Of Plumblines and Balloons

The idea of authority is losing out against the self in the ground-war of our culture. When I was a manager at PETsMART in Flagstaff, we were graded on several categories that they called “success factors” for our annual review. One of them was “Aligns 2 up and 2 down.” What they meant by that was that we were able to understand the instructions and goals being set for us by our supervisors and our supervisors’ supervisors, get behind them, embrace them, and then pass them on to our subordinates and our subordinates’ subordinates. For me, it meant that our Regional Vice-President and District Manager could count on me to communicate his vision to our store’s middle-management and our department leads. In these sorts of situations, what I see as a “good idea” doesn’t really matter. I set my compass and take my orders from those above me. It is their plan that I execute, and I need to make sure that not only am I in line but so are those who take their direction from me.

The same can be said, historically, for myriad other social roles: politics, families, cities, and social clubs all have some degree of expectation that you will fall in line, accept the guidance of those above you, and pass that guidance on. Looking back in time, this expectation has been understood from time immemorial. I am expected to line up under my parents, my ancestors, my lord, my king, my employer, my landowner, and my God, and I am to execute their will in my life and those of my subordinates.

That uniformity goes backward in time as far as the eye can see, but today, here-and-now, it is much harder to find.

Today, submission to authority is not assumed. I am not taught to salute or bow nearly as often as I am taught to stand tall and be applauded. It’s all about me, myself, and I. I am taught to seek categories that share the common prefix of “self-.” Self-esteem, self-realization, self-actualization, self-help. I should have a good self-image. I should be proud that I’m self-taught. I need to be self-assured, and I can capture all of this and show my amazing self to others through the prolific use of selfies! If PETsMART were to write a success factor to rate this, it would be that “all others align with me.” That’s a far cry from the behavior of a good organization, but it is where our society is headed.

The Knowledge of Good and Evil

The most sinister example of this transfer of authority from “up there,” somewhere in the organizational structure above me to “within me,” and the reason why I’m bothering to write about this here, in a blog about Christian Theology, is with regard to the Bible. There was once a time (not too long ago) when society used to align itself and its norms under the word of God. Not every individual did so, of course, but it was known which individuals were not in line. Since the norms were well-known, well-accepted, and well-taught, the cultural pressure to conform pushed on those individuals outside of the Bible’s norms, and they had the choice to either get in line or suffer the consequences. In some cases, non-conformists were simply outsiders and ostracized from the benefits of society. In other more serious cases, they were purposefully rehabilitated, incarcerated, or even executed. There was a clear understanding of right and wrong, and there were increasingly unpleasant consequences the further you strayed from those standards.

God is clear that this is His plan and intention for society. On the first page of the Bible, God begins by creating, the signature attribute of God, and by declaring what is good, which is also His fundamental right as the Sovereign of all things (Gen 1:4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25, and 31).

His unique ability to declare what is good or evil is what we usurped in the original sin. It was this attribute of which we were jealous. That’s the significance of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We wanted that right to declare what is good. Despite our rebellion, He intends to always be the one being under which all others need to align themselves.

“I am the Lord Your God.... You will have no other Gods before me.” (Exodus 20:1-2)

“You shall love the Lord Your God with all your heart, all your soul, and with all your might.” Deut 6:5

“I am the LORD; that is my name; my glory I give to no other, nor my praise to carved idols.” Isa 42:8

“"For My own sake, for My own sake, I will act; For how can My name be profaned? And My glory I will not give to another.” Isa 48:11

He expects that we will comply with his will, and if we do not, there are consequences, both natural and judicial.

"If you are not careful to observe all the words of this law which are written in this book, to fear his honored and awesome name, the LORD your God, then the LORD will bring extraordinary plagues on you and your descendants, even severe and lasting plagues, and miserable and chronic sicknesses.…” Deut 28:58-59

“I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live, loving the LORD your God, obeying his voice and holding fast to him, for he is your life and length of days, that you may dwell in the land that the LORD swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give them.” Deut 30: 19-20

In case all of the Old Testament quotations above make you think that lining up under the Bible or facing consequence is a relic of the “Hellfire and Damnation” attitude of the Old Testament, rest assured that the New Testament and the words of Jesus Himself are no less clear on this point.

“Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.” Judas (not Iscariot) said to him, “Lord, how is it that you will manifest yourself to us, and not to the world?” Jesus answered him, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. Whoever does not love me does not keep my words. And the word that you hear is not mine but the Father’s who sent me.” John 14:21-24

“When Jesus heard this, he marveled and said to those who followed him, “Truly, I tell you, with no one in Israel have I found such faith. I tell you, many will come from east and west and recline at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, while the sons of the kingdom will be thrown into the outer darkness. In that place, there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Matt 8:10-12

“It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that is not tolerated even among pagans, for a man has his father’s wife. And you are arrogant! Ought you not rather mourn? Let him who has done this be removed from among you. For though absent in body, I am present in spirit; and as if present, I have already pronounced judgment on the one who did such a thing. When you are assembled in the name of the Lord Jesus and my spirit is present, with the power of our Lord Jesus, you are to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord.” 1 Cor 5:1-5

“The one who conquers will have this heritage, and I will be his God and he will be my son. But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death.” Rev 21:7-8

So in both Testaments, from literally the first page of the Bible to the last, Almighty God claims to be the anchor for declarations of good and evil. It is his judgment that will win out and his opinion that matters. The degree to which I align myself to his rule is the degree to which I can expect to avoid his wrath. Now, we must, of course, admit that nobody is perfect (Romans 3:10, 23) and that Christ takes the wrath of God on behalf of sinful man when they put their faith and hope in Him (2 Cor 5:21). But the main point of this essay is not the ability we have to duck the wrath of God. Here we are concerned with how we can best avoid earning it in the first place.

Of Plumb Lines and Balloons

The following illustration may help. Consider a three-dimensional space as the realm of morality. You can believe and act in any way you want, and every belief or action corresponds to a location in this space. The command of God in his law may be seen as a vertical line, a plumb line, hanging down from Heaven and anchored in God’s Word. Like every good line in geometry, it is only one dimensional. It has no width. You are either on the line in your actions and are perfectly righteous or are not and are a sinner. Jesus, we know, is the only man whose life has ever stayed on the line in all ways and at all times. The rest of us are sometimes on the line but mostly not. Hence, our need for salvation.

There was once a time when all of society (at least in the Judeo-Christian influenced west) recognized the presence of this line of righteousness originating in the Word of God. As a consequence, our social constructions were geared toward aiming people back at the line of righteousness. Of course, we knew that we would fail, but not for lack of knowledge or effort. Family, school systems, laws and law enforcement, and most definitely the preaching of the Word from the pulpits of the land all told society, “There’s the line. Line up on it. There’s the Word. Line up under it.” Some people flouted these norms, but they were frowned upon and disciplined, and parents told their children at night not to be like them, that they had made grave errors and would suffer for them. There was a standard. There was a line. We needed to all try our best to line up on it.

But the old nature cannot stay hidden for long, and the original sin, latent in the soul of every man and woman pushed back harder and harder against these cultural norms. Over time, what was taboo in one generation generally gained acceptance in the next. At first, it was small, trivial matters that were really just cultural preferences or fringe issues anyway. Girls wearing trousers or Boys’ hair touching their collar in the back are examples. Formal dances which communicated cultural identities and formal relationships gave way to self-expression and a more overtly sexual overtone. You might learn to waltz with your mother, but you’d never learn to shake it with her! These cultural norms began to shift in the 1920’s through the ‘50’s, and culture as a whole had a decision to make. If ethics (the declarations of right and wrong made by a people group) were drifting, should morality (the declarations of right and wrong made by an objective standard)?

Well, drift they did. As culture spread out, wider and wider, it’s definition of what was acceptable, the church followed suit. Generally, the church’s spread has happened slower. If the zero-width line has become a mile wide in culture at large in the last hundred years, the church has always lagged, perhaps permitting only a yard from the vertical in the same amount of time, but the fact that permission to stray from the plumb line at all has been granted by our pulpits is testimony to the powerful pull of the original sin, the desire to declare, for ourselves, what is right and wrong.

For a long while, pastors were trying to bridge the gap between the plumb line and their flock, living on the line (as much as they could) while reaching out to pat the heads of their wandering parishioners. The stretch got harder and harder to make, and so some churches and denominations began to wander from the line. They would try to pull the plumb line with them, but it didn’t work. Everyone knew it, and it was talked about in hushed tones.

In more recent history, we have stopped caring how far we are from the original line altogether. Rather than lining up under the book, we decided that the line of righteousness is mobile, that it follows my wandering moral compass wherever I roam. Instead of a plumb line hanging down from the Bible, morality is now a helium balloon hanging up from me. Conveniently, wherever I go, my self-oriented righteousness goes with me. I am always at the bottom of a straight line, so I feel like I’m at the plumbline, even though I could be far away from it. I always feel like I’m a “good person” because I declare what’s “good,” and I base that declaration on my own subjective feelings, the same feelings that motivate my actions. Therefore, ethics are a tautology. I declare that my feelings and actions are good; therefore, I am good because I act and feel good things, based on my own declarations.

