bests such that I could choose poorly without choosing wrongly, choosing evil.

Making the world a better place

The moral value of your actions is found in you – in your desires / choices / actions / beliefs. Not in the affects that those actions have in other people. Mens Rea. It’s sin if you thought it was sin. It’s sin if the goal was wrong. It’s sin if method was wrong, even if the goal was good. It’s sin even if it works out for the best (because everything is always made to work out for the best).

A virtuous act is not virtuous because of how the other responded to it. But a manipulative act, an act that is intended to provoke a specific response from an other is judged for the provocational intent. Am I my brother’s keeper – no You are, and as your servant I am. Pharoah will harden his heart and not hear you – so you should be more creative in your presentation.

One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism. Morality is Personal.

There is only one way to be good. Only one right way to live. One right way to dress. One right word to say in that moment. One right way to cut an avocado. A person is only their own person because they continue to be sinners. When the perfect comes, every person will be the same person and everything will be done rightly.

morality, like destiny, is worked out with a personal God

The sinfulness of an action cannot be judged by analyzing only the action itself. The widow gave 2 mites - for most others this would be treating God with disdain, but her act honored Him. The people passed their children through the fire to Molech and were condemned as having done that which was worse than anything God Himself could imagine. Abraham sacrificed his son in fire on the altar and it was credited to him as righteousness. God sacrificed His Son in the fire of His wrath and it was righteousness to the world. Perhaps no action in isolation, abstracted away from the people and circumstances involved can be judged morally right or wrong. Maybe one of the lessons we’re supposed to learn from the OT Law is that it’s foolish to say things like “murder is wrong”. Not because we each get to decide what is good or evil for ourselves, but because the top of the moral hierarchy is a Person and so morality is inherently relational, concrete, and personal.

Go and sell everything you own and give it to the poor and come follow me.

Can’t be a command for everyone.

God calls and uses particular individuals. Not called to be Jesus. Perfection does not mean that I do the same thing that Jesus would do if he were incarnated into my position. Special revelation, the call / assignments on me in particular.

Morality is relational

Why you did something affects whether the action was morally right. There’s a mens rea of understanding, and a mens rea of intention. Did you restrict a child’s access to the Internet because A or B.

Forgiveness

All things are cleansed with blood.19

The evil you do deserves wrath. And you can’t make up for the evil by doing good, assuming it were possible for you to do anything good. An evil act creates division in the community. Justice = Righteousness = Reconciled = “Right with”. We good. Death is required for redemption.20

forgiving requires forgetting

What is easier to say “your sins are forgiven” or “get up a walk”. The sins was the real problem, the real disability. And to forgive or proclaim forgiveness was the harder work. The walking was proof that the harder work had been done.

Chandler: Grace does not make sin safe.

I want to say “I can’t tell someone else what is good or evil for them with the authority of God”. But I don’t want to be heard as saying “everything is permitted” (1 Cor 6:12). Nor as saying morality is subjective, up to each person to decide, as opposed to absolute. Morality is absolute and pervasive – every thought and action is either good or evil, and which it is may be discovered by you, but it is decided absolutely by God. Because the highest command is that I love God with everything that I am. Everything short of that is sin. Which means that our righteousnesses are filthy rags. … Is this hypothetical guy sinning when he has sex with another guy? Yes. His heart is filled with a thousand idolatries. In his actions and beliefs, he lies against who God is and who he himself is. Is it sin because of the gender of the person with whom he’s sleeping? I am not his judge. And I don’t have to make that judgement in order to counsel him because my counsel is on the truth and lies. God will change hearts and actions. I don’t get to decide which part of this other person He heals first.

Does special revelation trump general revelation – purpose of law is not to equip you to judge others, but to equip you to judge yourself. Thou shalt not murder (or sacrifice your children) – Take your son whom you love and sacrifice him to me. Thou shalt not lie – I will go and be a lying spirit in the mouths of the prophets. Thou shalt not make a graven image – Make a serpent and anyone that looks upon it shall be saved.

Only One is Good. There is not only one way to be perfect. Morality is objective and absolute. All of your actions are either morally good or morally evil and there is no gray. You are not your judge. Morality is objectively a Person and absolutely personal. Good is not defined by what feels good to you. Good may be different for you than others, because it is defined for you specifically by the person of God.

sin twists good, healthy things into evil. only God creates ex nihilo, evil must use what’s already there. Romans 7:13

Deal with sin by pursuing God, so spend some time discussing how to do that. Different from studying Text. Connects to “secrecy of God”.

Jesus was Jesus so that we don’t have to be. Our failures prove our need, we cannot hold others to a standard that requires them to be Jesus for others – they must be allowed to fail, to get divorced, etc.

Justice is about community. Questions of morality or equality are derivative of community, similar to Newton’s Laws being special cases of Einstein’s Relativity. Justice is not just reconciliation in the sense of “now we can be friends again”, it is making things right, restoring the world to what it would have been without the wrong.

Does a personal “offense” (someone sinned against me) create “debt”? You hurt me, so you owe me? Doesn’t feel right. By doing wrong, you brought evil, broke the “pre-existing peace, good, rightness”, and that needs to be fixed, repaired, made right, redeemed. And it seems right for you as the breaker to bear the costs of repair.

Jr’s arguments re his president who allowed a felonious sexual deviant to be a teacher/coach basketball and lied about it: epistemological - how can I know this guy is repentant and cured of that inclination to sin. Other equally qualified candidates who have not had a moral failing. If you had a moral failing and are really repentant then you wouldn’t want to have your old position back. Must be above reproach and can never be after a moral failing. – But I feel that justice is restoration. Not that you deserve or get your job back, but that you are requalified. Moses. Peter.

