01 August 2023
Let's review. I've said that pursuing questions of ontology is chasing after the wind. The term "ontology" is a fancy word that means trying to pin down the nature of something. Defining the nature of things helps you work with them and change the physical situation of life, but it cannot bring you peace. In terms of morality, ontology is always the wrong question.
In the Bible, for a Hebrew mind, questions of sin and evil were never a matter of the thing itself. The question has always been a matter of the effects in terms of whether it glorifies the Lord. But the paradox for us is that we cannot fix the results, so our human consideration is getting the process right. Faith is the glorious goal; law is how we get there. We are called to adjust our procedures, but always with our eyes on the outcome in terms of His glory. Thus, to be good and righteous is not a thing in itself, but a matter of our commitment to His glory.
There is little about our lives in this world that we can possibly control. The only thing we know we are required to control is our response. Not so much what our hands do, but the determination in our hearts to act out of love for the Lord. Holiness means a commitment to please Him, to live for His priorities.
If we could just nail down the issue of what matters to Him, everything else will fall into place.
Let's look at that paradox again: We embrace the priorities, an image God paints for us in terms of His glory. But the thing that occupies our fleshly minds in serving Him is being responsive. It's not locking down the procedures, because we are in no position to understand the full nature of the mechanics of things. It's our instinct to imagine we can analyze everything down to the smallest particle, to capture the range of what finite things can and will do, in all the various contexts. That instinct is a lie, part of the Curse of the Fall. There are influences at work that we cannot possibly discern, much less measure.
We have been taught to believe that scientific examination is all we really need to answer every question about our human existence. It has become the obsession of humanity to explore in both the macro and micro of how things work, to account for every resonance of existence. No one is going to argue that we haven't accomplished anything in that direction. And it's part of the game to file away as "anomaly" any event that cannot be explained. We do this to the point that we simply cannot be bothered to notice when the anomalies proliferate.
There are intelligent forces in nature itself, as well as in the spiritual realm, that can affect the outcomes. It goes against our culture to believe that.
Trying to imagine a pure scientific process is not going to make it work any better. Humans are inherently incapable of getting there. (How's that for ontology?) We are flawed, but so is reality itself. I'm not saying that scientific inquiry is a waste of time, but believing that the process will provide all the answers we need is simply a lie. Go ahead and pursue it, but never truly believe in the answers it provides. Make use of what you can, but the question of what "useful" means is not in the scientific process itself.
The question of what's useful is a moral issue. What fires a scientific pursuit will say a great deal about whether the questions ought to be asked in the first place. There is plenty we simply don't need to know. Making a god of knowledge itself is evil. For example, you cannot test torture methods without poking God in the eye. It won't matter if victims truly volunteer; there's no moral justification for wanting to know. The motives behind things like MK-Ultra were evil by definition.
That's because the motives behind such a program included a desire to abuse people. It was aimed at bringing convenience to evil rulers. It's not a question of the knowledge itself, but the motives in asking. That much should be obvious. It's not as if we could squelch the human appetite for knowledge; that's the Lust of the Eyes at work in our fallen nature. We are always looking for an advantage over our competitors. It represents a rejection of God's promise to provide for us.
Nor is it a question of harming others. God didn't forbid killing humans. Indeed, He demands that some be killed. Rather, the issue is killing them without His command. There are boundaries to every human action conceivable. Those boundaries start with your feudal submission to Him. It's not the actions themselves, but whether they are consistent with His glory in the given context.
Again, the biblical definition of sin is anything except what God wants, when He wants it. Evil is defined as interfering with His agenda. He portrays His agenda as building and maintaining a human community that promotes His reputation. Our life here is a training environment; it's not the real thing. God is testing how we respond, waiting to see how we develop a desire for His glory. If we can submit fully to that desire in this realm, we are granted access to real life in Eternity.
Years ago, I came up with the parable of slate. We need to be like slabs of slate laid as the floors in some buildings. We cannot stop human evil from walking across our lives, but we can become so hardened by grace that it simply has no effect on us. It takes centuries for slate to begin wearing from foot traffic; by then we are in His arms in Heaven.
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