Jordan Peterson (the Canadian clinical psychologist whose
book ’12 Rules for Life – an antidote to chaos’ has now sold over 2 million
copies) has said that you “can’t break the rules … if you twist the fabric of
reality it will snap back on you”. So,
for example, you may get out of a tricky situation by lying but you are
destroying your own integrity and mental well-being, and other people’s trust
in you too.
Based on his clinical work Peterson says that he has “never
known anyone get away with anything”. He
knows how people break ‘the rules’, he sees the chaos and pain in their lives
and he connects the two. It’s a striking
challenge to the usual view that I can live as I please. “I did it my way” is our proud boast. Peterson is right in this; our actions have
consequences.
But, I humbly submit, Peterson is still missing two things.
What Jordan Peterson sees as the ‘fabric of reality’ in this
world is attributed by the Bible to the unchanging character of the God who
made our universe. The reality at the
heart of everything is a person, not disembodied rules. Hostility to his rules is a personal affront
to the God who lovingly, deliberately and carefully knitted us. And so the consequences of breaking the rules
are far worse than Peterson has observed in his consulting room; they include
being permanently estranged from the One we were made for, disconnected at the
deepest level of our being.
But, secondly, a moral universe without a God leaves out all the good news – that the God who
created the rules has also stepped in to rescue us. God’s rules
show us what we should be like, but his answer to our failure is not
more ‘rules for life’ but Jesus – living by the rules, dying for our
rule-breaking and bearing in himself the full horror of the ‘snap-back’. Jesus offers, as a free gift, solidarity with
him so that our rule-breaking and chaotic life can become his responsibility,
and his rule-keeping and ordered life can become his gift to us, given in love.
How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given! So God imparts to human hearts the blessings
of His heaven.
Happy Christmas!
Graham Burrows
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