Two quick examples of this from recent history will serve to confirm this observation. They both happen to concern homosexuality and the Bible, but to be sure, we have balloons over thousands of other issues as well.

In an interview with Mark Driscoll and Piers Morgan, Morgan said:
“I also think what is harming America right now, like many countries around the world, is just a fundamental lack of tolerance and respect for people who may not share your personal values. You know, I just think that pastors like you, funny enough, are in a great position to trail blaze a bit, you know, to take this great book and bring it slightly kicking and screaming into the modern era a bit. Because eventually, America will get to that position anyway, and quite fast.”

Note the condescension there toward the Biblical position. That book is just old. Yesterday’s morality. We need to bring the Bible into the modern era and update it. In another part of that interview, he said that the bible needs to be amended, like the American Constitution. We, in his mind, are able to determine what the Bible ought to say to us today and just make it say that. Ignore the plumb line. Inflate your balloon.

Just today, reading the news, I read about Rob Bell’s interview with Oprah, when she asked him how far the church is from accepting homosexuals. He said that we were moments away and then clarified by saying:

“I think culture is already there, and the church will continue to be even more irrelevant when it quotes letters from 2,000 years ago as their best defense. When you have in front of you flesh-and-blood people who are your brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and co-workers and neighbors, and they love each other, and they just want to go through life with someone."

He knows better than Piers. The Bible says what it says. We can’t “take it with us” into the modern era. Its plumb line is permanent and immovable. Bell’s response is simply to leave it behind. If the Bible is your best defense, you’re irrelevant. Here’s your balloon.

Thanks to the attitude so aptly declared by Morgan and Bell, the sin of the garden is complete. We have grown strong on the nourishment of the forbidden fruit. We are able to declare good and evil with autonomy and without fear of reprisal. And with smoke and mirrors, we remove the awareness of our own sin and therefore our felt need for a savior.

My Balloon is Better than Yours

Because of the way that our culture has allowed us to individually redefine what is good and evil, you and I may have balloon morality and not even know it. We’ve been raised by parents who have balloons, preached to by preachers who have balloons, gone to school lead by teachers and administrators who have balloons. Even if the balloons of my mentors are very close to the plumb line that God dropped into our world from the Word of God, those balloons are not the same as the plumb line. Even if my mentors really like the plumb line, get really cozy with the plumb line, and have balloons that are touching the plumb line, if they are using their own balloons and not the plumb line, then they are in error. If my parents and mentors are in error, then the odds are good that I have inflated my own balloons and that I hold my own balloon very close to theirs, and so by approximating their approximations, the error grows and spreads, even among those who try very hard to hold their balloons very close to the plumb line.

It's interesting how we choose our balloons. Some of us are keenly aware of culture’s influence on the position of most people’s balloons on a particular issue, and so we work very hard to be much closer to the plumb line on that issue than “the world.” Those same people, however, may have drifted along with culture quite comfortably on another issue, allowing their balloons to float along in the cultural breeze for quite a distance without seeing how far they are from the plumb line.

Let me give you an example, and so that I don’t point fingers at anyone, I’ll use myself. The Bible teaches in the Old Testament that the Jew was to give 10% of their income as a contribution to the tabernacle. This was in addition to what might be considered an income tax which was paid to the King. On top of that was the periodic offerings made for sin and ritual cleansing, thanksgiving, and peace. During the festivals, they would come with prescribed and costly gifts as well. All-in-all, an Old-Testament Jew would give upwards of 25% of their income back to the Lord and his servants. The New Testament does not clearly delineate the percentages we are to give, but the pattern of Jesus is that the fulfillment of the law goes beyond the letter. In the spirit of hatred equalling murder and lust equalling adultery, it’s hard to read the instructions of Paul to be a “hilarious giver” and the narrative descriptions of the early church selling their possessions and giving 100% to the church and say that I am called to less sacrificial giving than the Old-Testament tithe.

That is the plumbline. Here’s my balloon. I was 35 years old before my giving to the church and missions reached the 10% level. That’s embarrassing to even write. See, I’d taken the drifting self-centered culture for a ride and raised my own balloon, declaring that for me, giving my time and talents to the church was also an offering to the Lord’s service, and it was, but it was not the tithe. I knew better. I’d heard sermons telling me the truth, but I had declared what was good in this area. It was actually my wife’s encouragement that first pushed our giving to the 10% mark. Again, that’s embarrassing to write. I should have led. I didn’t.

