by Kenneth F. Sheets
Humans and Their Relationship to One Another
Humans interact with one another according to their perception of what is “acceptable.” Societal norms and other external authorities may influence this perception, but the ultimate deciding factor is their own individual thinking in the matter. Individuals may know well how they should relate to others, and they may even desire to interact in an acceptable manner, but, in the midst of any given situation, humans tend to apply at that moment those characteristics of their personality which are the most basic, foundational, aspects of who they are. The criteria that govern proper behavior, as determined by others, are subordinated to each individual’s own personal criteria, criteria which he or she has “learned” by experience and perception to be effective in similar situations and conditions. This sort of “personalized determination” of proper behavior and interaction creates, however, an unpredictable and potentially destructive situation in every relationship between humans: each individual is the authority deciding what is right and acceptable regardless of what any other seeming authority thinks is right and acceptable.
Though each individual thinks himself capable of navigating through life with such a perspective of his authority, the experience of humanity from its earliest days to its latest is replete with an essentially continuous series of human interpersonal conflicts and destructions, even prolonged wars, which have resulted from the selfish determinations of individuals who sought only to impose their own authority in a matter. Indeed, however, if humans are merely a present state of a process wherein they are evolving from one state of being to another, then no standard of absolute rightness or acceptability exists, and each human is right in applying his own perception to the situations and conditions of life. Even when a composite of humans has formed a society, with its delineated norms and laws of behavior, the individual still possesses the “right” to conduct himself in a contradictory fashion, as long as he is willing to bear whatever “society” deems appropriate for his contradictory behavior.
“Proper behavior” becomes whatever is acceptable to those involved with what is happening. At these times, each individual who is involved applies his or her own set of criteria for determining whether or not some “personal behavior” is good or bad, and this evaluation is influenced not only by each person’s thinking in regard to the matter at hand, but also his or her “feelings,” “emotions,” about the matter. Regardless of who the evaluator is, the criteria governing the evaluation are rooted in the view of human life and the origin of life as well. If humans evolved, then all the various perspectives that govern human interactions evolved as well, and are thus rooted in the development of man’s “humanness.” An “evolved” human would then be a composite of experiences, and thoughts about those experiences, and his resulting perspectives would all be influenced by the degree to which he has retained the knowledge gained by experience in his conscious or subconscious thought. Some humans would have retained more of the primal side, the “natural feelings,” of human experience, allowing their interpersonal relationships to be governed by that primal nature, while others would have replaced those same primal urges and developed their ability to reason through matters, to understand at a level far above that of the primal. Life for those controlled by “feelings” would then reflect little more than moment by moment consideration of their existence, and life would seem to go from one unpredicted situation to the next. These people would always seem to be “caught by surprise,” seldom ever looking ahead far enough to prepare and protect themselves from undesirable happenings; their life would largely be governed by “whatever happens next.”
The Circumstances of Life Can Make God and His Design Appear Unworthy of Trust
The God Who Exists, the God who brought into existence all that exists, designed life to be a system of constantly changing circumstances. No condition in the creation is ever truly static and unchanging, because, though humans may not be able to perceive the nature and degree of change, at the very least, time is moving from one moment to another. Every human, then, exists in a creation that confronts him with constantly changing situations of life, and each must interact with the circumstance of one moment only to find that the circumstance has changed in the next moment. Every human is, however, a part of the Creator’s system, and, as an aspect of that system, the Creator built into man the ability to interact successfully with every circumstance that could, and would, arise.
Despite God’s provision of this ability, human experience seems to indicate that it is insufficient as the situations and circumstances of life become so intertwined that they appear complex beyond any human ability to resolve them. Far too often, when situations appear to be bleak beyond any foreseeable or reasonable resolution, the individuals involved “take the easy way out,” that is, they engage in some form of suicide, whether physical, mental, or social in nature, because they can perceive no other way to remove themselves from what they regard as an “unbearable condition.” At such times, God seems, at best, to be “remote” and “unrelated” to what is happening, and the situation appears to be beyond even His ability to resolve it. For the individuals involved, God is no help, and they no longer have any hope of “better days”; they are left alone to “figure out for themselves” the course of resolution. In their clouded reasoning, they conclude that “if this is the way God designed the world to work, then something is wrong with His thinking or His design,” and, obviously, neither He nor His design can be trusted.
God’s Design Included Criteria for Resolution of Any Circumstance
Human perception, however, is not the measure of God or His design. With man, and indeed the entirety of creation, existing within His Being, the Creator foresaw all that would occur in human history, and He never, at any moment, left His human creature lacking in any ability to successfully fulfill every aspect of His design. His design included criteria for proper interaction and resolution of even the most complex situation possible in human existence when those involved would truly seek to Him and the criteria of His design as the Creator intended. This was the design of the Creator’s original system, but the entire process became complicated by the first man’s decision to exercise his own authority over that of God. When Adam, the one possessing primary delegated authority over the creation, chose to usurp to himself a level of authority never delegated to him, the Creator did not change His design. That design already included a series of perfect, predetermined conditions to come into effect, not the least of which was the alienation sensed by Adam immediately upon violating his Creator’s design. The conditions were new only to the humans, but they had always existed as aspects of God’s perfect original design, and thus, though the man’s violation made the conditions of life far more difficult, the criteria for success remained the same. Humans were to apply the criteria as the Creator originally intended, and they would experience success as they did so. Humans were never to act as if they possessed the authority to determine which criteria and how they were to be applied. They were to seek, to apply, and to trust, regardless of what they could perceive or the influences prompting them to reject God’s way.
