Threads from Henry's Web

Tag: integrity

  • Psalm 119:160 – Truth

    Psalm 119:160 – Truth

    The source of your word is truth,
    and every one of your righteous judgments is eternal.

    It is said that we live in an age where truth is becoming less and less important.

    Personally, I disagree. I think truth has rarely been all that important in human society. From village gossip to the propaganda inscriptions of ancient rulers, words were made to serve the goals of those speaking them, with truth either secondary, or of no concern at all.

    What has happened in our modern society is that technology has made it much easier to spread lies. It is much easier to provide good evidence for falsehood as well.

    I am not an artists, but I wanted a picture of a tiger cat like my Mo (the Energion Spokescat!) taking off on a quadcopter to fly around the house. I fed a couple of sentences to Adobe Firefly and you can see what I got below.

    Cat on a Quadcopter!

    Now I see a number of things about this that indicate it’s not real, but I’m wonder what would happen if I posted this on social media and said that Mo had learned to ride on a quadcopter I’d bought him, and was now carrying out his mission of flinging all objects possible to the ground.

    There might even be people who would repost the picture and claim that they now knew cats could do this, and who wouldn’t care if the picture was generated by AI. This is why I always try to indicate when something I post was generated by AI.

    No, Mo does not ride any kind of flying device. That picture is absolutely artificial. But I have seen less plausible pictures immediately accepted as truth simply because they tended to back someone’s political or social views. When someone points out the problems with a picture or a post, I frequently see people respond what was posted was plausible and fit with the character of the person(s) described.

    No matter how many fact checkers we may line up, people will believe what they want to believe. But that isn’t the main problem. The main problem is that people become indifferent to the truth of any statement or the genuineness of any picture. They decide that doesn’t matter.

    I think it would be better if we had opinions on many less topics, and only took a position on something we had been able to study thoroughly enough to give a good foundation to our opinion on it.

    The Psalmist is here thankful that God’s Word, the foundation of all God’s creation, is founded in genuine reality, really real reality. When God judges it’s right.

    So we get the idea that when we get something from God’s word, it must be true. This is in turn morphed into the idea that if you found it in the Bible, it must be true. That’s obviously why we have hundreds of denominations with a variety of opinions on just what the Bible teaches.

    It’s not that we all have to be right. We’re human. We’re going to make mistakes. Lots of them. The point is that we need to be very careful what we claim is true and what we accept as true. That includes studying your Bible. Are you sure you’ve gotten precisely what that verse said? Perhaps you need to study some more.

    Or perhaps we should simply admit that we are expressing our opinion of what is true.

    Now don’t get the idea that opinions are unimportant. An opinion should be backed by the best evidence you can find. You should try to have accurate, true opinions. Just don’t be arrogant enough to believe you always do.

    A commitment to God’s Word means both a commitment to serious study, and also a realization-an accurate realization!-that we are not perfect.

    Seek truth. Admit fallibility.

    (The featured image, also a cat on a quadcopter, was generated by Jetpack AI. Different take!)

  • Psalm 119:87 – Almost Finished

    Psalm 119:87 – Almost Finished

    They almost finished my time on earth,
    but I did not abandon your precepts.

    Mitchell Dahood again provides a good translation:

    They nearly exterminated me from the earth,
    but I did not forsake your precepts.

    Mitchell Dahood, Psalms 100-150, Anchor Bible, p. 166

    Dahood continues on page 183 with a discussion of the text, dealing the final phrase “in the earth” or “from the earth.” For some time there was a suggested emendation (textual correction not reflected in any manuscript reading) change “in” to “from.” That emendation then received support from a Dead Sea Scrolls fragment, but Dahood maintains that there is good linguistic evidence for translating the Hebrew prefix for “in” as “from” in many cases.

    There! A dose of language study, however superficially written and documented!

    The claim that one is doing right while bad things are happening is not a rare one in scripture. It is, in fact, the big issue in Job. While Samuel-Kings repeats a refrain about evil bringing bad results and good behavior bringing good results, Job discusses the contrary situation: Job is declared righteous in the text by God, yet he suffers. Job’s friends thought he was obstinate and arrogant for maintaining his innocence. God doesn’t challenge Job’s innocence, but rather simply challenges Job with presence and power.

    One of the problems of living together with other people is that our suffering, if attributed to human action, is not always attributed to our own action. Bad actors make many people suffer, irrespective of their behavior.

    When faced with a bad situation, it’s not the time to be forgetting good actions. If I’m walking along a mountain trail and find myself in danger because someone else has damaged the safety rail, or damaged the trail itself, it’s not the time to forget rules of safety. In fact, I need to be more carefully because someone else was either less careful or actively destructive.

    “Everybody else was after me and almost got me, but I stuck to your rules.” It’s a good loose interpretation of our verse today, but it’s generally good practice as well.

    When I was younger, I would try the excuse that all the other kids were doing something. It didn’t go far with my parents. But in society as a whole I see this as a justification for bad behavior all the time. The other folks are doing it, so why not me? Or perhaps the other folks are doing it, so I have to do it or I’ll lose.

    Rather than seeing this as some kind of boast, perhaps we ought to see it as an example for ourselves. When other people do it wrong, we should stay on the right track, right to the end. I suspect no good is accomplished by ignoring God’s principles and rules, no matter how many other people we see doing it.

    Reflect: Can you say that you haven’t taken up the approach of the other guys?

