Article 13: Judged by Purpose

Rule Four of the Firmament:

All are ultimately judged by law fairly in accordance with their intended purpose, state of affliction, and level of maturity.

At long last we have entered into the next rule! I hope that so far you have enjoyed the deep dive into what might make a fantasy race biblical.

This next rule is one I’ve given a lot of consideration to. For a time I considered scattering its ideas among the Corrupted and Afflicted articles, but upon reflection, it seems deserving of its own focus.

I have spoken much on the necessity of judgment. Without corresponding justice– mercy, truth, grace, and ultimately love, all lose their fullest level of expression. Being that it centers around God’s justice I think it is first important to look at the type of laws he makes. “Laws” here meaning not only the laws of Moses, but all moral revelations, edicts, and directives. I split them into three categories: Individual, Corporate, and Universal, which I further divide into Persistent and Temporary.

Individual

Laws that are Individual apply only to a specific person. Jonah was told to preach in Nineveh, but that doesn’t mean that we should all go to the middle east. There are things God directs us to do as individuals that he does not expect or desire to be applied to all things. A great showing of this scripturally is in Romans 14 where Paul speaks on being convicted by our conscious and doing our personal forbiddance unto the Lord.

Corporate

Corporate laws can refer to an entire species (like edicts given to Adam that carry over to all mankind), people groups (like the Jewish sacrificial system), or individual families (like Abraham’s).

Universal

Universal laws are things that would apply to all intelligent creatures everywhere. Worshiping no God but the one true God would fall into this category.

Within each of these categories, laws can be either Persistent (such as bearing false witness) or Temporary (such as certain animals being unclean for consumption). Typically, Persistent laws are based on nature, either the race’s intended nature or God’s nature reflected in creation. Temporary laws usually have to do with being in a certain season of life/maturity, or else given so that we might measure progress. Much like how the rules of basketball are not applied to every ball encountered outside the court, Temporary law requires more specific contexts to have their purposes understood. Such is the case of the ceremonial laws in the books of Moses.

It is particularly important to separate all of these laws because when we discuss speculative fiction we need to determine (or at least be aware of) what might differ between our scriptural examples and other races. What morality applies to all life, and what to particular groupings? Having A way to determine this was vital for me to create worlds and species in such a way that they represent some of God’s character and approaches to morality. To do this I determined three factors, as I wrote in the Rule itself. They are Intended Purpose, State of Affliction, and Level of Maturity. I will break down those concepts, and then afterward I will use the Ten Commandments as a case study to show how the thinking plays out. As you might already expect, I will be pulling and referencing concepts from the previous articles on Rule Three. I recommend reading them if you want greater detail on my reasoning.

Intended Purpose

The intended purpose of a race, I think, is the most crucial in determining the laws God uses to asses that race. We see the curse of Adam and Eve (work becoming toil and birth becoming painful) are directly connected to his edict to “subdue the earth and fill it” (respectively). On a smaller scale, it’s clear that God does not judge all of humanity for eating pork when he only ever forbade it for the Jewish people. Even a word study on Khata (sin) reveals that the heart of sin is not doing bad things, but rather “missing the intended target”. God creates with a specific intention, and as I’ve said before, all sin boils down to subverting his will. If, therefore, I were to create a race of sentient deer, it would be against God’s will for them to eat any meat (as they were created only to eat plants). Likewise, a race of intelligent sharks would be acting outside of God’s will if they refused to eat the fish God created for them. Refusing to do as designed is fundamentally a rejection of the designer himself. After all, a plank of wood might help you float in a flood, but its buoyant quality must be judged on a different standard than a life preserver. Just as a life preserver could be lit on fire, but its burnability can’t be fairly judged by the standard we asses wood. As such, just dealings must be rooted in their design. Even if we consider non-sinful races, it’s important to know what intention God might have for them to see the “why” of their being, and thus the fullness of God’s design.

State of Affliction

Obviously, God will only be sentencing those who deserve it, so I think it is safe to say that only those in sin need worry. I cover these topics in Corrupted and Afflicted thoroughly (if not exhaustively) in my cosmology articles 6-9. In brief, there is a process that God brings a race through to rectify the broken relationship between them. Judgment is more complex than sentencing based on the law too. To see justice meet out for all involved God will need to look at not only how He has been sinned against, but how the races have sinned against each other. Beyond sin, God also takes into account personal circumstances. He would not, after all, say a barren woman is sinful for not “filling the world”. Nor would he say to a comatose man is to be denied the faith for failing to provide for his family as is spoken of in the Pauline letters. No, God is aware of any and all facts and will determine justly for each, missing nothing and accounting for everything.

