"Without revelation, the people perish." So goes the King James translation of the first part of Proverbs 29:18. In a day when we are besieged by numerous proclamations about what constitutes the truth, be it religious, cultural, or political, this verse is worth pondering. It tells us that any truth that we in ourselves try to develop or elevate above all others will inevitably collapse on itself. Finite people cannot hope to ever agree on what constitutes an absolute truth. We are creatures of relativism who are living in a relative world.
The point this proverb is therefore making is that humanity needs to assess itself and its mores and behaviors by a standard other than what its broken beings can devise. While humanity has succeeded, usually admirably, in developing fairly universal moral standards to this point, it is in the end constructing them on the basis of an incomplete picture of the world. The presence of God, however, changes everything.
If God is there, and we have every reason to believe that he is, he constitutes the absolute standard by which all things worldly can be measured. Relativistic morality ultimately founders. Only revelation, that is, communication from the transcendent and divine, communication that humans could not possibly conjure on their own, provides us with the key to understanding this relativistic existence we lead. While it is an entirely good existence filled with many entirely good things, it is an existence that has no real basis to promulgate morality. Even if randomness becomes, as it inevitably does, order, unless this order has a teleological point, it is simply more of the same. It cannot say what is right and wrong because it doesn't know why it's even here.
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