Aloha Friday Message – November 1, 2024 – Rules are made to be _______.
2444AFC110124 – Rules are made to be _______.
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Deuteronomy 6:2 (GNT) [1]– 2 As long as you live, you and your descendants are to honor the Lord your God and obey all his laws that I am giving you, so that you may live in that land a long time.
Psalm 18:1 – 1 I love you, O Lord, my strength.
Hebrews 7:27-28 – 27 Unlike the other high priests, he has no need to offer sacrifices day after day, first for his own sins, and then for those of the people; this he did once for all when he offered himself. 28 For the law appoints as high priests those who are subject to weakness, but the word of the oath*, which came later than the law, appoints a Son who has been made perfect forever.
PLEASE USE THE ABOVE LINK TO SEE THIS PASSAGE IN CONTEXT. That is important.
Mark 12:32-33 – 32 Then the scribe said to him, “You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that ‘he is one, and besides him there is no other’; 33 and ‘to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength,’ and ‘to love one’s neighbor as oneself,’—this is much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.” * Psalm 110:4 –
4 The Lord has sworn and will not change his mind,
“You are a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek.”
[1] Passages marked (GNT): Good News Translation (GNT) are from the Good News Translation® (Today’s English Version, Second Edition)© 1992 American Bible Society. All rights reserved. For more information about GNT, visit www.bibles.com and www.gnt.bible.
I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him. Grace, mercy, and peace will be with us from God the Father and from our Lord, Jesus Christ, the Father’s Son, in Truth and Love. General Douglas MacArthur has been quoted as saying, “You are remembered by the rules that you break,” and “Rules are mostly made to be broken and are too often for the lazy to hide behind.” Over the ensuing decades this has been pared down to “Rules are made (or meant) to be broken.” In this sense of the phrase it means that it’s OK to break the rules sometimes. Where many of us get in trouble is in applying that adage to everything – always.
We can all probably recall times when as children playing that our playmates would make up impromptu rules that were clearly beneficial to them; and we also were occasionally guilty of that. All of us can probably also recall when we decided not to follow the rules and got away with it. There are probably even more occasions when we finked the rules and got busted. There’s a little rebel inside us that wants the rules to be “flexible.” In the 1948 film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, one of the bandits says, “We ain’t got no badges. We don’t need no badges. I don’t have to show you any stinking badges!” The paraphrase of that line is what millions of people use to justify doing whatever they want. “We don’ need no stinkin’ rules.” And this is the point where we need to stop for a minute and look at the word fallacious.
Fallacious comes from the word fallacy. A fallacy is an error in logic that leads to a false conclusion because the premise, the basis, of the reasoning is false or formed in fantasy. There is a wide variety of fallacious reasonings – circular logic, false dilemma, straw man argument, and the most famous and favorite of many politicians, the ad hominem argument. In this form of “unreasonable reasoning,” this fallacy occurs when someone attacks the person instead of their argument or public position. A method frequently used is name calling. When a politician leans into the mic and reels off a string of invectives against his/her opponent, s/he is using the ad hominem (“to man” – an irrelevant attack on the person’s character instead of the person’s stated issues.) A fallacy is a falsehood which we use to try to gain some perceived advantage over someone (or many someones). It’s a lie. All of us lie, some of us better, or more often, or more easily than others, but all of us lie, and that’s because of what went down in Eden. The Devil is a liar, and – in enticing Eve and Adam to break their trust in God – he foisted on us the inheritance of making and believing lies.
Recall what Jesus said about the Devil. John 8:44 – 44 You are from your father the devil, and you choose to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies. We have mentioned here before the remarkable way toddlers can tell flat-out lies about eating the chocolate cake while their chins, fingers, and shirts are coated with it. Who teaches them that? Consider also when we see someone come into a house to find the couch destroyed and when the dog is questioned about it, s/he slinks off with head and tail hanging. Who teaches them that? I’ve seen dogs and cats put the blame on the real offender, but I’ve never seen an animal – other than a human – lie.
We all know that lying is wrong, and there is a gigantic list of other things we do that are also wrong and all of them are summed up in The Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments are so powerful that sinful people want them hidden, banned, revoked. Why? Because they do not want to be limited by anyone’s rules but their own. Let’s face it ʻŌmea, we’re all guilty of straining that limit at least once – and more likely thousands of times. Lies are fallacious arguments against the facts of life, AND AGAINST God.
“25 mph is too slow for this stretch of road. It’s OK to go 32 because the cops won’t stop me if I’m only going 7 mph over the speed limit.” This makes the de facto speed limit 32, and soon people are reasoning that it’s OK to go 39. “No one will see us. No one else can see my speedometer. No one really cares.”
