Rules, principles, character

Rules, principles, and character are commandments at different scopes

God’s commandments are instructions that help you better understand how God would live in your place and why. God’s commandments can be expressed as rules, principles, or character qualities, each expressing how God would live in your place with higher fidelity. Rules are extractions from principles, which are extractions from character. All principles are emitted from character qualities, and all rules are emitted from principles.

A rule is a fixed description of how to act in a certain situation. Rules provide a way to transmit the greatest possible blessing to people unwilling to learn and live more like God than rules provide for. Rules are easiest for people to perceive, receive, and obey, but they are the most limited in how much of God’s character they can describe.

A principle is a generalized description of a higher order purpose. Principles are emitted extractions from character qualities, just as rules are extractions of principles. Principles are more difficult for people to perceive, receive, and obey than rules, but they are capable of describing much more of God’s character than rules. Principles prescribe behavior in terms of motives, transcending the limitations of rules, which are only applicable in specific situations. Principles are a blessing because they provide greater access to better behavior for those who are not yet willing or able to adopt God’s character.

Character is the composite of a person’s purpose, qualities, values, and beliefs.¹ Character qualities describe God in the greatest accuracy, depth, and breadth, but provide a standard beyond what almost anyone is willing to perceive and live. Character provides the only way to merge principles that overlap or define a priority order between principles that conflict. The fullest description that of God comes in the form of living examples of his character,² but these examples are the most difficult for people to perceive, receive, and obey. Those few who manage to understand, obtain, and live the character of God become most like him and can act as he does with great fidelity and extremely fine resolution in all situations in which they are placed.

Since the dawn of time, it has always been the case that almost everyone³ knew of another person who was more like God than they were. From Adam until now, God has painstakingly arranged for almost everyone to know of some other living person who had some character quality that was superior to the corresponding quality in themselves. While God’s character is most often demonstrated through someone more like him than you are, it is least perceived, received, or valued this way, due to the limitations of human nature. While the greatest demonstrations of God’s character leads to the greatest and longest lasting joy, they are also the hardest to see, as holiness is almost always far different than what people expect.

Much more of God’s character is learned from principles rather than examples of it in other humans. While it is easier to learn God’s character from principles than from human demonstration, it is much more difficult to learn as much in this way, as principles are a lower resolution channel than character. Principles are easier to perceive, receive, and value than character, but doing so still requires unusual virtue. While character is learned from the top down, through examples of those who already possess it, principles are typically learned from the bottom up, through abstraction from the rules that are emitted from them. People learn principles from observing common patterns across rules and formulating generalized representations of them. In order to extract God’s rules into principles, a person must be more intentional, honest, and alert than most people are. It is because so few are willing or able to receive commandments by character or principle that most people are most familiar with commandments given as rules. While rules reveal the least content about the character of God, they are the easiest to perceive, receive, and value.

You keep different tiers of commandments differently. Rules are obeyed, principles are fulfilled, and character is embodied and lived. Rules are the letter of the law. You obey a rule by following it exactly. Principles are the spirit of the law. You fulfill a rule by learning the principle from which it was derived. You keep a commandment of character by becoming like the one who gave it. Those that keep commandments of character think, feel, and act as the one who demonstrated the example to them at all times and in all things.

Rules provide an initial idea of the character of God, but cannot fully describe it

A rule is a description of behavior under a specified circumstance, an instance of an applied principle. Rules are meant to assist us in initiating our understanding of God’s character. Rules are waypoints on the path to similarity to Christ.⁴ Rules provide a beginning of a description of Christ’s character,⁵ but they can’t completely describe it. The objective of the gospel is to produce people who are actually more like Jesus, not just people who follow a list of rules.⁶ The point of rule-based commandments is to bring us to principles and on to the actual character of Christ.

The more you rely on rules for your understanding of God’s character, the less accurate your understanding of his character will be. God’s character cannot be described only by rules, because he lives by character qualities and principles. Each of God’s rules provides a low resolution encapsulation of some aspect of his character. While they provide greater specifics than principles, rules do not cover all situations, nor do they provide the necessary hierarchy of importance required to sufficiently allow for modeling what God would do when two rules conflict. A person who only has rules cannot accurately describe God, know what he would do in all situations, or why he would do it.

