Rules for Life?

Psalm 15:1 LORD, who may dwell in your sacred tent? Who may live on your holy mountain?

I am not the stereotypical man. I like the directions that come with things that need to be assembled. But I probably don’t like them for the obvious reason you are thinking. It isn’t because they help me put the item together.

The help they give me in assembling the item is good and proper. That is what assembly instructions are supposed to do. They are just doing their job. Or at least that is what they are supposed to do.

What I really like about the instructions is the version of English that is so often used! You can tell it wasn’t a native English speaker who wrote the instructions because of the curious use of words and scrambled grammar. I love trying to figure out what they actually wanted to say.

Although, I can imagine in a generation or two no one will know what correct grammar actually is. It will all be left to AI to determine! We will be speaking binary code instead! We will be adapting our language to fit the computer rather than the other way around.

The computers will be the ones to fix the rules of communication. But they have been doing that my whole life. It started with the computers demanding that we enter information into them using punch cards. If they weren’t in the right order, or in the proper orientation, the computer just stubbornly refused to accept them.

They wrote the rules. Well, actually the inventors of the computers wrote the rules, but stick with me here. Even today, if you mistype something in your web browser’s address bar, you might be very surprised by what pops up on the screen! Yikes!

Rules can become what drives life. Some people live their lives by the rules, including their relationship with the LORD. They either pass or fail in their own eyes by how well they keep their personal set of rules. And of course, most of these people’s lists are designed so that they fail, and consequently feel guilty and filled with shame.

Psalm 15 can be read as a set of rules to be kept, as the entrance requirements for God’s presence. But I don’t think that is what it is. As I read the Hebrew Scriptures, I see the rules, commandments, regulations, and laws as markers of the new people of God living in a world with a very different set of values from theirs.

If passages like Psalm 15 were a written standard by which we must live, none of us would be accepted into the LORD’s presence. All of us have failed and will fail at at least one of these “rules” at some point.

But if these things are indicators of the kind of people we are to be, the character we are to exhibit, then that is something very different. They become an outgrowth of the person who is in the presence of the LORD, not the entrance exam. When people are close to Him, this is how He changes them from the inside out, shaping their actions and attitudes.

As you look back over your life, how has being in the LORD”s presence shaped you and your relationships with other people and the world at large? How has His holiness been infused into your life? How has His holiness seeped out?