The Fall

How then can mankind be righteous with God?  Or how can anyone who is born of woman be pure?  If even the moon has no brightness and the stars are not pure in His sight,  Job 25:4-5 NASB

Righteous – Perhaps Moses was delusional.  Or maybe just egotistical.  He certainly seems to have been affected by some mental mistake when he said, “For this commandment which I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you, nor is it far away” (Deuteronomy 30:11 NASB).  Even Job can’t imagine that any man or woman can measure up to the standard of righteousness.  Most people I know concur.  What do we say?  Oh, yes: No one is perfect.  That’s the problem.  No one is perfect.  No one has kept all the Torah.  Everyone falls.  Job gives us a celestial portrait of our condition.  Even the moon and the stars don’t live up to the pure light of the divine standard.  How can anyone, including God, expect that we can?

These verses in Job provide Lohmeyer with ammunition for a critical point about the familiar verse, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”  He correctly notes that this is quite impossible—now.  The request is thoroughly eschatological.  It can only happen when God intervenes in the world and makes it conform to His will.  This petition is “based on the discrepancy which marks the suffering and corruption of this world and at the same time the miracle of eschatological consummation.”[1]  Job’s question is the right one.  Something is deeply flawed about this world.  So flawed that it isn’t even possible to imagine that any man or woman can stand before God and claim perfect righteousness.  Paul summarized: “For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.”  It doesn’t matter if you don’t believe in a god.  By anyone’s standard, you’ve still made moral mistakes.  You’re less than perfect.  You might have developed exquisite ways to excuse this situation, but that doesn’t make it go away.  The question is not “by what standard.”  The question is what can you do about it.  And the answer is–nothing!  What’s done is done and there’s no undoing it.  That’s why Job’s question leads to the third petition of the Lord’s prayer.  Only God can do something about this.  Men can justify, rationalize, excuse, or defend their actions, but the actions are still “water under the bridge,” and whatever damage they did is permanently etched in human history, both communal and personal.  Until God brings heaven to earth, we’re fallen creatures.

Of course, God knows that.  He probably anticipated that such a thing could happen.  And so, until He acts to bring an eschatological end to this world of blood and tears, we’ll have to find some other solution besides perfection.  Some Christian doctrinal views consider the Fall as the reality of humanity.  They suggest that the first mistake plunged us all into irreparable rot, not just morally but cognitively.  Fallen men can’t even think correctly.  Therefore, until the Spirit lifts us out of the morass of fallen existence, we just spiral downward toward punishment.  And since God is the only One who can change our bent nature, any uplifting we experience is not because we made the right choices but because God empowered some to be saved, an act of divine selection.

Other views take the Fall seriously enough but opt for the corrective measure of choice.  Yes, we’re a mess, but given that we can choose, we are able to correct our thinking and our behavior and seek righteousness.  We are in desperate need of forgiveness for those “under the bridge” acts, but they are “under the bridge” and what’s gone under the bridge doesn’t have to be what’s upstream.  We can change—not easily, not without tears, but nevertheless possible.  Just ask the “higher power” crowd.

And finally, there’s Job.  He knew God forgives.  He also knew he didn’t need forgiveness (yet).  But his experience told him that no one gets by on his own merit.  That’s pretty much the Jewish view.  No one gets by on his own merit.  There is a place for merit.  That’s why Moses matters.  But Moses isn’t the end of the story.  Yom Kippur, and all that it implies, is the end of the story.  Exodus 34:6 is the end of the story.  Job is right.  The light has faded.  But it hasn’t gone out.  We might be dust and ashes, but we are divinely created dust and ashes.  And He looks after what He makes while we wait for heaven to show up.

Topical Index: Fall, righteousness,  choice, Yom Kippur, forgiveness, heaven, Job 25:4-5

[1] Ernst Lohmeyer, Our Father: An Introduction to the Lord’s Prayer (Harper & Row, 1965), pp. 122-123.