There are many blessings available from God that are not obtainable by those whose morality is based on rules.⁷ As all good stems from the character of God, each lapse in fidelity to the character of God created by the shortcomings of rules corresponds to a lack of blessings from being like him in that way. As long as your knowledge of him is limited to rules, you cannot say you know him. Because eternal life is to know him, rules-based morality or religion cannot provide you with eternal life.

Rules don’t apply outside of the specific situation they describe

A rule is a specific instruction for a specific situation. Unfortunately, rules do not usually come with a description of the situation under which they apply or exclusions to indicate when they do not. God’s pattern is to provide universal rules with personal exemptions or exclusions. For example, the commandment “thou shall not kill” did not specify the difference between human, animal, and plant life, nor did it differentiate between self-defense, the application of justice, or murder. It did not come with a description of times when it did or did not apply, but when God told Moses to kill whole nations, he did not argue.

Rules cannot describe how to live like Jesus outside of the limits of their scope. A rule applied outside of the situation it is designed for will describe and lead to behavior different than how Jesus would live under those circumstances. In any case where the limits of rules apply, the purpose of the principle will be best served by behavior other than the rule.

Upgrading from rules to principles provides you with better tools to achieve the best possible outcome independent of the particulars of the situation. While rules describe optimal behavior in specific situations, principles describe optimal behavior across specific situations. While rules are useful and helpful in the endeavor to learn more about God’s character, greater progress requires that we transcend situation-specific rules through adopting and living by principles.⁸

Rules can’t cover all situations

God’s commandments cover all situations, but his rules can’t.⁹ God’s commandments are instructions indicating his will. His will in any situation is how Jesus would think, feel, and act in that situation. There is no situation where Jesus’ thoughts, feelings, and actions are undefined. However, there are many situations where you will not be aware of a rule from God that prescribes what your thoughts, feelings, and actions should be. A list of rules that covered every possible situation would need to be as infinite as reality itself to cover every circumstance.¹⁰ For example, what color would Jesus paint the walls of your living room? What kind of car would Jesus buy? What would Jesus eat for breakfast? These questions and a seeming infinity of others remain unanswered by the rules-based commandments found in the scriptures. However, they are covered by the principles provided there.

While God can prescribe ideal behavior to anyone in any situation and provide the solution to any problem, the specific nature of rules makes it impossible to provide a sufficiently large list of rules to describe all possible situations.

Rules break down amid changing circumstances

Rules describe preexisting solutions to previously seen problems. Rules are ill-fitted to adapt to changing circumstances. The more complex life becomes, the less likely existing solutions are to apply to present problems. As complexity increases, conditions change, new details emerge, and constraints change. Any change in circumstance makes it less likely that the prior rule still describes the path to the ideal outcome. The more complex life becomes, the more the limitations of rules become obvious, and the more principles and character are needed to thrive in and overcome that complexity.

Rules are traps for those who want to do less than their best

Rules often become traps for those seeking to excuse themselves for doing less than their best.¹¹ Rules-based religious paradigms look at life through the filter of minimum requirements instead of maximal potential. God’s rules are meant to help us understand what he is like and become like him, but instead of using rules to answer the question “what would Jesus do?” many Christians only ask “what can I get away with?” They don’t seek to do the best they can, only the minimum they absolutely have to do.

The wicked will resist new and better ideas that violate their rules, because those ideas identify the areas of their character that aren’t aligned with God, removing their ability to be wicked without feeling guilty about it.¹² An unfortunate number of people remain in and venerate rules-based morality simply because it provides them with the ability to pursue what they know is less than best while feeling the least guilt—though few realize it.

It’s common to hear complaints about how difficult rules-based moral systems are to keep. The real challenge isn’t the difficulty of the system, but the difficulty of following it while maintaining your desires for anything else. Perceived difficulty in rules-based systems comes from a double mind and continued choice to sin. Rules-based systems are excellent at plainly manifesting limitations in submission to God, and until those limits are removed, no person is prepared to live commandments of principle or character.

