Immovable Markers
Differing Weights and Measures
Confusing Meanings
Babylon Needs Confusion
In 1813, the U. S. Treasury Department defined a legal yard using lines engraved on a certain bronze bar. Of course, this bar was not available everywhere. For every day use, such as in dry goods stores, for example, wooden and metal copies of this bar, called “yardsticks” proliferated. Of course, unscrupulous individuals sometimes produced shortened yardsticks for selling, and somewhat lengthened ones for buying.
Immovable Markers
To distinguish themselves from such people, honest merchants began driving brass tacks into their store countertops at standard intervals of feet and yards, for example. Any movement of these tacks would leave tell-tale marks behind, so these brass tacks became a symbol of reliable measurements.
So the expression, “Let’s get down to brass tacks,” meant something like, “We need to be real, be honest and accountable.”
Differing Weights and Measures
It isn’t just consumers who care about reliable measurements. Proverbs 11:1 is only one of many texts with the same fundamental message: ”
Differing weights and differing measures,
Both of them are abominable to the Lord.
Nowhere in the Bible does God give perfect weights and measures for exchanging commodities. All weights and measures are of human devising. So God cannot be advocating “perfect” weights and measures. Instead, he insists on consistent ones. Yards vs. Meters doesn’t matter. Keeping them consistent and honest does.
Confusing Meanings
Of course, Babylon does not like consistent weights and measures any more than it likes landmarks. Honesty and consistency get in the way of Babylonian ambitions and designs. But these days such actual weights and measures are defined by such things as the wavelength of certain frequencies of light. It becomes more and more difficult to tamper with such measurements.
What Babylon does have access to, ironically, is language; words. Ever since God confused the languages of Babel’s builders, they have been confusing us by changing the meaning of words.
For example: Love. Love once meant commitment, devotion, and affection. Today it means anything from the satiation of appetite to casual liking. “Love scenes” in literature and film rarely involve devotion and discipline these days. On the contrary, they usually involve unbridled lust. Then there’s “love” for pizza, or the color blue, or a popular song—anything, really.
Songs tell us “All we need is love,” without specifying what type of love is being signified. You many wonder why all this matters. Well, when the scriptures tell us “God is love,” what are we to make of that? Is he a “warm feeling?” Is he, as a popular line defining love goes, “Never having to say you’re sorry?” Is he whatever positive impulse you perceive?
The assault on language is essentially an assault on meaning. I remember a discussion some years ago with a young minister. He said how impressed he was with a certain post-modern philosopher. This philosopher taught, he said, “There are no true statements, only linguistic constructions designed to perpetuate power relationships.”
In an attempt to get down to brass tacks, to deal with immovable standards, I asked, “Does that include the statement you just made?” He had no answer. I then added, “That’s the problem I have with such ideas. They’re self-defeating, like sawing off the tree limb you’re sitting on. If you tell me there are ‘no truths’ you cannot in the next instant expect me to believe you have told me a truth. It makes no sense at all.”
We hear the language of such confusion, the language of Babylon, all around us. We are told an august body that “Present-day believers in an absolute truth identified with virtue and justice are neither willing nor desirable companions for the defenders” of a certain cause which is held to be a moral good, in other words, a virtue. So, the sentence actually says that “”Present-day believers in an absolute truth identified with virtue and justice are neither willing nor desirable companions for the defenders of [this particular virtue].”
This gives rise to a number of troubling questions, such as, “Do real virtues come in conflict with one another?” “Can a virtue not embody or apply an absolute truth but still be virtuous?” “How do we know if something is virtuous?”
But in Babylon, we are not supposed to ask such questions. If we do, we shall soon discover how Babylon deals with troublesome questioners.
Babylon Needs Confusion
Babylon has no patience with brass tacks, with immovable standards. They get in the way of what Babylonians want to do.
