Commentaries:
"Way" can be understood both as a narrow, single issue within one event or an entire package of values within a course of conduct. The proverb's point is that mankind is frequently driven by blind self-deception or ignorance. He often has no absolute certainty regarding right and wrong because his standards have been merely absorbed and never seriously compared against God's. How do ours compare?
This is a fair question because, since our calling and the fact that we are no longer blinded, we have the opportunity to make a fair assessment of this. In one sense, God is challenging us in this proverb either to defend our body of beliefs and practices, or to drop them and change to His. He is also warning us in advance that our way of life—if it is wrong—is going to kill us.
Any system of ethics and morality is by definition an expression of religion because religion, again by definition, is a way of life containing some measure of worship. Worship is merely a respectful response to one's god. A system of morality concerns itself with values and the way one lives, even as God's moral code does. The major overall difference is that His way works because it leads to life, even though in a given instance it may appear more wrong than ours.
Because these principles are true, it leads to the fact that each one of us is technically the god of our system of values and its way of life in opposition to the Creator God, if our code of conduct is not in alignment with His. We are serving, and thus in a limited way, worshipping ourselves.
Law, therefore, is codified, enacted morality. Whether it is God's or man's does not matter. The difference is in what they produce. What does man's law produce on earth? History makes this obvious: confusion, warfare, constant competition, pain from all the collisions of values, and ultimately death.
John W. Ritenbaugh
The First Commandment
Other commentary entries containing this verse:
Matthew 7:21
Matthew 15:7-9
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