Except the One who cares about everyone. He cares about us and Loves us so much that he gave us The Ten Commandments and the authority to be governed by others who are tasked with making and enforcing rules for entire societies. Often those societal rules are based on The Ten Commandments, but sometimes they are not. Some sets of rules say it’s OK to have sex with a child, or with a person of our own gender, or to murder a person before s/he is born, or to worship Satan. All of those kinds of rules are based on a single fallacy: “The God who gave us The Ten Commandments is imaginary, or at least less powerful than the made-up gods I have created and worship.” Even under those circumstances, when things go wrong and the natural consequences of our errant behaviors overwhelm us, we try to expiate our sins by our own feeble powers so as to appease our dead, speechless, motionless idols. Wherever humanity has settled we have created religion. At the heart of all religion, there is worship. At the heart of worship there is sacrifice. The most important – and effective – sacrifices are the ones that we make in and of ourselves. To get to the point (finally), to keep the rules as God expects us to do, we must sacrifice our willingness to give in to the little rebel in us, to the fallacious arguments we hold dear, to the idols we create. We must fully and freely commit to living HIS way by walking as he walked. That’s the purpose of the blank line in today’s title.
At the end of the title there is an underline – a blank line for us to fill in. Rules are made to be … what? Broken? Nah, all of the preceding should show us that’s not a good answer. When the title was given to me, I wondered about the blank, too. What should we put there? At this point I can tell you that the blank should be replaced by a period – or even the word “period.” Rules are made to be. Period. We could put “obeyed” in place of that blank. “Rules are meant to be obeyed.” Except some rules are wrong. We listed a few a moment ago. It is never right to have sex with a child. It is never right to murder a fetus, it is never right to commit adultery or fornication – especially with someone of one’s own gender. It is certainly never right to worship Satan. Yet we have laws that – in some places or circumstances – permit all of these things.
We can write (and have written) BILLIONS AND BILLIONS of laws, but unless they are congruent, necessary, and properly aligned with The Ten Commandments, they are not valid; they are immoral laws and contrary to The Ten Commandments. We could write a law, for example, that says it is legal to steal the pencils from the library. That does not make the law right because it is not moral, it is not congruent with moral Law, it is unnecessary and improper, and it is also ridiculous. I would argue that many of the laws we “have on the books” today are also ridiculous. Examples would be allowing adults to marry children and to consummate the marriage before the child is mature; allowing parents to force their children to undergo “gender reassignment;” permitting abortion on demand without parental knowledge or permission for minor children; and when it comes to immigration there are many wrong rules that are present and right rules that are missing, but few rules that match what God’s Laws command.
Let’s tie this to our Key Verses for today. From Deuteronomy: one might say, “Well, that was for Israel, but it’s not necessarily our way of doing things.” EHEHENGH! Wrong answer! It’s God’s way of doing things, and that’s what matters. God commands us to Love and serve him, but wouldn’t it be great if we Loved and served him because he first Loved us? (See 1 John 4:19) When we hear someone we Love say “I Love you,” that feels right because it is right – if it is in and from God’s Love. If it is from some other source, as good as it feels, it is wrong. It is never wrong to Love God. The Apostle Paul tells us in his Letter to the Hebrews that Jesus is the Perfect High Priest because he himself was the Sacrifice, the Priest offering up that Sacrifice, and the Altar upon which he is offered up. That makes no sense unless we accept that it is a Mystery of Faith – a Mystery of Love.
That’s another of God’s rules – one of the most important ones. Its meaning is “I Love you so much that – in your Earthly Life – I will give you x+n chances to be forgiven for breaking the rules – including the rules you yourself made up! All you have to do is keep two simple rules.”
This Great Mystery is the mystery of Sacrifice, which is the center of Worship, which is the Center of Religion, which is the center of our Being. God’s Commandments tell us how to live in, at, and for that center. They are integral to our personal Peace and happiness. Living against them, creating fallacious lies about how to “get around” their requirements – all of that is SIN, and sin makes us … miserable! That little rebel in us loves to make us miserable because that means we have turned away from God, and if we keep getting more and more miserable, we just might forget about ever turning back. That’s a terrible spot to be in. BUT, WAIT! There’s a way to fix that!
WHY?
Why is this possible only through Love? Because
GOD ≡ LIGHT ≡ LOVE ≡ TRUTH ≡ WAY ≡ LIFE ≡ ETERNAL ≡ MERCY ≡ GOD
(↑ Music Link)
And The Apostle Paul tells us in Romans 13:10 – 10 Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.
There is only One God, and nothing or no one can change that. He sent his Only Begotten Son to redeem us. He sends his Holy Spirit to renew us. He sends us all his Love all the time even if we don’t acknowledge it, or even betray it with our own fallacies. That is why we pray “Come Holy Spirit (↔ Music Link). Walk with me on this long road to Home. With you at my side and Jesus in my heart, we’ll all get to Heaven as soon as we ought.” He only is our Rock, our Strength, and our Salvation (↔ Music Link). As there is only One God, there is only One Rule. That’s easy enough to remember, but oh, so hard to do! Still, it beats anything any of us can come up with. That rule is Christ’s Law of Love. It is a rule meant to be. Period.
Whatever, whenever, wherever, whoever, however, if ever, forever —
at your service, Belovéd!
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Unless otherwise indicated, all scripture passages are from the New Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition (NRSVCE) New Revised Standard Version Bible: Catholic Edition, copyright © 1989, 1993 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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Aloha Friday Messages by Charles O. Todd, III is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