Rules-based morality requires very little energy or thought. All you have to do is keep a list of rules that someone gives you. No matter the length of the list of rules, it will always be limited to a subset of life, and therefore easier to live than any principles- or character-based morality. Observing rules-based morality has a very high likelihood of giving someone an unrealistically high estimation of their own righteousness. Rules-based morality provides unrealistically high confidence. Unlike anything else known in reality, a rules-based moral system presents only two possibilities: everything is 100% correct, or nothing is. Finally, rules-based systems provide massive self-esteem for an exceedingly low price. With a rules-based moral code, there is no need to actually become a good person or provide others with actual value; if you keep the rules, you are as good a person as anyone could ever be, and you are better than anyone who doesn’t.

While the ease of conveyance and obedience of rules makes them more accessible to more people than principles or character, each of their properties also makes it more difficult to ascend beyond them. The packaged, finished nature of rules makes the transition towards actively thinking about and testing what you believe all the more difficult for those who live such rules-based systems. Rules-based people have little practice with critical thought and feel overwhelmed in doing so. They are often taught that to question their rules is to betray God. It takes them a great deal of faith to learn to segment their beliefs and assess individual confidence measures for each of them, based on specific reasons. Their binary confidence assessment doesn’t help, as it deprives them from any subtle onramp to a better way of thinking; in order to abandon their 100% confidence, their system tells them they must accept 0% confidence, and that is something that most people are not willing to do. Finally, anyone abandoning a rules-based moral code will likely have to accept a drastically downgraded self-worth, as they will need to face the reality that their rules probably failed to make them any better than those without them, failed to help them overcome significant challenges in reality, and may have actually made them significantly worse than they would have been without them. The only way to recover lost self-worth is to actually become the kind of person you assumed you were before.

Principles are harder to keep than rules

Professed Christians often present the Lord’s way as easier than anything less.¹³ For example, many believe that the principles Jesus taught during his mortal life are easier to live than the law of Moses.¹⁴ Principles will only seem easier than rules to those who inconsistently live them. Principles are more difficult to live than rules are to keep. A person unable to perfectly live rules is unable to live by principles.

The main difference between principles and rules is that a rule applies only to a specific situation, but principles scale and transfer across contexts. It is because principles are more generally described than rules and can be applied across any situation that they are much more difficult to keep than rules. There are infinitely more opportunities to break principles than there are to break rules.

To learn and live up to principles requires greater virtue than rules. Most people are not willing to become as good as they would need to be in order to live by principle.

Principles require a pure and noble motive. While you can obey a rule without understanding why it is necessary, principles specify action as the application of a motive. Principles specify what to do from the perspective of why to do it. Those who hold multiple motives will struggle to live by principles, because they will alternate between competing motives in response to challenges. The greatest motive is love, which is dedication to the benefit of others independent of the benefit to self.¹⁵ Love is a motive that cannot co-exist with any other.¹⁶

Principles require honesty. Dishonest people will apply principles only when it serves their selfish interests, greedily maintaining a false nobility. Meanwhile, they use principles to justify whatever their arbitrary emotions have enticed them to do.¹⁷

Principles require knowledge. Unlike obedience to rules, living by principle requires consideration of outcomes. The calculation of what benefits others the most requires knowledge of cause, effect, and value. What benefits the most cannot be stipulated with rigid rules for all, because what benefits the most differs between people and situations.

Greatest net benefit is not the same as the greatest number of people that receive some benefit.

Principles require understanding. Principles require the individual to interpret and apply them. When you upgrade from rules to principle, what is right can no longer be discerned merely by blindly following something or someone; You actually have to query the light that God has given you, researching your options and evaluating the long-term cost and benefit of each. You actually have to study God's word, pay attention to the world, and actually think critically about the choices before you. You have to ask questions that identify your blind spots and crack open your preconceived notions with greater understanding from God.

If a person were honest, intelligent, and benevolent, the following would be sufficient to guide them for all eternity: always do everything you can to improve all things as much as possible. Unfortunately, honesty, intelligence, and benevolence are all rare qualities, and even less abundant in combination. Most people have none of the three, and those who have any of these qualities do not have very much of them. A shortage of these three qualities make the full, plain truth much harder to see and seem less desirable to obtain. In his mercy, God presents the truth in reduced quantity and quality, adapted as needed to hearer’s preparation.

