The Rules

“... God didn’t create a world where every possible dangerous act is precluded by fences and barbed wire. God made us free to do whatever we please. It might seem like we’re on a cruise ship — or better yet, like we’re in a McDonald’s play gym, where every possible problem that could go wrong has been foreseen and accounted for by foam padding and rounded corners. But it’s not. God did not put us in a McDonald’s play gym; he put us in the wilderness, with quicksand, snakes, and savage enemies with poison darts hidden in the trees all around us.

God treats us like adults. He simply gives us the rules. No foam padding, guardrails, and safety fences so we can walk blindly and blissfully along. He doesn’t put up a high wall around hell to keep us from falling into it; he leaves the dangerous cliff just as it is, and simply tells us to stay away from the edge.

You see, to someone who loves and trusts God, these simple commands make total sense. God can see all, and he knows what is over the edge, so nothing could be more practical than this simple rule: stay away from the edge. But to us, this rule seems crazy and counterintuitive.

There is always some reason for us to go to the edge, even though when we watch other people do it, we can see how stupid it is. The woman in the horror movie always walks toward the danger — despite us yelling at the screen to stop. Some strange logic in her mind tells her to do something that we the viewer can foresee will end in disaster. And she never hears our warnings.

But when you’re the one going toward the edge, you can’t hear the warnings. The rules always seem random, silly, and meant for someone else. G. K. Chesterton has a great riff on this theme. He likens the rules of this life to the rules of a fairy tale. He uses fairy tales as his hermeneutic key to understanding the world. He calls it ‘The Ethics of Elfland,’ and he notes how God’s rules are just like those rules in fairy tales:

According to elfin ethics, all virtue is in an ‘if.’ The note of the fairy utterance always is, ‘You may live in a palace of gold and sapphire, if you do not say the word “cow”’; or ‘You may live happily with the King’s daughter, if you do not show her an onion.’ . . . The true citizen of fairyland is obeying something that he does not understand at all. In the fairy tale an incomprehensible happiness rests upon an incomprehensible condition.

But for some reason, we can’t resist showing the King’s daughter an onion, just like good old Eve, who had the whole garden to eat but had to eat from the one forbidden tree.

A box is opened, and all evils fly out. A word is forgotten and cities perish. An apple is eaten, and the hope of God is gone.

As with Pandora and Eve, it seems the mere act of prohibiting something makes it the most important and logical action one could ever take. In Paradise Lost when the serpent is tempting Eve to eat the apple, he says, ‘Why else set here?’ as if breaking this rule were the very purpose of her being created.

But silly or not, there are rules. And we’re always breaking them. And there must be some consequences for that. The fairy tales always had consequences when people broke rules. The Greek myths are the same way; that’s why Atlas is stuck holding up the whole world, and Sisyphus keeps pushing that rock up the hill.

So I think the fear of God is a good thing. It’s this different kind of fear, one that must be taught. We must learn that we are totally at his mercy. (You would think that the mere fact that we had no say in our own coming into existence would tip us off to that little fact.) But as long as we obey his rules, we’ll be fine. If we don’t, there is no telling what the hell might happen.”

~Peter Giersch (from Talking of Michelangelo: Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell in the Burgundy Region)