02 September 2022
It's not possible to give a clinical explanation. Divine revelation doesn't work like that; there is no such thing as "objective truth" and the Bible is not "propositional truth" -- whatever people imagine that means. Ancient Hebrew scholars would laugh at the very idea. If we are going to use such fancy terminology, perhaps we can say that the Bible is an exemplary truth. It's a record of revelation, but is not revelation itself. Actual divine revelation can only be written on the hearts of people. We are accountable to Scripture because we are accountable to God who sponsored it; it was His project, but it is not Him.
Reality itself is feudal and personal. There are lines of authority through persons. The Scriptures cannot be sacred in themselves; they become sacred when you submit to the God found in them. The Word is not actually the printed matter on paper (or displayed on the screen of your device). The Word must live in your heart; otherwise the printed matter means nothing more than mere human sentiment. You cannot have the Word of God in your hands without having the Presence of God Himself in your soul.
That is the ancient Hebrew approach to things. The Bible was founded on that kind of outlook. That's how Jesus viewed things; He didn't carry His Bible in His pocket, but in His heart. If you want to understand the nature of good versus evil, you must approach the subject from the biblical point of view. Any discussion we have about what it is in the human condition that is evil or good, we have to start with this philosophical assumption.
This realm of existence is fake; it is imposed as punishment for the Fall. To be under the Curse of the Fall means being limited to a mortal frame of reference. All we have is what the fallen fleshly nature can tell us, and it's not the whole story by a long shot. So, to get back to our native eternal existence, as we had in Eden, requires that we get some help. The only help there can be is from God. We need divine revelation to fill in the vast blank spots in our understanding of our situation. We cannot know good and evil without going to the Source of judgment for what is good and evil.
God's revelation to us is a matter of seeing His glory. The sole purpose of Him even bothering is that He is God and we must acknowledge that. Doing so includes falling down on our faces before Him as sinners with no hope. We are utterly dependent on His grace and mercy. Sure, we could wander through this life using only what our fleshly capabilities can tell us, but we would have no clue what's really going on. We would never see His glory and never understand what He, as Creator, considers good and evil.
Thus, the essence of revelation is God revealing Himself. It's all about Him and His divine moral character. Right away, we must get one thing: His self-disclosure takes the shape of what He requires of us. This is why the Scripture uses the term "law" to indicate the earliest revelations of God. The only way we can come to know Him is by absorbing His expectations. We can progress no further without dealing with that first -- not the particulars, but the full impact of what it says about us. Thus, the initial revelation of God in our lives is this hammering realization of what awful sinners we are in light of His demands on us. People who aren't humble about their fallen natures don't know Him.
Thus, a law code is the gateway to grace, in terms of our human awareness. Even without the written code of words, we must become aware of our sinful nature that is inherently hostile to revelation.
As I said, it's not possible to give a clinical description, but I'm doing my best to lay down a parable that your mind can handle, but only if your heart already belongs to Him. I have nothing to offer those who aren't already struck by a sense of divine call. This is what Paul means in Romans 8 & 9 about predestination; the initiative is on God alone. You cannot come without His call. Whether and when you are called is for you alone to know in any sense of "knowing". The whole discussion is a parable in the first place.
But if/when you become aware that He calls you, one of the first things you must do by His own driving moral fire is dig into the Bible. You will never get enough of it. I'm not talking about obsessively reading it, though it will include that, but you will have a hunger for what it says. It's not the words themselves, but the flow of moral authority coming down from above. You absolutely need to know His will for you -- "hungering and thirsting for righteousness".
Guess what? The first thing you should get from the Book is how He does not operate personally outside of His Covenant. This is the hardest thing for western minds to grasp; our civilization is hostile to the whole idea. Sorry, but you'll have to adapt or you'll never see a consistent understanding of His will. His revelation is inherently feudal, tribal and covenantal.
To understand the nature of good versus evil means understanding your covenant obligations to Him. We need to get this picture (yeah, another parable): The eternal bodies we see after this life will bear some vague resemblance to our fleshly bodies. The things we can do with the former are incomprehensible, but it excludes an awful lot of things we are obliged to do in the latter. Under the Covenant, we are obliged to procreate because our mortal bodies expire. The Covenant will die on the earth without the living witness of His people in fleshly bodies. It's not that He can't start from scratch with whomever is willing, as He did with Abraham, but that the whole point of the Covenant is to avoid that. It is in our best interest to perpetuate the Covenant through our descendants, and in their best interest, too. So, the Covenant talks to us about how to marry and how to raise kids and all kinds of things.
For the time being, we are a part of the natural world in which we live. The cycle of life and death is imposed on us through our mortal frame; we are part animal. Granted, the natural body has the same wiring as some other animals, and that in itself is neither good nor evil. Rather, it's a problem with the hostile fallen nature we carry that does not afflict the rest of the natural world. Humans are fallen; nature is not. So, whatever it is we do to mess up and depart from the Covenant way is evil, not because of our natural impulses, but because we do not submit them to the Covenant.
The only moral flaws in the natural world are the result of our abandoning our eternal forms, which includes our duty to guide the natural world. Without that guidance, things don't go quite right -- "the ground will bring forth thorns and thistles". Nature resists our mortal will because we lack the moral authority of an eternal frame. We are morally beneath the natural world. Until we can get hold of Jesus, and He gets hold of us, we cannot rise to the higher plane of moral authority to command the storms to cease, or at least let us pass unharmed. Please note: The storms were no hindrance to Jesus in the first place.
All the flaws we see in human nature, particularly in human sexual interactions, are not a matter of clinically picking through what is natural and what is morally evil. Without the context of the Covenant, such questions have no meaning. If something builds the Covenant, it is good. If it defiles the Covenant, it is evil. Some things are obvious, but a great many details are wrapped up in context. We need to understand that context, and we further need to understand that it cannot be answered clinically. It's a matter of observing the pattern in Scripture and contemplating your convictions.
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