To cater to those who are less honest, intelligent, or good, lesser representations of this same truth must be given. In practice, this usually means by providing a rule. When a person can’t handle a principle, a rule is the next best thing.

It is possible to keep God’s rules and yet work against his purpose

A primary benefit and drawback of rules is that you do not need to understand their intent in order to follow them. While this enables more people to follow the rule if greater understanding were required, it also makes possible the exercise of the rule against the intended outcome.

The greatest example of using rules to argue against their intent is the treatment Jesus received at the hands of ruling Jews. The crimes they charged him with and most of the arguments they offered against his teaching and works were stipulated in the law of Moses, whose rules he indeed broke, but whose purpose he perfectly fulfilled.

Once people forget that the purpose of God’s commandments is to instruct them in becoming more like him,¹⁸ it becomes all too easy for religious practice to corrupt to the point that it turns the hearts of people away from God rather than towards him,¹⁹ makes them less like him rather than more like him,²⁰ and makes them hate rather than love those who are more like him.²¹ The Lord chastised the Pharisees for developing traditions so obviously against his purpose, but many Christians do the same or worse today.²²

It is possible to keep God’s rules without ever learning his purpose, and this is precisely what happens most of the time, even in the rare case that people actually keep the rules at all. God’s rules are meant to teach you about his principles,²³ but this will only happen inasmuch as you actively question the reasons for his rules²⁴ and pay attention to their consequences (see John 7:17).

God does not want you to be an animal²⁵ that unthinkingly follows his rules.²⁶ He wants you to learn how he is and choose to be like him.²⁷ As you live by the rules you receive and pay attention to their consequences, you will develop a greater understanding of God’s principles in ways you can’t when you are already satisfied with judgment based on the unthinking acceptance of rules alone.

Keeping principles requires breaking rules

Wherever a principle exists, you will find situations where keeping the principle requires breaking the rules. Rules are generated from principles, but they can never adequately replace the principles they were emitted from. Where contradictions between rules and principles exist, the spirit of the law requires you to violate the letter of the law.

Knowing when a rule violates a principle requires you to understand the principles a rule comes from. Never break a rule whose purpose you do not confidently understand. Your lack of understanding for why a rule exists is not the same as or an adequate substitution for understanding the principle it is based on! Until you understand a rule well enough that you would gladly bear the consequences of breaking it, you shouldn’t do so.

Keeping principles is always more important than keeping rules.²⁸ On several occasions, Jesus broke rules from the law of Moses in order to keep the principles of the law of Moses. For example, the Lord taught that the purpose of the Sabbath was more important than the rules given to govern it. When confronted by the Jews because his disciples had broken the law of Moses by harvesting and eating grain from the field they walked through while preaching, he replied: “The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath: Therefore the Son of man is Lord also of the sabbath.” (Mark 2:27-28) The principle of the sabbath wasn’t that man should not work that day, but that on it he should exclusively pursue God’s work. The eating of the grain furthered God‘s work as it allowed the Lord and his disciples to continue their preaching and walking.

How could Jesus break God’s rules and still not sin?²⁹ To be “perfect” isn’t to live all of the rules all of the time, but to always live the intent for which they are given. Jesus only ever broke the rules in the law of Moses when it was required to keep the principles in the law of Moses.³⁰ Whenever there was a conflict, Jesus lived the higher law—the law that more accurately described how the Father would live in his place.

Sin consists of doing less than the best you know.³¹ It is a sin to live a lower commandment when you know of a higher one, as higher commandments will always bring greater good. No commandment can excuse you for doing less than the greatest good that you know of. This is why Jesus spoke against the priest who refused to help the beaten man left for dead in order to preserve his ceremonial worthiness in the parable of the Good Samaritan (see Luke 10). The Lord used the commandments to help identify the best course of action, but never used them to excuse himself for doing less than what was best.

Principles are more succinct than rules

Principles concentrate on conveying intent, allowing the individual to figure out ideal behavior in any situation instead of overtly prescribing it in every particular situation. You can imagine commandments as a signal coming from God with a slider that modulates between intent and means. The more you describe the intent of a commandment, the more the commandment becomes a principle. The more you specify the means of achieving the intent, the more the commandment becomes a set of rules.

