Worldly Ethics
He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? Micah 6:8 NASB
What is good – Want to know how to live in this world? The prophet Micah provides YHVH’s answer. Just three things are required of us. Do justice, love hesed and walk humbly with YHVH. Wonderful! Simple! Maybe not so easy. But what does this all mean?
Micah gives us the principles of worldly ethics. Not ethics from the world but ethics for living in the world. These three principles summarize all the detailed instructions of Torah—and more. It’s the “and more” part that usually baffles us. We can figure out what the clearly written, culturally dependent Torah instructions are for the people who were in the audience when YHVH spoke, but how that applies to emails and automobiles, jet airplanes and electric guitars, gay couple adoptions and ISIS isn’t quite so clear. What we do in circumstances not anything like the agrarian cultures of 1200 BCE is often difficult to discern and sometimes apparently arbitrary.
Perhaps Ira Stone’s commentary on Luzzatto’s statement will help us. “What constitutes a human being is this conformity to ethics and justice . . . ‘all that leads to the end of true good, namely, strengthening of Torah and furthering of human fraternity.’ Here, the true good, which is the ethical and the just, becomes synonymous with Torah and humanity combined. . . The implication here is that Torah and the human community are predicated on the implementation of the good, that is, ethical conformity to God’s acts, or ‘walking in God’s ways.’ Ethics preceded Torah, precedes human community, and precedes philosophical speculation. . . . our consciousness is not a solitary one, but rather a relational one. . . We are first objects of love and then we become the subjects of love, the lovers.”
Stone observes that we are first called to treatment of the other as ourselves because we have experienced being treated by the other. The relationship is primary. Our awareness of who we are originates in being the object of someone else’s love and then we can reciprocate as lovers of another. The ethics of love relationship comes before the codification of Torah, before the awareness of the community of others’ needs, before the speculation about the meaning of ethics. In the end, our abilities to act on God’s desires is substantially influenced by the experience we had before we were aware of our own consciousness as separate from another. How we were loved (or not) plays a major role in how we become fully human.
Obedience to Torah is still a choice, but the predisposition to obey is conditioned by our prior experience of being loved. Those who didn’t experience the security and sanctity of a loving relationship before they came to the Father will find it much more difficult to trust the Father for His love. However, when they do find it, perhaps the experience of actually being loved will be all that more powerful.
What is good is more than what is given by God. What is good is the fabric of our lives, the whole of our lives, experienced in daily interaction with those who love us and who we love. What is good is what enhances the love of others and ourselves. Torah provides the foundation. Life provides the house resting on that foundation.
Topical Index: Micah 6:8, ethics, Ira Stone, community, Torah
ANNOUNCEMENT:
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Thanks Skip. This explains a lot, makes sense out of things that haven’t made sense.
What is the Law of the flesh vs. the Law of God? What is the Natural Man vs. the Spiritual Man? If the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life, what does that mean? If the Golden Rule is “Do as you wish to be done by”, then what were we doing before, that we had to be told that? How do those people, who do not have Torah, live the best that they know, and how is that counted to them for righteousness? Where did they learn what they do have? It is pretty clear that to those to whom much has been revealed and given, much is to be required, but what did we have before? This stuff really consumed me the whole time I spent outside the Fence, and I went looking for the answers. I thought if I could discern what Cold was, I could figure out what Hot was. I did finally think I came up with a few observations, so here they are, for what they are worth.
First, I think there is such a thing as what we used to call Natural Law, and that is the law of consequences. The Moral Law is what we were given to keep us correctly lined up with the Natural Law. If I follow dietary instructions (which is moral obedience; i.e. I do it because I choose to be obedient) in the Torah, it can keep me out of trouble in the natural. People who do not have Torah instruction are not held accountable for what they do not know, but they still can suffer from the consequences. (Pork is nasty stuff, y’all. We share so many diseases and parasites with the pigs it just isn’t funny.)
I also saw that we are hardwired for love, but we are not born KNOWING what love actually is. We are born EXPECTING to be loved; we are born with a propensity for love: I think of it as being born with receptor sites for love, but it is quite clear that we learn love by being loved. When we were created with the yetzer ha-ra, I think it served a function, and that function was designed to serve our free wills, but our free wills were designed to serve God. We are not born naturally wanting to serve God. We have to learn to serve Him, but that makes sense, or else we would not have a chance to CHOOSE to serve Him. I think Skip has the correct order of operations: we have to be loved before we can love. We are designed to experience love, but we have to experience it before we know what it is. So then, we can conclude that we are held accountable for choosing love to the extent that we have been loved, and that is accounted to us for righteousness. Those to whom Torah has been given, or those who HAVE INFORMED ACCESS to Torah, where they have exposure to, and assurance of, the love of God, then, are going to be held accountable for their response to that love.
