Metaphor 18 - The Letter Strict Teenager

In the last paragraph above, I mentioned the problem of perceiving the Creator’s desire at any given time, and the thought may have crossed your mind that maybe we could perceive our Creator’s desire if He gave us a set of rules to live by.

Well, that’s really beside the point, isn’t it? We have no shortage of written rules for how to conduct ourselves. Any reasonably competent scholar can go through all the legal systems that have ever existed, from Hammurabi’s Code to the latest 10 step program of the today’s best selling self-help guru, and find a great body of similarity in all their injunctions.

The problem is not a shortage of knowing what the rules are. The problem is that the rules - the law - even not just the law but the principal of law - is itself a metaphor. It is a metaphor of what?

Well imagine that you are a good parent who has done the best job of parenting as could ever be done, but your children are now teenagers, and that has, just by itself, brought your relationship with them to the breaking point. (I have it on good authority that this is not farfetched).

There comes a day when, if they do not actually rebel against you entirely and completely, that they will say to you, "Don’t bother us, just write down your rules and we will obey them." And this is a day that makes you very sad indeed because you realize that such a set of rules would only be an incomplete metaphor of your personality and how your personality relates to your children’s personalities.

The law - any system of law - the very principle of law, can only be a very incomplete metaphor for the personality of God, who is eternal, holy, and righteous altogether. It can only point at His quality of moral synesthesia and perfect pitch. It cannot describe all of the relationships and interactions we can have with Him. It cannot be our whole relationship with Him, anymore more than a parent’s set of written rules to his child can be the whole relationship with the child. And it is because law is a representation of God’s personality that breaking one even one commandment means you have broken all of them.