Living from the perspective of God
Well, here I am finally making my first posting on this blog. Brian invited me to start posting a couple months back and I kept putting it off because of my self-induced extreme busyness. But making one post a month isn't such a hard thing to do after all, so here goes:
I have been reading through the books of Samuel and Kings recently and the one striking thing that I kept noticing over and over again was the fact that the author (or authors?) of these books made a moral statement about each one of the judges and kings, stating something to the extent of "and such-and-such a king did what was evil in the eys of the Lord" (or "did what was evil from God's perspective" in my Complete Jewish Bible). And while I was reading through them, I kept ignoring these repetitive statements. But when I finally got to the end of these books, I went back and reconsidered my original inattention. These small and repetitive statements hide a great truth within them.
It's easy to say that someone is doing something wrong, immoral or evil, but ultimately - and that is the main insight of post-modernism - any value judgement we make will be our own and will not necessarily be something with which others would agree. We all have our own perspectives and worldviews on life, but ultimately the only perspective and the only view that we will be judged against, will be that of God. Perhaps it is time that we follow the author of Kings in adding "in the eyes of God" whenever we make a moral judgement or a statement about anyone or anything. Striving to do that will motivate us to learn what it means to live from the perspective of God, as well as to judge form His perspective. It is one thing to live well, to do good and to be righteous. And it is an entirely another thing to to live well from God's perspective, to do what is good in God's perspective and to be righteous in the eyes of God.
There is also another striking pattern I have noticed in the both books of Kings. There are very tangible rewards associated with doing what is right in the eyes of God. The kings who were righteous on average had much longer terms during over which they ruled over Israel. One evil king ruled only for a couple of days and some achieved even twenty years, but the average is quite small compared with the righteous kings who ruled anywhere from 7-50 years. Now I haven't done a close study or mathematical calculations on those numbers, but I would venture a prediction that if we were to plot a graph of the length of terms of Israel's and Judah's kings, there would be a very high correlation between the king's righteousness in the eyes of God and the length of his rule. Which only goes to illustrate the old biblical truth that "blessings are in the right hand of God and he gives them to those who please him." Let us live from the perspective of God and let us be righteous in the eyes of God. (Of course our righteous status before God comes from Christ's sacrifice for us, but that is a topic for another post.) An unexamined life is not worth living, if it is not examined from the perspective of God. That is the key to not only understanding our very own selves, but also understanding how the whole world works and living our lives the way we were meant to live them.
Let us live from the perspective of God!
Aleks Kalashnik