The church’s work, as Christ’s presence on earth, is to do the same thing Christ did: bear the sins of the world. To suffer for sinners. Not to suffer as righteous.

the saying of Rav: A man will have to give account on the judgment day of every good permissible thing which he might have enjoyed and did not.21

Our understanding of sin and redemption must be grounded in joy and life to the full, both tasted today and hoped for tomorrow.

We talk as though government is an “it” that takes from “us” and gives to “them”. But government is us. “We”, as a community, in order to be in community, agree to use our individual freedoms to, in part, advance the interests of the community. Acts 4 is not a commune or communism, it’s a microcosm of the natural order of community. The natural state of man is not a Hobbsian war of individuals. It is communal cooperation. Cain is the aberration. The Tower of Babel the perversion. The natural, healthy bent of man is to community. Scatter us across the globe and we immediately band together as much as we can.

Incorporate Other People’s Problems book into this one?

Whatever keeps you going. Whatever gets you up in the morning.22

Don’t settle for bullshit. The lies you tell yourself are the most hidden to you and most destructive. The heart is deceptive above all else.23 But if you’re going to hold onto a lie, then own it. Don’t claim to be an atheist/materialist and then pretend there’s an alternative to nihilism. Don’t accept nihilism and then claim there’s a reason to get up in the morning. Walk towards truth or own the lie, but don’t see the lie, pretend that it is the truth and change nothing.

Cannot decide what is broken in another person, any more than you can decide how you’re going to fix them. Cannot see or know. Can only help them see themselves and then allow themselves to be seen and healed.

You are not their priest, their confessor. They do not owe you penance or require your absolution.

Darkness is a harsh term, don’t you think? And yet it dominates the things I think. … It’s not the long walk home that will change this heart, but the welcome I receive with a restart. – Mumford

What are we with our little conversion, our little repentance and revising, our little ending and beginning, our changed lives? .. . It is in His conversion that we are engaged…. It is in His baptism in Jordan that we are baptized…. It is in His death on the cross that we are dead … and in His resurrection. .. that we are risen. . . . It is because this is the case .. that the awakening to repentance is the power of the Gospel, and that it has the force and depth … which are proper to it. .. . It remains for us to know that .. . we are [upheld] by the great movement which He has fulfilled. – Karl Barth

You will not be pure again until I have satisfied my wrath on you. Ezekiel 24:13.

As the body of Christ, the church is called to do the same - to be present in public life as sinners who direct God’s judgment away from others by taking responsibility for sin through repentance. In doing so, the church faithfully witnesses to the lordship of Christ and participates in Christ’s transformation of this world. – From church and politics book on kindle

How to deal with sin?

The work we do is identify the lies we believe about ourselves, God and others; counter those lies with the truths of God; incorporate those truths into our minds and souls; commit to live according to the truth.

The Sin of others:

We are all sinners. We all have unconfessed sin. We all have sin in our lives that we don’t know is sin. Our souls are broken on the surface and in their depths. God does not require that we address all of our sin at one time, nor that we fully understand the depths of our depravity, or the far reaching death brought into the world through our sin. He works slowly, on little parts of us, and He redeems the death our sin has wrought. It is not our job to tell others their sin. It’s our job to walk with others as we both walk with Jesus, and let Him address their sin. There are situations when we are required “to judge those within the Church”, to help someone get the speck out of their eye. Those situations are decided primarily by the discernment offered by the Spirit as guided by the wisdom revealed in the Text (as in the above passages). Anytime we are dealing with other’s sin, we have to remember to be gracious, to remember that “we were once ourselves foolish, deceived, enslaved to various lusts and pleasures … but the kindness of God appeared and saved us” (Titus 3). Often the only thing that can or need be said when someone you care about is dealing with sin and death is “That sucks. I still love you. God still loves you. Let’s walk through this.” God is immeasurably kind and patient and wise. Jesus prayed for those driving nails into His hands.

  1. Romans 10: 3↩︎

  2. Often the psychological move is the in the opposite direction: we feel ashamed, and respond by making God little hoping that this will lessen our shame. This move does not merely fail, it worsens our situation. Our conscience is the source of our feelings of shame and we have not salved our conscience. And a small god cannot forgive us. So we are now alone in a fight against ourselves and our innate and true understanding that we have not lived up to our own standards, much less the standards of holiness to which we know we are called.↩︎

  3. Wittgenstein, Tractatus↩︎

  4. as a practical matter or as a moral matter?↩︎

  5. John 12:27-50↩︎

  6. 1 Samuel 15:3↩︎

  7. Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances.↩︎

  8. Romans 9:22↩︎

  9. 1 Corinthians 8:6↩︎

  10. Exodus 3:14↩︎

  11. Luke 12:5↩︎

  12. Steven Miller, White House deputy chief of staff for policy for President Trump.↩︎

  13. 2 Peter 1:20↩︎

  14. Judges 21:25↩︎

  15. Merton 11.4↩︎

  16. Galatians 3:21↩︎

  17. Galatians 3:24↩︎

  18. Merton 4.13↩︎

  19. Hebrews 9:22↩︎

  20. Hebrews 9:15↩︎

  21. Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Pesachim on Judgment Day↩︎

  22. Whatever keeps you going, Donovan Woods.↩︎

  23. Jeremiah 17:9. Does the heart deceive more than anything else deceives, or does the heart deceive more than the heart does anything else?↩︎