Psalm 119:137 – Right

You are righteous, Oh LORD,
and your judgments are correct.

Have you ever noticed all the things we say about God that might sound like value judgments?

Everything from God is love or God is good to God is just or God is righteous. Just how did we make that determination and is it ours to make? Come to think of it, what would we do about it if we happened to be wrong? If we quit worshiping or praising God, speaking of all these wonderful attributes, God would still be God and would still do precisely what God wants. Who could stop God?

Of course we don’t mean that we have evaluated God and decided that God passes all the God-tests. We really don’t! But at the same time, we’re right ready to complain if God doesn’t pass some of the God tests. In our superior opinion, of course.

So is there anything worthwhile going on here or are we just repeating stuff because other people have repeated it for how long we don’t know?

I’d suggest that these kinds of affirmations do serve a very real purpose. They help us remember that we are going somewhere, that there are options for things to be better, and that we do actually matter. If God is good, then there is goodness at the other end of our activities, our lives, and even our universe. It’s not all just a jumbled mess.

In fact, I have known people who don’t believe in God to make similar affirmations about the world we live in. Like various religious believers, they make these affirmations with various levels of assurance. Sometimes it’s a faint hope that things can get better. At other times it’s a determination.

Over may years I’ve seen this note after various national elections. I always say that God is in control. As affirmed in Daniel 4, God rules in the kingdoms of men. Sometimes God sets over them the basest of men. In the dialect of English I used there, “basest” is not a compliment.

Inevitably someone then asks me why I bother to vote if I think God rules it all. I think that gets it absolutely backwards. Because God rules, I believe there is a good goal to work toward. Because God rules, I feel I owe the situation the best that I can do. With Dr. Martin Luther King I affirm that ?the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I immediately want to bend it faster!

We really have our own choice of hope or despair, and it is a choice. If we choose despair, it will follow us all our days. If we choose hope, we will pursue that all our days.

Will you choose hope, and righteousness, today?

(Featured image generated by Adobe Express, which uses Adobe Firefly based on a prompt produced in a discussion with Gemini AI.)