Level of Maturity

Maturity can have many determining factors when it comes to a justified conclusion. Obviously, an adult is more culpable than a child. But it is not age that detriment this, but their ability to understand what is right and wrong. In God’s judgment of Satan and his followers, I think he has taken into account their maturity level when they rebelled. They were, after all, creatures that existed in his heavenly presence, and likely their understanding of him was far greater than ours. Unlike us (who were deceived and tempted into sin) Satan and his followers defied God quite on their own. Personally, I see this as the most significant reason why there does not appear to be any offering of redemptive grace for them. Much like how a three-year-old does not receive the same response to burning down their parent’s house as their thirty-year-old son.

Now that we have an understanding of all of these principles, let’s take a look at the Ten Commandments.

You shall have no other gods before me.

You shall make no idols.

You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.

Remember the Sabbath day

Honor your father and your mother.

You shall not murder

You shall not commit adultery

You shall not steal

You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.

You shall not covet

Now the first three appear universal. They all deal with the sovereignty of God, which is certainly consistent for each life in the universe. Murder, stealing, bearing false witness, and coveting all seem universal as well. They each have to do with any creature’s possible interactions, and I think these hold true upon our interactions with alien life as much as with one another.

But the remaining three seem more distinctly human. The Sabbath is found in the creation of our world as we know it, in God modeling our need for rest. But would such a need arise for a spiritual entity? Do Angels get tired? If they are locked in the same seven-day cycle as us, scripture does not seem to point to it. God rested on the seventh day, yet to say God can tire or is somehow “made for the sabbath’ is a stretch at best, and blasphemy at worst. While It seems plausible that all life might have some version of the Sabbath to take time to reflect and connect with God, it is by no means definite, especially when you consider how it connects with our solar calendar.

Next, I will tackle adultery and honoring our parents together. This is because they are both related to the human family unit. If we were to apply such things universally we would have to assume not only that all races have parents, but that all races have marriage. Christ Tells us in Mathew that Angels are not given or taken in marriage, and after the resurrection, neither will we*. So the idea of applying a rule perpetually about having sex outside marriage, which is racially optional and for us only temporary, seems beyond the scope of its intention. And if Angels don’t have marriage, it’s plausible they do not have parents, and thus can’t honor them. Now the argument can be made that those without parents ought to honor God as their parent, yet the heart of that commandment seems to be about family relationships, not divine ones. Even if we stretch its meaning to respect for authority, such a situation is already covered by God’s sovereignty. Even if we ignore spirit beings and remain with the physical, our idea of marriage and parentage is inextricably tied to our biology. What about a race that inseminates outside of the body, such as certain reptiles, birds, or fish? Salmon, for instance, inseminate over an area, not the eggs on one specific fish. If they had sentience then it would make no sense, biologically speaking, for them to get married or to acknowledge specific parentage. Certainly, a creature must have a need for, and definition of, marriage before it can have a rule against adultery. Therefore, neither of these rules could be universal.

A race in the Firmament must have an intended purpose, its circumstances, and a state of maturity. Without them, it is hard to craft a realistic redemptive plan that is individualized to its intended nature. Rebellion will look different depending on the nature of the rebels because disobedience is framed by the expectations given by the relevant authority. When that authority is God, his expectations will be geared fairly because of his intimate understanding of the reasons and intentions at play in the rebel’s creation. It is one of the reasons why only God can truly judge because only he can know the situations in the fullness of detail.

As to my own use, I’ve found that to give a thorough structure to judge or save my own races I needed to create with intentionality as well. I would need a reason for why God would, in my fictional universe, create the aforementioned sentient deer. Because it would be wrong to give them their own “Fall” if they do not fulfill some function that they can reject. Say God created them to eat a type of plant that is harmful to the environment if left unchecked, but they refuse. They choose instead to eat other plants or perhaps create convenient gardens instead of grazing in the wild, all at the expense of the ecosystem. God might send others to remind them of what they were made for, repent of their gardens, and return as a balancing element of the wild.

Now, we know gardens are not evil, humanity was created for a garden after all. But for these sentient deer, a garden subverts their purpose and thus ought to be forbidden. You see, we cannot assess the morality of God’s laws for them without first understanding what they were intended for. Nor can I write a plan to redeem them that reflects God’s fundamental nature if I never gave them one in the first place. Central to this fourth rule is exactly this; if I am to create a race as God might, I must asses their behavior not on the merits of the laws and judgments he gave to humanity, but the laws and judgments he would give them based on their own circumstance. Anything less would be at odds with my first rule, that God in the Firmament is consistent in character with the God of the bible.

*https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+22%3A+23-33&version=ESV