Psalms 1-2
April 12, 2010
Psalm 1: Another look.
Walking on the way is a familiar metaphor in Scripture. It pictures the pursuit of the moral life as marked by God. People of faith (all kinds of faiths) have known that more than human wisdom is needed to negotiate a life well lived, a good life. This brings up the question of whether we can be good without God, the question of the ages. If I were to answer this question honestly and personally (from personal experience), I would say: “I know that I can be somewhat good. But I cannot be the best I can be in goodness without God.” And he who settles for some goodness by self-will when all the goodness he can be with God is at his disposal is a rank fool.
Yes, belief in God does not exempt the saint from doing foolish or immoral things. And there’s plenty of atheists who live lives worthy of saints. Question them, however, and they’ll admit that they are at a loss to explain their own moral lives coherently to your or their own satisfaction. They cannot adequately answer “Why should we be good?” The moral life has no obvious authority. Reason alone cannot justify it. The desperate need for it in society, and in human nature, are not sufficient to explain why we should be good. Only God’s will and God’s call can make perfect sense of the inherent necessity of being good.
God not only answers the question of why we need to be good but the ultimate answer to how we can be good. We have tried, all of us to walk, stand, and sit not with the bad of the world. Not one has ever succeeded (except the One in whom there is no guile or sin). No matter whether we have the genius of Ben Franklin, the moral vision of Martin Luther King Jr. or the dogged perseverance to alleviate poverty of Mother Theresa. Our strategies for tooting our own goodness trumpets sound like clanging cymbals. Lowering the bar of goodness is a bankrupt way of doing goodness. The demand is sky high, the will and the natural capacity worm low.
In Why Bother Being Good? The Place of God in the Moral Life, John Hare articulates what we need. “We need moral faith… the faith that it is possible for us to be morally good in our hearts and the faith that the world outside us makes moral sense… We have to believe that our capacities have been transformed inside [ourselves]… and that “the world outside is the kind of place in which happiness is reliably connected with a morally good life.” (cited by Miroslav Volf in Against the Tide: Love in a time of petty dreams and peersiting enmities.
As moral people, who are imaged as walking in that blessed-is-the-man-tableau, which the psalmist paints for us in Psalm 1, we, who are moral people bent on a goodness that is not our own but gifted to us by God, are convinced that we need not do what is morally reprehensible in order to be happy. Unless we are persuaded by this, as the Psalmist of Psalm one evidently is, we cannot satisfy the demands of morality. We will think otherwise and cease to try to be moral if we believe “that we will be miserable when we do.”
The moral faith necessary for leading moral lives (why should we be good?) demands faith in God. He alone is able to “transform hearts and providentially lead the world in such a way that (in the end) virtue will unite with happiness.” Believers and non-believers alike may not realize that God is at work in the heart and in the world to marry virtue and blessedness. God ordained and performed the ceremony of that marriage. Ultimately on a cross.
To truly live abundantly (to walk, stand, and sit in attachment to a Righteous God), is to walk on the way that God marked, with God, before God, and for God.
Prayer: Dear God, I know deep within that my moral goodness can only come from you. Even the moral faith that I need to do the right things in life and believe I can be pleasing in your sight is a gift from you hand. I, in my own power and might, try as I may, have no natural capacity to be good. The good I know to do, I do not, I cannot do. Thanks be to God, who in Christ Jesus, my Lord, charted the way of goodness for me, and has given me the Spirit of God to convince me that I should be good and enabled me to be good. Help me even more today to remain convinced that virtue for me, as it is for all your people then and now, is necessarily tied to blessedness. Blessed is the man indeed. Amen.
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