I think the yetzer ha-ra, which we were created with, then, is our hard-wired natural propensity, but it was designed to receive love. I think what we call our egos must be the receptor sites for love. The ego is insatiable – it wants to be loved all the time, and that is correct. I think where we get into trouble is when we go looking for love in all the wrong places, ways, times, etc. So how is the yetzer ha-ra hardwired? What, exactly, is the law of the flesh (which isn’t a BAD law; it just isn’t a MORAL law)? Ok, y’all, hold your hats; here it is. When I had my babies, I could see that I could only hold them accountable for what they knew; specifically, what they had experienced. When I went to compare that with the GOLDEN RULE (because I wanted so badly to hold them to that Rule, but I could see they didn’t have a clue!), I found that it was because they knew another rule in their flesh, and that rule (not a bad rule, y’all) was that we are hardwired to Do As We Have Been Done By. This rule constitutes the basis for the yetzer ha-ra – the flesh: this is what it runs on, and swears by, and holds to.
So it is exactly WHEN we experience love that we then have a true choice. I think the yetzer ha-ra WILLS TO HAVE LOVE, but cannot provide it for itself. The yetzer tov is where I choose to reciprocate – to respond to – love. The yetzer tov, then, is only possible when I have been on the receiving end of the love of God. Trust is a phenomenon that can only occur when the trustworthy has been experienced. A baby learns to trust; learns to love, to the extent that it has been loved. To the extent that it has not, is to the extent that the yetzer ha-ra is still unfulfilled. At that point, I think it is obvious that we have (excuse my language) all been screwed. Do As We Have Been Done By may work great in paradise, but nobody here was born there. I am going to treat others in my flesh the way I have been treated, for that is how I was made, but it is painfully obvious that we need an override on this system! None of the made-up religions of the flesh – nowhere in paganism – is there to be found an answer to this dilemma of how to get beyond how we have already been treated. The Golden Rule could never have been made up by the flesh, because there is nothing in the flesh that could possibly follow it. I think only heaven is in a position to have the audacity to suggest that I love no matter what, but then, only heaven is in a position to reach down to love me no matter what.
Too Much Freedom (?)
Coloring Outside the Lines
“Love God, then live as you wish.” —St. Augustine
There is a massive difference between liberty and license!! We are, dear family, free to do as we “ought,” but not free to do “anything” we want! In reality, we are free to do what God wants and to live a life of child-like obedience to our Heavenly Father.
Fr’instance, we may take an untrained child, sit him or her at a piano or drumset, and then instruct the little urchin to “bang away” freely! Do “whatever” pleases you, little Johnny. And the guaranteed result will be? —Yes, more more noise than music. Chaos. Confusion. Cacophony.
No, we musicians, er.. Christians, must “play by the rules!” For any community or family to exist together peacefully there must be order. ~ Let all things be done decently and in order! ~ Clean house, anyone? House rules.. little Johnny, please pick up your toys and put them in their proper place.
No rules? – BTW, whose rules are we living by? As we are His by right of creation, and His again by right of Calvary- it is crystal clear we should heed the admonition of Solomon: ~ Listen, my son, to your Father’s instruction! ~
“Love God and live as you wish” that Luther and Calvin had the same idea, at least that is how I read and understood them. Your words Carl, are clear and precise and clearly understood. Thanks for the pure simplicity!
“Here, the true good, which is the ethical and the just, becomes synonymous with Torah and humanity combined…” “that is, ethical conformity to God’s acts, or ‘walking in God’s ways.”
There is NO good in us except when we respond in deeds in accordance to Torah instructions!
“How we were loved (or not) plays a major role in how we become fully human.”
True! Being loved is a beautiful life experience, the best ever. When we have experienced that love, we so desire to pass it on. Mankind has such a need for it as we see the corruption of our natures.
Loving through YHWH’s instructions/Word in restoration is a sure solution. This is the wonderful testimony of my helping to give support to a lovely, very receptive- to- YHWH family.
“What is good is what enhances the love of others and ourselves.” Amein!
The last paragraph is so well expressed! Tov meod, Skip :- )