The Measure and the Reward

And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone. Luke 18:19 ESV

The statement above was not an admission of sin or unrighteousness on Jesus' part, but rather a declaration that our very sense of goodness--right and wrong, if you will--comes from God. It is the holiness of God--His absolute purity, transcendent of human capacity--that is the measuring stick for goodness.

This is where systems of morality unconnected to God inevitably fail, for they all use man as the measure and the reward for their function.

Try as you might to pick a living man or woman as your metric of morality, you are sure to be disappointed. At some point he or she will fall short of your "real" measurement which, perhaps against your best conscious efforts, resides within you somewhere beyond the reach of your reason and maybe even your consciousness; it is that inexplainable "ideal" man or woman which attests to the right or wrong of an action or attitude. The irony, of course, is that this ideal is not a man or woman at all--it is God.

In my years as a fabricator, and now as a draftsman, I've dealt with tolerances--the allowable deviation from the standard. But this very concept presupposes that standard of perfection. If the standard itself varies then even tolerances become meaningless. This is the fatal flaw in using man as the measure of morality.

Man as the reward fails as well. The appeal to behave a certain way for the good of society, or as a type of solidarity with your fellow man, or even to make your own life a little easier in avoiding conflict, always seems to smash against the wall of ego. We inevitably think something like, that's fine and well for my fellow man, but what about me?

Reinhold Niebuhr in Moral Man and Immoral Society wrote the following:

Pure religious idealism does not concern itself with the social problem. It does not give itself the illusion that material and mundane advantages can be gained by the refusal to assert your claims to them...Jesus did not counsel his disciples to forgive seventy times seven in order that they might convert their enemies, or make them more favorably disposed. He counseled it as an effort to approximate complete moral perfection, the perfection of God. He did not ask his followers to go the second mile in the hope that those who had impressed them into service would relent and give them freedom. He did not say that the enemy ought to be loved so that he would cease to be an enemy. He did not dwell upon the consequences of these moral actions, because he viewed them from an inner transcendent perspective.

Perhaps it was this inescapable sense that nothing in our physical reality quite "measures up" that led Plato to formulate his philosophy of the ideal, but that is the paradox of our existence; that we are perpetually disappointed yet inspired to better things. Our inability to realize Jesus' injunction, Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect, (Matthew 5:48) is both the necessity for Jesus' redemption, and the promise that God's ultimate plan will, at last, make that perfection a reality.

It is God's perfect nature that is the measure of our morality. And it is our relationship with God that is, ultimately, our reward.

"If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him." John 14:23 ESV