Now that I’ve been honest about my own balloons, can I point out a few more that I see in the crowd of balloon-holders trying to be near the plumb line? There are people who are near the heart of God and want to love everyone so much that instead of worshipping the God of love, they, in fact, worship love as a god. As long as you’re loving, you’re good, right? So same-sex love is good. Man-boy love is okay. Loving more than one spouse is just an abundance of good love. There are churches for all of these perversions. The homosexual, the pedophile, and the polygamist can all inflate their balloons and hold them aloft with pride because, to them, Love is a god. There are pastors or priests who also hold their balloons around these ideas, so all the people with the “Love is god” balloons can stand near one another, attend “church” together, and validate each other as having very good moral standards, according to their balloons.

Another group of people has drifted along with the women’s liberation movement of the early 1900’s (which had many virtues and many good Biblically-supported ideas) right out of the plumbline’s message regarding gender roles. They’ve inflated their balloons about gender equality and now congregate around women Pastors and women Elders, women Bishops and Archbishops, all validating one another that God did not really mean all that stuff about male headship anyway. After all, God has to have gotten with the times since then.

Others who are drawn to the beauty and complexity of God’s created world hear the testimony of supposed experts about the age of the universe and the mutability of species throughout vast aeons of time and leave the plumbline’s clear message of God’s good creation, inflating their balloons around ages red with tooth and claw before anyone named Adam could have fallen in the garden. They turn around and mock the simpletons still standing under the plumb line on this issue while culture blows their balloons, and themselves as passengers on the wind of science, farther and farther away. Soon, they’ll be worshipping the creation and apologizing to each other for their very existence in this world they were created to dominate.

Hundreds of clusters of balloons can be seen as you take a careful survey of the moral space around us, huddled around a leader who holds his or her balloon high enough that others assume that theirs is the best balloon around. They are eloquent and charismatic, friendly and quick-witted. They make people laugh, cry, and think about important things. They have a ready answer for naysayers, shutting down their opposition without seeming to want to do so. They are the cultural icons, people with good things to say about a wide range of topics. Of course, none of the topics is the plumbline. They avoid that topic because they don’t want to admit how far they (and by consequence their little huddled mass of followers) have drifted down the cultural wind from that marker. These are the Sam Hitchens’, the Richard Dawkins’, Oprah Winfrey’s and Joel Olstein’s, the Deepak Chopra’s and the Rob Bell’s: Cultists, Snake-charmers, and Hucksters who can sell their trash and have it snapped up as if it were gold. Their balloons are beautiful, and people pay to get near them. Perhaps they might even autograph your balloon for the right price.

It’s easy for people near the plumb line to spot an Olstein and point out the obvious stench of their heresy, but those of us who think we’re the closest to the plumb line ourselves are prone to make our own point of reference some great teacher rather than the Word he teaches. When the movement stops being about the message and starts being about a man, it will soon become a monument to the man and later, after his death, the movement is only a mausoleum with a hollow message (this progression has been given by many speakers. I don’t know to whom I should attribute it first).

We are a people of balloons. All of us. We can’t say, “I don’t have a balloon. I’m under the plumb line.” Your certainty is only clear evidence that you have a balloon. So many people have encouraged us to inflate our balloons and follow them that it’s even the main theme of most Disney movies these days. Moana’s grandmother counsels her:

“The village may think I'm crazy
Or say that I drift too far
But once you know what you like, well
There you are.
You are your father's daughter
Stubbornness and pride
Mind what he says but remember
You may hear a voice inside
And if the voice starts to whisper
To follow the farthest star
Moana, that voice inside is
Who you are”

Yes, follow your inner voice. Inflate your balloon. Leave the plumb line! Let me show you how!

The Way Back: Popping Balloons.

What can be done? There are almost too many balloons around us, each tethered to our loved ones by the thread of their own morality, for us to see clearly the plumbline’s zero-width line reaching down to us from heaven, from the Word of God. It’s a clear “can’t see the forest for all the trees” problem. Where is that plumb line anymore? If only there weren’t so many ribbons and balloons all around me, perhaps I could see it. The first step in finding our way, culturally, back to the plumb line is to start “popping balloons.”

