God answers all questions
…not just the big ones, but the most important kind, the small ones…
The most important questions are very simple, not complicated, but also are the easiest to ignore. What is good? What should I do? How do I affect people? Does my behavior matter, or just my beliefs? These are fairly simple as long as they’re not bogged down in rationalization. “Good” is just that which results in the well-being of others. It is when we displace well-being from it’s original meaning, being under God’s care, that makes it a harder question. There is, in fact, no well-being outside of God’s provision. Yes, your behavior matters because it directly affects the well-being of others. Bad behavior takes others out of God’s care, and good behavior puts them under it. All of the most important answers are found in this simple understanding of God’s will, but the practice of adding confusing qualifications to them, aside from falling into the category of bad behavior itself, is really the definition of disbelief in the truth.
If the argument becomes, “What do we owe God?” or even, “Where is God at all?” then all truth plummets down into the chaos of our own personal will, which will frequently be in conflict with the wills of others. Then, all that is left is to consume one another with bad behavior, because there is no more good to be found, except that we’ve convinced ourselves of it. For example, taking a purse is now a good thing because I can then use the money I stole to make myself happy. Even mutually consensual acts become lost in confusion, leading to veritably any act being called good, and only for the perceived benefit it seems to deliver. Unless all benefit is defined as acts that bring us closer to God, anything can be called benefit, no matter how cruel and illogical.
This is because all benefit remains one-sided, even where there is a perceived exchange of benefit. This is because the value set on it is based on arbitrary perception of gain, rather than any true standard for the definition of the word benefit. If there is no perfect law handed down by a perfect God , then no good exists. But, if there’s is a perfect law handed down to us by a perfect God, true benefit is very simply defined as that which follows this law. You have to rule out God, truth, good, and benefit altogether, or else you must hope that there is a good, true God of all benefits. To take even the hope of him away from someone, then, is the ultimate cruelty. Who can say that I must not believe in God, goodness and truth, but then also say they’ve not taken away my hope?
Hope, then, is of the highest sanctity, and this is born out in all forms of loss. We hope for the best in those closest to us, and then we lose hope when they fall into destructive behavior. As well, we ourselves fall into destructive behavior only after we’ve lost hope in the good that could save us. Hope is always the savior of the suffering. Without it, a person then becomes a slave only to their desires. We then either serve our desires instead of others’ well-being, or we abandon hope of fulfilling even our own selfish desires, having forgotten what truly is good. Hopelessness is the result of disbelief in goodness and truth, and hence disbelief in God, and hopelessness is also the cause of all forms of addiction. You cannot hope in anything different than the benefits of God, and then also avoid being led wholly into unfulfillment and disappointment.
Fulfillment is only a result of serving the law of God. Anything else is simply serving made-up laws, and these can only (falsely) benefit one’s self-serving desires to the detriment of someone else’s. Living in the fantasy of thinking all gains being defined in materialistic terms, then, is the truest definition of hopelessness. If all that you ever hope to have is pleasure from using things and people, and you perceive all gain as making yourself happy in fulfilling one of your desires, you are by definition bankrupt of hope. This kind of hope is empty in the truest sense, because it can never find fulfillment in the gain of others because it discounts the value of their well-being, of their worth beyond thing to be used, entirely. It can only find fulfillment in others’ loss.
Materialistic exchange is a necessary component for life, but it is not a basis for defining value. There is in fact no basis for defining value without a perfect lawgiver. I used to have trouble with this concept, as it assumes that I myself cannot divine a perfect law. It’s seems a little too convenient for a good God to declare what is right or wrong without a basis in rational thought, especially that which I feel that I can generate on my own without a shot calling, all-knowing referee to correct me when I’m “wrong.” But, there is a law that does govern all others, aside from any misgiving I might have that the name of this law is “God.”
That law is the choice we all have, and the choice God had, to make our only desire, our only acts, intentionally to raise the well-being of others. God set all other laws in place when he made that one choice, once and for all. This choice was that he’d share all that he has with us. If he had chosen not to, there would be no us, no good, no truth, only God hoarding all he has to himself for eternity. You can easily see why the answer to the simple question “what is good?” can be answered “God” if his choice is why we’re here at all. If we’re here, contrarily, because the whim of fate allowed for all that is chaos and hopelessness to then somehow generate beings of hope, faith, love, goodness, and truth, so much that without these they despair and die, and plunge others into despair and death with them, then the same law still stands — Serving others is better than serving yourself. — But, then it stands in contradiction to its own origin.
It seems like the most complicated answers come from that chaos, the belief that we can formulate meaning from the gifts we’ve been given for free from a useless universe. However, it’s not simplicity that makes these answers important. It’s to where you believe these questions point. Do they point to your ability or necessity to bring forth your own judgements about how to treat others? Or, do they in fact point to the possibility, no matter how slight, that goodness, hope, and truth have a name? One of these prospects entails a responsibility far outpacing this author’s faith in my ability. The other asks for my consideration of one basic but inescapable question. Does the truth have a name, or not?
If there is no truth, and there is no intellect beyond my own, then, yes, it’s my responsibility to decide even the value of the lives I touch, or of life at all, negating any hope for true meaning. But, if there’s anything implied by our acute awareness that we can be good, we can have hope, then shutting out the question seems to fly in the face of all truth, manufactured or otherwise. So, to consider why the simple answer to truth might be, yes, he’s a person, and why this is the only way to preserve hope, this should be an easy question to answer. The reasons that it might not be should be obvious. The complications we add when we appropriate the responsibility that only a good, benevolent God of truth can fulfill are evidence enough, especially considering that this very act implies that it requires a person, not a blind and dumb cosmos of chaos, to make those benevolent choices.
The simplest questions are the most important ones. Where are my actions, my beliefs, leading my friends, my children, even my enemies, to the truth or to destruction? Telling someone they should abandon hope seems like a selfish choice, at the very least. Even the act of believing it, that there is no hope, should give anyone pause, evidenced by where that kind of thinking inevitably leads. If good can come from living a good life, and exchanging materialistic pleasures with others for mutual benefit, then there is no other end to such a world except that which has nothing else to hope for but a humanity that learns, someday, the best way to feed off of itself sustainably. If, however, the question is simple, and the answer is simple, that we’re not alone, and that there’s a right way and a wrong way to live, then our hope is indeed best placed in a God that chose us, that made us, and wants only the best for us.
I’m writing to inspire thought about God, his Son, Jesus Christ, and His Holy Spirit. If you can support my quest join me here on Medium, https://jusayin-topix.medium.com/membership