Principles are richer and more succinct than the rules derived from them. Because principles apply over every circumstance and at every scale, a single principle may subsume many rules without any loss of information. Principles are succinct because they only describe intent, while rules describe a means to accomplish that intent in a specific situation. A rule contains everything you need to know to obey it, but obedience to a principle requires knowing its intent. The spirit of the law cannot be applied without understanding why the law was given, including the cost and benefit of obedience, disobedience, and any alternatives.

In order to live a principle, you need to understand more about reality than you do with rules. A principle is implementable across the full spectrum of awareness of reality. The more about reality that you correctly understand, the more effectively you can pursue a principle.

The power of a principle is in how many rules it can absorb. Jesus demonstrated the brevity of principles by collapsing the more than 600 rules in the law of Moses down to 44 verses of principles in the Sermon on the Mount, and then condensing those down to the two great commandments. Jesus said that the entirety of the law of Moses and the teachings of the prophets emitted from the principles “love the Lord with all your heart, soul, and mind,” “love your neighbor as yourself.”³² On another occasion, he said all of the law and prophets are answered by the principle “treat others as you wish they would treat you,”³³ showing that you fulfill the first great commandment by living the second great commandment.³⁴ Every instruction God has ever given or will ever give aims to this supreme end: We are to be like Jesus is,³⁵ which is like the Father is,³⁶ by loving as he did.³⁷

Detecting violation of principles

The fact that principles scale and transfer to adjacent applications can be a powerful way to screen your life for hypocrisy, which is a form of dishonesty caused by a mismatch between what you do and why you do it. Principles scale, and if you violate your principles in small³⁸ or large³⁹ things, you are not a principled person.⁴⁰

Some people are not intelligent enough to realize when they violate their own principles. Others are smart enough to detect inconsistency, but too careless to notice. Still others know their hypocrisy well, but find sufficient comfort hiding behind the pretense of principle, having seared their conscience so thoroughly that their only source of shame is found in the negative opinions of others.

Jesus frequently pointed out the hypocrisy of others by identifying the principles the people pretended to keep, then measuring the consistency of their actions against them. For example, he pointed out that the Jews who attacked him for working miracles on the Sabbath didn’t actually oppose working on the Sabbath, since none ceased caring for their animals that day.⁴¹ The principle of the Sabbath is to provide a full day to dedicate to God’s work. Had they been living the principle, they would have celebrated Jesus’ work and not opposed it. You can detect hypocrisy through measuring the consistency of your intent across your actions. As an exercise, consider your actions in a specific area or timeframe. For each action, ask yourself why you do it, and then whether there is a better way to accomplish your stated intent. Pay particular attention to mismatches between seemingly big and seemingly small situations. You are a principled person when you continuously make any changes needed to bring your intent and actions into mutual alignment.⁴²

Error rate in rules, principles, and character

Rules, principles, and character are all susceptible to the error of using a less important commandment when a more important, mutually exclusive commandment is available. You should never allow a less important commandment to displace a more important commandment. Each commandment type also has unique potential sources of error.

Rules are the easiest type of commandment to equivocate. Rules can be applied to the wrong situation, or be wrong altogether. In either case, if you are observant and honest, you will notice that the intended outcomes do not occur, do what you can to correct for the damage done, and learn from your mistake. Of course, those who have an affinity for rules are the least likely to notice or learn from this kind of error, as they are likely to think that keeping the rule is its own reward, and might even consider it a mark of faith to live a rule in spite of obvious negative outcomes.

Principles are more difficult to equivocate than rules, primarily because their generality prevents applying them to the wrong situation, but they can still be applied poorly. Principles can still be badly implemented in ways that counter the intent of the principle. For example, it is good to save up money and invest, but it might be very bad to make a particularly poor investment.

Character qualities are the hardest to equivocate. Unlike rules or principles, character qualities do not require the formulation of a definition or the application of it, just an example. Character qualities are embodied in people, and all that is required to minimize error is to follow the example of the person who has the quality. For example, you might attempt to embody the quality of love, but if you detach it from the example of Christ, even if you live it perfectly, you will likely live the world’s corrupted version of it instead of the best version demonstrated by the Lord. The world’s version of love will do things like allow an adult child to live with you for free indefinitely without any improvement, but God’s love will not.

