Posts Tagged: negative goodness

“BEYOND NEGATIVE GOODNESS”

On November 26, 2018 by Dteb With 0 Comments - down to earth believer

16        “Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean;

remove the evil of your deeds from before my eyes;

cease to do evil,

17        learn to do good;

seek justice,

correct oppression;

bring justice to the fatherless,

plead the widow’s cause.

 

Is. 1:18           “Come now, let us reason together, says the LORD:

though your sins are like scarlet,

they shall be as white as snow;

though they are red like crimson,

they shall become like wool.

19        If you are willing and obedient,

you shall eat the good of the land;

20        but if you refuse and rebel,

you shall be eaten by the sword;

for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.” (Isaiah 1:16-20)

I wonder sometimes if I don’t have a merely negative goodness.  There are times when I am so focused on not doing certain things that I have a difficult time doing anything good.  And if I avoid the negative, harmful, evil things (as I do upon occasion), I pat myself on the back as if I had accomplished something.  I am like a home builder who has merely done the dirt work, but hasn’t even poured the footer for the building.

And that is perhaps a pretty good metaphor for a merely negative goodness.  Avoiding evil is like the dirt work that needs to be done before a building goes up.  The ground needs to be cleared of trees and stones.  A footer is dug, so that the building will rest on bedrock.  Yes, it is all so time-consuming, but also essential.

Isaiah challenges Judah to do the necessary work of clearing the ground of their evil behavior.

“Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean;

Remove the evil of your deeds from My sight,

Cease to do evil.”  (Isaiah 1:16)

But Isaiah doesn’t stop there.  Vers 17 is overflowing with verbs, positive things that Judah needs to do.

“Learn to do good;

Seek justice,

Reprove the ruthless;

Defend the orphan,

Plead for the widow.”

Apparently, Isaiah, speaking on behalf of God, says to ancient Judah that they are to learn to do what is good.  Goodness is apparently not an innately human trait.  But it can be learned.

And what is goodness?  Apparently, it isn’t looking out after themselves.  They had apparently been doing pretty well at that.  Rather, learning to do good was a matter of seeking justice for the most vulnerable—orphans and widows.

Of course, it is easy to recognize the mess-ups of ancient Judah.  However, for those of us who believe that the Bible is the Word of God for all time, all places, and all people, things get very personal and very ugly very fast.  The word of God shines a spotlight on our own individual selves and our own society.

Do we cease to do evil and learn to do good?  Do I?  Do we seek justice, not for ourselves, but for the most vulnerable in our society?  Do I?

I can’t be content with a merely negative goodness.  The dirty dirt work is essential, but not sufficient.  I need to move on to positive.  So do we all.

May God forgive us for merely negative goodness.  And may God teach us to do what is right.  Today would be a great day to begin.

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“A MERELY NEGATIVE GOODNESS”

On October 2, 2018 by Dteb With 0 Comments - down to earth believer

Today’s blog deals with breaking bad habits.  The thesis is simple: We can’t!

I have sometimes (often?) fallen into a simple but deadly trap—trying to be good by not being bad.  It doesn’t work.  Process precedes product.

In a book entitled, Self-Knowledge and Self-Discipline: How to Know and Govern Yourself, B.W. Murin writes the following wise and helpful words:

“The oftener we choose anything the easier it is to choose it again.  The Law of habit reigns in the moral order as truly as the law of gravitation in the physical.  The most difficult things become easy in time.  It would be as difficult for a saint after long habits of virtue suddenly to fall into mortal sin, as it would for a man living for years in habits of vice suddenly to become a saint” (115).

Concerning bad habits, Murin writes, “. . . [H]abit can only be conquered by habit” (116).

“The prodigal who wakens to find himself a swineherd in a distant land cannot get back to his father’s home, however much he longs for it, save by treading step by step the road which he journeyed in leaving it” (117).

“The result of a great battle does not depend upon the moment’s struggle, but upon the discipline and training of the troops in the past.  Before a blow is struck or the first shot fired the issue of the conflict is practically decided.

The conflict, therefore, must be unceasing; the opportunities of training the will present themselves every hour” (124).

Murin goes on to note that a merely negative approach to the mind and thought-life does not work.

“There is a better way.  The positive rather than the negative way.  Let not your mind be overcome with evil, ‘but overcome evil by good.’  The emptying the mind of evil is not the first step towards filling it with good.  It is not a step in that direction at all.  If you succeeded in emptying your mind of every undesirable thought, what then?  You cannot empty it and then begin to fill it with better thoughts.  No, you must empty it of evil by filling it with good.  Nature abhors a vacuum.  You drive out darkness by filling the room with light.  If you would fill a glass (150) with water you do not first expel the air, you expel the air by pouring in water.  And in the moral life there is no intermediate state of vacuum possible in which, having driven out the evil, you begin to bring in good.  As the good enters it expels the evil” (151) (150-151).

 

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