By What Standard Did We Decide What Is Fair?
By what standard did we decide what is fair? A man yelled at me one day saying, “Christianity is not fair, and neither is God”
Cheating, or depriving ourselves or others of something valuable by the use of deceit or fraud is especially easy to justify when you frame situations and cast yourself, in your own movie, as the victim of some kind of unfairness. And yes, i believe many people really do frame situations and cast themselves as the unfortunate victims of unfairness. Eve’s actions in the Garden accused God of not being fair for she felt God was holding out on her somehow. After casting ourselves as a victim of unfairness, then it becomes a matter of evening the score; we re-think about how put upon we are and tell ourselves, “i’m not cheating, i’m “restoring fairness”. Restoring fairness? That’s like my joke in reference to myself saying, “i don’t have an obsessive personality, i just do everything A LOT.”
We all have heard the common international story of good people gone wrong. We wag our heads and click our tongues and say to ourselves, “How could this have happened to them? They were good people.” It begins with small infractions or transgressions, all so subtle, like the idea of “wandering away.” We practice to perfect a polished nonchalance, we get good at masking our deep fear of being found out as a fraud, and maybe for some it’s learning to skim small amounts from the register, or how about lies of omission — and the behavior grows by increments. And what was once a lie of omission, mastering the art of leaving out parts of our story, eventually, becomes willful commission, meaning we consciously decide. It went from a one-time occurrence, to becoming a pattern of behavior. Do you see the “pestilence which creeps by darkness” there? It’s not the one Oreo cookie which makes us fat, it’s the lifestyle of Oreo’s that’s the problem.
No one ever wakes up one day and decides to be a thief, or a fraud artist. We don’t just wake up one day and think to ourselves, “I think I’ll begin my career as a thieving drug addict today.” It is typically a long slow seduction into chaos and darkness; a “pestilence that walks in darkness” (Psalms 91:6), or a “disastrous affliction which comes and grips our heart in calamitous gloom”.
This story of life on a gradual downhill slide makes it difficult to distinguish the process of moving to the dark side; namely, that people subconsciously seek shortcuts more than they realize. Often, we make deliberate decisions to deceive in earnest. As in game theory, with deception and other misbehavior there’s a battle between short and long-term gains, a tension between the more upright choice and the less principled one – how much sin is too much to live with? When are our choices honest and noble enough? How good is good enough, how bad is too bad? At what point do we have such a lack of peace we are willing to cry out to God for help? Yet, psychologists say, perhaps the most powerful urge to be less than honorable stems from a deep sense of unfairness. As people first begin to compete and compare themselves with others, they also begin to learn of others’ hidden advantages. Private tutors. Family money. Alumni connections. A regular golf game with the boss. Against a competitor with such advantages, taking credit for other people’s work is not only easier, it can seem only fair.
A corner cutter often begins to think everyone else is cutting corners only after they have already started cheating, not before. That’s the same as saying some dreaded disease isn’t so dreaded now that everyone else has it too. Or the daughter who says to her mother, “You just don’t want me to have a life! It’s not fair! All my friends are doing it mom!” Hmmm…are they really?
And many times don’t we use similar language and thinking about God like our teenagers do, in order to get our own way? When we don’t get our way, we say with an aiming finger, “It’s not fair! Why would you do this to me Lord?!” or “You are God! If you’re SO good, how could you let this happen to me?! It’s not fair!!” Fair? Fair!? Actually, the Lord is more than fair, He went beyond fair and gave His life for us. You’re right. Christianity is not fair, truthfully, it’s more than fair.
Everyone slips & slides around some in life, but while we’re making our way along the path towards Home, let us opt for the Fruits of the Spirit and not let our eyes get used to the gloom and dark around us. God really is just and righteous and we need to lean not to our own understanding, letting God be God, which is something He is really, really good at.