Popping balloons means admitting that I have one, that I have drifted along with the culture in some (or many) regard(s). I have allowed my basis for right and wrong to be informed or even completely controlled by what my culture has told me or by my own desire for it to be so. Once I can admit to my own tendency to declare good and evil in my life, I can begin to see my balloon for what it is, a substitute for the word of God. Target acquired. Now, I need to hand the authority to declare good and evil back to God in this area and specifically confess the sin of self-righteousness in this instance, asking God to forgive and heal that area of sinfulness in my life. By so doing, I’ll be popping that balloon.

Quite likely, once I begin this process, confessing to God that I’ve been declaring good and evil in one area, the Holy Spirit will start to show me other areas that have a balloon as well. Quite likely, I have not just one balloon on one issue, but a whole big bundle of them on a constellation of issues. Quite likely, I’ll be at this balloon-popping thing for a good long while. Quite likely, I’ll be plenty busy popping my own balloons and don’t need to get involved in popping yours, your freinds’, or my acquaintances’ balloons on facebook. After all, the Bible tells us to worry about the [bundle of balloons] in our own eye before worrying about the [one balloon] in our neighbor’s, right (Matthew 7:5)?

Now, the above admonition to focus on your own balloons doesn’t mean that you can’t let other people know that they have them, too. Obviously, I’m doing that for you right now. Don’t fall into the “Don’t judge me” camp that makes Matthew 7:1-5 mean that we can’t ever tell someone that they’re wrong. That’s not the point. It obviously isn’t what Jesus is getting to because in the very next verse (Matthew 7:6) we are cautioned not to throw our pearls before swine or give our treasures to the dogs. How do we know who the dogs and swine are if we can’t evaluate their lives? No, the point here is that we need to deal with our own mess before we have any right to point at someone else’s. This is a warning against hypocrisy. So let me model this for you: I’m a mess. I’ve got a lot of balloons. I need to pop mine. While I’m at it, you’re a mess too. Let’s pop ours together and hold each other accountable, shall we?

Get Under the Book!

Once I have confessed and repented of declaring my own standards of good and evil in all the areas that the Holy Spirit brings to me, I’ll be able to start looking for the plumb line again. This won’t be as easy for us at it would have been 200 years ago. While people 200 years ago were still sinners, they had constructed social mechanisms that pointed people back to the Word of God, and someone seeking out the truths of the Word would have been aided by popular culture. This will not be our reality.

We will have to beat back all of the “be true to yourself” and “the answer lies inside you” garbage while we diligently seek God’s position on things. We will have to say no to well-meaning friends and family when they tell us that we’re “obsessing” over scripture or “becoming a fanatic.”

When we, through study and the Holy Spirit’s guidance, find the plumb line on an issue and hear the voice of God on something, we will have to fight to stay there. We will be fighting the drifting opinions of culture, the traditions of denominations and families, and most importantly, we’ll have to fight our own sin nature, which will still have a pocket full of balloons just in case we’d rather inflate one of those.

Our world is going to get darker before the day breaks at Messiah’s second coming and we all get to live in the light of the Millennial Kingdom. There will be more post-Christians saying that we need to do away with the Bible. More voices will join Morgan and Bell in declaring that the distance between the balloons and the plumb line make it clear that the plumb line is not for today.

But we need to respond to these voices with courage and with the conviction that it is not the Bible that needs to be drug into the modern era, but it is the modern era which must be drug back to the Bible. Culture is lost, and it’s running away from God as fast as it can figure out how to run, but we can be the difference.

Culture is not something that is manufactured somewhere and imported, sold to you as a finished good. Culture is something that is made by a people group, and we all have a hand in it. It’s a moving average of the wills, beliefs, and practices of the people who practice it. If I pop my balloons and seek out the plumbline’s declaration of right-and-wrong, and if I can encourage you to do the same, then even the two of us hanging out as close to under the plumb line as our sin natures will allow has already changed our culture--in a microcosm to be sure, but changed nonetheless. If you can encourage others to join us there, and they can do the same, then perhaps there is hope for America after all.

I’m not saying that we can yell at America and get it back in line. I’m not even saying that it is possible for us to, on our own will and by our own strength, accomplish anything. But it is still in my copy of the Bible that,

“If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.” (2Chron 7:14)

Can I contextualize that promise for you, in light of my ongoing balloon metaphor? If God’s people will pop their balloons and pray and find the plumb line and stop floating with the culture, then God will hear from heaven and will forgive our sins and heal America. It’s going to be God’s work, as salvation and sanctification always are. We need to be involved, as is also always true. So let’s get started, shall we? I’m a mess. You are, too. Let’s get popping!