Integrity

The word that came to my mind this morning was “integrity”. It was in answer to thoughts about situations and rules and responses and values that were swirling around in my head.

There is always discussion generated whenever a Christian is faced with a dilemma of whether to obey laws or whether to act in violation of laws for the best interest of someone's safety and well-being or even for the honor of God's reputation. There is always a lot of argument over what criteria should be considered the correct measuring tool by which to determine the rightness or wrongness of such decisions.

I am not attempting to settle this age-old discussion by any means. However, these decisions in times of stress reveal the fundamental concepts of reality that have been nurtured and adopted by the person over their lifetime and show what they believe to be the most important things in their life. When circumstances force a person to make a very difficult life or death decision, especially when it involves the risk of other people's lives who are trusting them for protection, it is no time to begin to wonder and study and research what is the right thing to do. At that point it is simply the time when whatever has been put into the heart up to that point in life will come out without hypocrisy; it can accurately be called a day of judgment. For judgment really means the revelation or exposure of what is really on the inside.

It is in this context that the issue of integrity comes into focus. But integrity is not so easy to label or define as most people might think. Because integrity is a description or revelation of a heart condition before God and human beings are notorious for misreading the heart even when they are absolutely certain there is no possibility for error. That is what I am beginning to see when it comes to rules and relationships and motives.

I have noticed the tendency for most people to base the definition of morality or integrity on how closely a person keeps a list of rules. Those rules are usually man-inspired rules and regulations but the concept also extends to the rules assumed to be God-inspired. The main point is that we generally use rules and laws as the measuring device by which we are certain we can determine whether someone is right or they lack integrity.

Our whole life revolves around the strictures of rules. The problem with this however, starts to become a little more obvious when it is seen how quickly and easily people can change and tweak their system of rules to accommodate their own desires or even whims. It does not take a very intelligent mind to observe the way our country's legislators primarily work to pass laws that are designed to serve their selfish interests with little regard to what is really right or with a view to principles higher than their own greed for power and control. In fact, what we are observing over the past few decades is a broad process of reverse maturing as it becomes more and more evident that the political system favors less and less mature people in positions of power. I have come to believe that the desire for power and control over other people's lives is diametrically opposed to the consideration of the need for mature people to lead wisely and look out for the lives of others.

Consequently we are quickly filling up the public offices of trust with people who have a hunger more for control and advantage-seeking than for anything else. They are easily bought and sold behind the scenes with bribes or threats that are more and more legitimatized by the ever-changing accommodation of shifting rules. As a result of this reverse maturing we can see that we have put power-hungry adults with child-level maturity at best into positions of rulership over people who are often more mature than those in leadership. The end result of this process is certain ruin and the disintegration of all that has been built up since the founding of our society.

There is a great need for the presence of real integrity in the midst of all this confusion. But a problem arises when integrity is defined as one who perfectly obeys the law. Because our notion of law is so contaminated by the selfish and immature nature of lawmakers who constantly use manipulation of laws to arbitrarily control the lives of millions for their own selfish advantage, we also become confused about the nature of God's “laws”. It is very easy for most people to mistake the motivations of God because of the abusive nature of the activities of human lawmakers.

When God presents “laws” throughout history, He is simply revealing principles of reality that we must be in harmony with to live a thriving life, not arbitrary rules by which to control our lives. There is a distinct difference between the principles of reality in the universe, which are often referred to as God's laws, and the arbitrary nature of the artificial impositions and punishments thought up by men to control the lives of those around them. But the blurring of this distinction has created great confusion and darkness in understanding the nature of real integrity.

As I said previously, most people assume that honesty and integrity means that a person keeps the rules and should be honored for doing so. This is very much in line with a childish level of maturity that pervades nearly all of society today. And the problem is that a person is incapable of understanding or grasping broader concepts that govern the lives of people who have grown to a much higher level of maturity. A child is simply incapable of grasping the complex decisions and considerations that must be grappled with by a very mature parent, and even more so a true elder. The issues and inner guidelines and principles that go into the decisions of a wise elder are completely foreign and baffling to most people at best and often come under much suspicion. There are so few true elders among us that they might properly be added to the endangered species list.

But true elders do not live in the pettiness of rule-based thinking and logic like most people living in far less maturity levels are bound by. This makes sense if one simply looks at the normal family and how young children need many more rules at times to protect them until they develop internal integrity and self-discipline and can be trusted to live beyond those rules. The whole notion of our need for laws to control and govern us presupposes that we are all infant or child-level maturity. The greater problem arises when you have child-maturity people in charge of government who cannot imagine a society operating anywhere past their own level of maturity. They have not the capacity to envision such a world, and those who do have the capacity to craft such a society are not allowed to take their role as leaders because they do not service well the selfish interests of those more hungry for power and control.

In this kind of world, a person who dares to grow past the ruling classes level of maturity risks being labeled as an outlaw and a rebel. Man-made rules are generally designed to service the selfish interests of the ruling group and anyone who thinks differently is considered a serious threat. Thus is put in place a very strong incentive for people not to mature but to simply maneuver for advantage and power.