It is easy to get a rule wrong. It is harder to get a principle wrong— there are a lot more examples that you can use to fine tune it from thinking and the experiences of others before having to make the mistake with your own experiences. It is harder still to get a character quality wrong. Even if a potential character quality passes the gauntlet of thinking about it or applying the experiences of others to it, the moment you embark on living true to a character quality, you will be barraged by evidence of whether it is worth it or not.

It is better to follow a principle, even in specific situations where the rule seems to yield a better result

Rules are never as important as the principles they come from. The most beneficial time to keep the principle rather than the rule is precisely when keeping the rule seems to yield the greater outcome. In fact, this is the correct version of the mistaken idea that it is righteous to keep a rule even when it causes obvious net-negatives.

Reality is designed with laws of cause and effect that are intentionally obfuscated in order to provide an opportunity to exercise faith. This means that you will definitely find specific situations where better short-term outcomes are obtained through following a rule that violates applicable principles. However, you will never find a situation where better long-term outcomes are obtained through following a rule rather than a principle. This isn’t just because long-term outcomes of good decisions tend to far outweigh their short-term costs, but also because living by principle will spare you a lot more pain than it costs.

Understanding and living by principles can increase your ability to see the shortcomings of a given rule. You can leverage the fact that principles describe ideal behavior across all situations by abstracting the rule to a principle, applying it to other situations, and analyzing the results. The consequences of the rule in other applications may be more obvious or more extreme to you than in the original situation, suggesting that the rule isn’t as good as you thought. For example, it might seem like a good idea to criminalize certain statements because they can be so offensive, but the benefits of the principle of free speech across all circumstances far outweigh the costs in any particular.⁴³

The closer you become to how God operates, the better off you will be long-term. God’s laws of cause and effect are most fully described by character. Principles are a lower fidelity representation of those laws, and rules are a still lower fidelity. If you ever have the choice between keeping a principle or a rule, always keep the principle.

Character is more important than principles

Character supersedes principles and rules precisely because it is held and demonstrated by a living being. While learning God’s rules and principles teaches you about him, you can’t learn God’s character without coming to know him.

Rules, principles, and character each provide a mechanism for coming to know God better. While rules teach you how God behaves in certain situations, and principles teach you why God behaves as he does across all situations, only character teaches you who God is all of the time.

The purpose of God’s commandments is to teach us more about him and persuade us to be the same way.⁴⁴ His character does this more effectively than any other mechanism.

If God’s character is so much more important than principles and rules, why does God spend so much effort teaching them to us rather than just teaching us his character directly? If all of the commandments trace back to love,⁴⁵ why did God speak so many words, send so many servants, and even come down to die in order to convey the gospel to us? Why not simply reduce all of this down to “love one another, as I have loved you?” (John 15:12) The answer to these questions is found in the magnitude of the distance between how we are and how God actually is. God’s love is so far above human nature⁴⁶ that nothing less than what was done and is still being done could be sufficient to begin to understand the depth, breadth, and motive of his love for us. Human nature is so much worse than most admit or care to know. Very, very few people would respond well to God directly teaching his character to them, even if this were possible. The results would be disastrous,⁴⁷ as the brightness of the light turned away from determines the amount of light lost by doing so.⁴⁸ If God were to teach his character more directly, so many would rebel against it that they would destroy their ability to draw nearer to him.⁴⁹ Instead, he provides a gradient of options for getting to know him, more closely matched to the willingness of each individual. Those that come to know him through the initial means he offers them are given greater demonstrations of how he is as they live up to what he’s already given.

How to resolve conflicting commandments

There are circumstances in which God’s rules will seem to conflict with one another. For example, while each rule prescribes ideal behavior under some circumstance, circumstances can combine in ways that make those prescriptions mutually exclusive. Alternatively, new rules that come from God can displace prior instructions with an advanced idea of what he would think, feel, or do in a certain situation.

You should only ever violate one commandment for the purposes of obeying a more important but mutually exclusive commandment. When Satan tempted Jesus with scriptural commandments, Jesus countered with other scriptural commandments, not ideas he made up in his head.⁵⁰ Your own ideas are not sufficient to counter God’s commandments. There is a massive difference between saying, “I think there is a better way” and “I need to choose the better of two of God’s commandments.”