    (Featured image generated by Jetpack AI.)

  • Psalm 119:75 – Humiliated

    Psalm 119:75 – Humiliated

    I know, LORD that your judgments are righteous.
    It’s in truthfulness you have humiliated me.

    If I were making a translation for publication, there would be a footnote on “truthfulness” that would include “faithfulness,” “honesty,” and “trustworthiness” as a minimum. It’s important not to imagine that a Hebrew word brings all of its applications into each use. The Amplified Bible does this by giving many synonyms in a single verse.

    But in poetry, we can see a less limited way of reading, because the text is intended to be brief and to evoke a range of related ideas.

    I’m leaving “righteous judgments” for another day. But righteous judgments are also truthful judgments. In much of what I’ve read of court cases, I get the feeling that the judgments rendered by human judges are often constrained by current custom, and less so by written law or by principles of justice. I would say that the idea of divine justice involves an expectation of total truthfulness and faithfulness as well as adherence to statutes of law. This is an unreachable goal for humans, I think, though it is a good goal for which to strive.

    I couldn’t think of an efficient way to say it, but the final words of this verse suggest that we are brought humiliation by truthfulness/faithfulness. One might say “integrity.” God simply brings truth to bear on our actions, and it’s humiliating.

    It’s in our human nature to get upset at this. We don’t want to be humiliated. But how often does reality do that to us? We think we’re great, and then reality strikes and something goes wrong. We announce that we can handle a situation, make a repair, or pass a test. Then reality comes to get us.

    Most spiritual things have everyday analogies. Spiritually, we decide to do things a certain way, accomplish certain goals, spent certain amounts of time in prayer or service, keep our motivations pure, avoid unjust anger. And then we get busy and we don’t get that time in prayer, we don’t read out Bible as we planned, and we find we have less time and resources to serve others as we had determined.

    I can give an example from this series. On the one hand, I’m happy to be 75 verses (and days) into a 176 verse plan. But I can’t count the number of times I’ve actually forgotten which verse I was working on during the day. I’ve sat back, intending to bring the verse to mind, and I can’t remember it. I’m supposed to be meditating on it. That’s a minor failure, but it’s still a failure, and it annoys me that I do it.

    I wish I could say that my faults are generally small, like forgetting a verse. I can always look it up again. But when I speak hurtful words in anger, for example, the problem is not so easy to repair.

    So what shall I do? To echo Paul, “Who will rescue me?”

    Well, actually, the same God who provides the truth that puts me in my place over and over. The same God the psalmist has been praising for these 75 verses and will continue to praise for another 101. This help comes in three ways:

    1. This God claims me as his own and allows me to call him mine. See Psalm 119:57 – Still Mine!
    2. I can learn to know my own limitations. It may be humiliating to come up against the truth, but if I’m not arrogant, it’s not going to hurt as much!
    3. The same God also provided this law, this distant goal, that helps keep me pointed in the right direction.

    Coming up against the real standard is good for us in all these ways. We tend to want to pretend that the standard is lower so we can feel better. We’d like God to protect us from the results of our own stupidity and failures. But those options results in a lack of growth. God wants to grow you up. To take the next step. And the next.

    What next step does God want you to take today?

    (Featured image generated by Jetpack AI.)

    Some books:

    Holiness of Heart and Life
    Walking Together

  • Shifting Theology

    Last week I was talking about doctrinal distinctives, and today Scot McKnight has a post very close to that topic. He’s more specific, talking about pastors who shift theology. I think he would have done better to illustrate this post with something other than pastors who have become secret atheists, though I know such things happen.

    The interesting question I would have is just how much can a pastor shift, and on what issues. From there I’d be wondering how much a leader can shift, for example, a Sunday School teacher. Finally, where might the standard be for members?

    Having grown up in the Seventh-day Adventist Church, where I had to affirm a large number of doctrines before baptism, I have experienced the very tight option. After I had left the SDA church, I received a call from someone who wanted to complain about my parents’ positions. They were debating about very minor points and were completely shocked when I pointed out that I didn’t accept either of the positions they were comparing. (The topic was the SDA doctrine of the investigative judgment, which I reject.) To me the issues they raised, and which were critical to them, sounded silly.

    In an earlier, Unity, Diversity, and Confusion, I argue that it’s important to have some essential doctrines, but it’s also important both to know what they are and to keep them limited to actual essentials. A church denomination (as opposed to belonging to the universal church), has limited impact, in my opinion. If one finds that one is drifting from the essentials, as understood by that organization, one should cross the street openly and honestly.

    Let’s say that a local congregation regards tithing as essential. I think it is just as much a lack of integrity to pastor or lead that church if you don’t accept that essential from their point of view, as it would be to pastor a church after you have lost your faith. (I use this example, because I do not believe tithing applies to Christians.) I would make an exception for those cases in which the congregation is aware of the difference, but accepts the leader in spite of it. In that case, however, I would question whether that doctrine was truly an essential in that particular congregation.

    In addition, what precisely is essential? That is not an easy decision either. Are your differences actually on doctrines that are essential? Most congregations have more stated doctrines than are actually essential. Perhaps your shift is one on which you should teach and preach.

    I always like to add a caveat here. I’m a publisher, not a pastor. I work for myself. I teach Sunday School, but I’m not on the church board. Thus I speak from the cheap seats. A pastor who has committed his or her life to a calling and to a particular church group has a  much more difficult decision to make than I will experience.