But real integrity involves seeing that man-made laws are by nature arbitrary and thereby inherently faulty by nature at best, particularly when produced by people who are infant and child-level maturity. But even beyond that, the very concept of living under the dictates of rules altogether is to insist that a person cannot be allowed to live at higher levels of maturity as they could in a true family model. In effect, society is coming to the place where we are denying the very existence of higher levels of maturity simply because we may not believe they exist. We generally do this because those who do progress to higher levels than we are currently do not pander easily to our selfish desires for control and pride. So the easiest way to avoid the exposure of our own immaturity is to refuse to accept our need to grow any further and deny those who have more maturity any part of our government.

Of course, this is all very subtle and in the public will be vehemently denied. And this is not to say that no one in government is mature at this point. But what I am pointing out is the trend that has been taking place over a long period of time and that is now coming to a crisis point. There is increasing pressure at nearly all levels of government to slowly push out those who have true wisdom and maturity and have them replaced with pliable characters who are more interested in placating our cravings for power and greed than in living by true principle.

We are increasingly becoming a very divided society with distorted ideas about the intrinsic value of those in power and demeaning the value of those who are not in power. This is the essence of the concept called Kingship. We pretend to serve the idea of honesty and integrity on the surface but at the heart level there is little left but deceitfulness and selfishness. The false trinity of power is coming to a climax that was begun many centuries ago and we are about to see its final collapse. That false trinity is what makes up the foundations of what we consider civilization: Economics, Kingship and Law.

It is at this approaching point of meltdown that we will discover the elements of true integrity coming to the light in contrast to the darkness of man-created civilization. Of course it will be decried as the opposite by those who know little about integrity themselves. But true integrity has nothing to do with keeping artificial laws and trying to appease men's selfishness. Real integrity has to do with real maturity and will be in stark contrast to the general absence of maturity that now swallowed up most of the world. Real integrity is inspired by much deeper motivations and considerations than keeping an artificial list of requirements, even if those are promoted by the most religious people around. Real maturity means that one is no longer under the rule of law or confined to a legal way of thinking but has grown beyond that to live in harmony with the true principles of reality as defined by the One who created all of it to start with.

God's “laws” are not really laws as we have the concept of law. The reason that God uses the term laws and statutes is not because He endorses our immature concept of life but because He has been forced to “dumb down” His terminology and the means He uses to communicate reality to us because of our language and concept restrictions. He has been forced to relate to us using infant and child-level methods with a view to help us move past those levels and grow up into mature sons and daughters of royalty. A most important part of that transition from childhood to adulthood is the transformation from living blindly under the idea of controlling rules in our life – conformity – to living with higher priorities in selfless relationships where we discover the real joy of continuous service in community with the rest of God's perfect creation.

Real life is described more accurately as primarily thriving in close relationships with others, receiving and giving life in a perfect circle of unselfish love, gratitude and praise. This is what we are designed for and this is the future of all who are willing to rise beyond the dark confines of selfishness, desire for control and the abusive nature of arbitrary law. It is not enough to just strive to make ourselves obedient to all of God's (or man's) rules and statutes; that is the mindset of the system of Babylon the Great, the mighty counterfeit of God's government. We need a radical transformation of thinking that comes from a complete renewal of our mind and a separation from Babylon and its ways (come out of her My people).

Real integrity is not found in keeping rules but is revealed in the lives of those who have the internal principles of God's character imprinted in their hearts and who have a spirit that is reflective of the true Spirit of God. Law-keeping is by nature external and immature. A character full of integrity and real love no longer takes note of petty and artificial rules. Real maturity operates from the real “law”, the character that has been brought into sympathetic harmony with God's creation. It is living from the heart given to us by God and may at times produce external actions or decisions that appear to be in conflict with our perception of law-abiding.

Integrity is not in conflict with true “law” but may often be found to be in tension with our Babylonian legal-based way of thinking. The reason I refer to it as Babylonian is because it was from the earliest roots of ancient Babylon that all of these foundations of counterfeit thinking began. They are now almost completely matured to fulfillment in what we call civilization and the book of Revelation prophecies that this whole system of operation will collapse when the true glory of God is revealed to the world. But God is not going to use force to overcome the false system – that is the weapons of His enemies. He is going to simply undermine the false concepts that keep that false system in operation by revealing the real truth about Himself and about reality. The Bible refers to this as the glory of God.

When the false system of force, fear and phoniness is exposed – the system we so highly esteem as modern civilization – then those who have received the renewal of their minds instead of being conformed to this world's mentality of rules and force, (see Romans 12:1) will be not only seen to have made the right choice but will become transfigured quite literally as was Jesus who prefigured this event on the Mount of Transfiguration. It will then be seen that the bonds of love are far superior than the bonds of fear and force. And right now the choice is still up to us as to which system we will live under.