In all cases, apparent conflicts between commandments are not a license to disobey God, but rather an invitation to more fully take up his purpose and follow his example. Choosing to obey a greater commandment isn’t the same as choosing not to obey any commandment. Breaking rules isn’t a question of setting aside submission to God, but of choosing submission to God in something more important rather than submission to God in something less important.

All commandments are ultimately given to help us learn more about and live more like Jesus. New commandments reveal more of God, providing the next increment of instruction beyond former commandments toward the fullness of the character of the Father. The Lord taught⁵¹ that learning and living higher commandments in preference to lower commandments doesn’t break them, but fulfill them,⁵² attaining the intent for which they were given.

In the event that any two commandments aren’t possible to keep at the same time, keep the more important of the two. The intent of all commandments is to enable people to be as much like God as they are willing to, but not all commandments equally contribute to this end.⁵³ The most important commandment is always the one that most accurately describes how God would live in your place.

The most important metric for selecting the most important commandment is by measuring it against the crowning character quality of God, which is love.⁵⁴ God’s love is different than how the world would define it. God’s love is his willingness to suffer all things for the maximal benefit of all people. In all things, Jesus would choose what most benefits all people for the longest time.⁵⁵ In order to rank commandments according to net benefit, you have to understand the options available to you, and the cost and benefit of each, which is no small feat given the complexity of reality. As you learn more about reality, your morality will increase in similarity to God’s.

It isn’t always possible to keep all of God’s commandments all of the time, but it is always possible to always keep every commandment that doesn’t displace a more important commandment. This is one and the same as living the best way you know of at all times.

The process for changing rules, principles, and character

You should change your belief in a rule when you discover the rule is false, notice limits to it, find a better rule, or discover and live the principle that it came from. The best way to ensure you have the best set of rules is to always live the rules you believe. By doing so, you will quickly gather evidence for or against the rule, learn its limits, and gain motivation to exert greater effort in finding something better.

One barrier that prevents people from living principles is their willingness to change their principles in the moment as a result of an increase in cost for the living the principle or increased desire for something that violates it. You cannot be a principled person while violating your principles when they are tested. The benefits of living by principles are gained precisely by living them at all times and in all places. Principles can change, but you should view those changes as intentional and outside of the scope of what happens as a part of daily life. Changing your principles isn’t something you do when you are in the middle of something else. They should be changed through intentional thought and during set aside time.

Shifts to character qualities are done through looking for and finding examples of people with better character than you. You can assess your character qualities, choose qualities that are better than your own, and intentionally apply them in daily life. An effective strategy for making these changes is given in the author’s book Joy on Purpose.

Submission to God through rules, principles, and character

It is easy to pretend that you are willing to submit unconditionally to God by claiming you live at the principles level. Your willingness to obey a set of rules serves as a test against using principles as an excuse to avoid obeying rules. A person capable of living by principles is more than capable of living by rules. Unconditional submission to God never occurs in a person unwilling to first submit fully to a set of rules.

While a willingness to submit fully to a set of carnal rules is a useful tool in measuring your willingness to submit unconditionally to God, perfect obedience to a set of carnal rules does not indicate unconditional submission to God. It is possible to be fully obedient to a set of carnal rules without being willing to learn or obey principles. In the time of Jesus, there were many Jews willing to live the letter of the law of Moses, but unwilling to live the spirit of the law of Moses.⁵⁶ Many baptismal candidates have willingly subjected themselves to initial rules, only to fail to continue to obey God as he taught them more about himself.⁵⁷

Unconditional obedience to God, in its fullest sense, is only possible at the level of character. At the rules and principles levels, obedience to God is based at least in part on your appraisal of value in what God is asking of you. Unconditional obedience to God at the character level occurs when your decision to follow his instructions comes fully from your belief in the merits of God rather than your belief in the merits of the particular instruction.⁵⁸ When you truly believe that because God is more loving, wise, and benevolent than you, you have no reason to hesitate to gladly obey him in all things, no matter how difficult, painful, or bad the effect of doing so may seem in the moment.