“Urgency” in Life Situations Often Precludes a Seeking of God’s Design Criteria
The situations of life often require that those involved act immediately, or with some urgency, to deal with what is happening in some way to help correct or improve the situation. Thus, humans often develop the very dangerous and destructive thinking that the urgency they experience in life situations dictates that, because it is easier to “go with the flow,” then it is a useless waste of time to try to discern a right course of action all the time. In fact, it often seems impossible to “figure out” what should be done, what is right, in a given situation, and if one cannot determine what is right, then it is a waste of time to try to do it. Man would need to know the criteria of right before he can even attempt to apply them, and as fast as circumstances change, the task appears hopeless. The situation is something like driving fast along a highway and seeing something of interest immediately ahead. Before the driver can direct the attention of others in the car to that sight, the car has already passed it, and a whole new set of sights has replaced the one he had wished them to see.
God foreknew all the complexities man would encounter, complexities to which man would not properly react if he was left to learn only after he encountered the situation. Humans needed to know in advance not only the criteria to be applied in a given circumstance but also how to correlate and prioritize those criteria to one another and the conditions they faced. Thus, the Creator revealed to man His criteria for human existence. Never was a human left without sufficient perception of the Creator’s design to enable him to evaluate and correlate all the information available to him to make wise decisions. Because the LORD, the Creator, is the only definer of wisdom, wise decisions and actions are, quite simply, His design for human life, and therefore, they define His will for life at any and every moment in time.
Certainly, because of the expansive and comprehensive nature of His design criteria, multiple points of His design are incumbent on every moment, every situation, of life, but those criteria are themselves wisdom. The criteria are not different from wisdom; they are wisdom; they are the wisdom, the will, the design, of the Creator and cannot be distinguished from His Person, and He has given them that man may properly utilize them, according to the priority He has established for each point, at every moment in time and in every situation of life. Some criteria exist which are absolutes that always outweigh every other criterion, but below that level, God has provided man with complete sufficiency to “rightly divide the word of truth” and properly correlate the priorities for himself. Stated differently, God has revealed the criteria of His way and, in so doing, He has provided all that any and all men need to reach conclusions and make decisions that are right in His sight. Having made this information not only available but prominent to man, He holds man accountable for using that revelation properly and making those right choices.
This does not make for multiple “right” courses of action. Indeed, only one exists which is right in His sight, though many others exist which appear “right” in the human perspective, but as He has said, every man is “drawn away and enticed” by his own desires in every matter he faces. Accordingly, every man “has a will in every matter,” and that makes for a plethora of human wills, but their correspondence to the will of God, to His design in the matter, is only as valid as their correlation to all the various points of that which the Creator has revealed.
Every man’s understanding in the realm of God’s knowledge is partial at best, and thus, man’s decisions, his choices in life, tend to be of the same quality as his pursuit of knowing and understanding God and His design. Individuals who know God in salvation, but do not pursue knowing Him and understanding Him as He has revealed Himself, can and often do make “good” decisions when the primary criteria incumbent upon a situation seem to be few and simple. However, when those primary criteria are many in number with highly complex interrelationships, the same saved individual may be at a total loss in discerning that which is truly “good,” that is, the limited nature of his or her understanding of God and God’s design renders that person lacking in ability to perceive that which is right, or “best,” in the sight of God. This is why God designed His assemblies of believers to be overseen by mature spiritual individuals, not just “older people in the church who have been active Christians for years” or those who are “busy doing in the church all the things other people think they should do,” but by those whose lives openly manifest their search to “know and understand Him” by the revelation He has provided. Those who lead are not to be those who were “taught how to lead,” but those whose lives demonstrate a continuing, never-ending desire to grow in the knowledge of God.
This is the essence of the teaching that many things may be considered “good” for us, but they are not “best,” because “best” is that which the LORD God would have man to do in every increment of time. Far too many believers who call themselves “Christians” never learn to do that which is “best” in His sight; they are too busy doing, and being satisfied with, that which is “good” in their own sight. In reality, then, such individuals are not seeking God’s will, they are seeking their own will and trying to make that appear to be His will. In most believers, this practice continues to degenerate from doing “good” to doing “good enough,” or stated differently, the “Christian life” has degenerated to doing that which is “good enough,” because the believer wants to do something and wants to appear justified in doing it, so as to not jeopardize his or her “testimony.”
The Creator has a will in every matter man encounters. The problem is that man also has a will in every matter, and the two are not identical.
“Open doors” cannot be trusted; “unexpected provision” cannot be trusted; many an “open door” or “unexpected provision” has led to willful rebellion and destruction.
Circumstances cannot be trusted; most are generated by people who know very little, if anything, of God and His will.
The ideas and perceptions of “counselors” are valuable only if those counselors are truly, completely seeking to know and understand Him and His design criteria for life.
Those who have been reconciled to Him by the blood of His Son are sons and daughters, but sons and daughters make many, many unwise decisions. One must seek to evaluate the criteria of a situation according to righteousness, that is, according to God’s revealed design, and then do that which conforms to His design.
Life is full of opportunities, and an individual may possess the ability to act in a great number of them, but opportunity and ability are not the determining factors in regard to the will of God. The determinant is whether or not God has delegated to the individual facing the opportunity the authority to choose whether or not to enter into that opportunity. The Creator has indeed delegated to man the authority to make choices, but He also holds man accountable for making those choices within the criteria He has established for all that exists. Life is full of opportunities, and no one person can fill every one that presents itself. Every believer must determine that which is God’s design for him or her personally, that which the LORD would have him or her do in order to fulfill not the “needs” that men think to perceive, but the design that the Creator has established, a design that has stood and will stand forever.