A Reflection on the Intrinsic and Extrinsic Value of Human- and God-Ethics in the Story of Moses and Khidr in the Surah The Cave 

This reflection is indeed a response to my previous interpretation of this story a while ago, where I criticized Khidr for killing a young boy, without committing any crime, just for the fact that based on Khidr's God given foreknowledge, he knew the boy would become wickedly rebellious and disturb his righteous believer parents.  In this reflection, I will reject my first interpretation and discuss the qualitatively different intrinsic and extrinsic values of the ethical for humans and for God.  I repeat my conclusion here:

To recapitulate: two major elements separate us from divine sources who have foresight and foreknowledge of future.  First, it is the fact that we are bound to pain and pleasure and these two are bound to becoming, our finitude and death, on the one hand, and grandiosity, greed, and will-to-power, on the other.  We can intensify our pleasures momentarily through sex and drugs.  We can take pleasure in luxury and ownership of palaces, towers, and cities.  As well, we can take an ascetic path and starve ourselves to death or to survive on the minimum, on the other extreme.  Khidr and divine forces, because of non-acquired knowledge of unseen, establish a completely different relation with their existence.  Their ethics is not grounded in how to deal with their limitation and lack of foresight, and because of their infallibility their ethics is purely consequentialist, i.e., what they do won’t affect their essence, and they do what serves the divine telos.  So, Khidr was ethically justified to kill a young boy who hasn’t committed any crime, but we are not, because we have neither the essential nature of Khidr, nor his divine foreknowledge. 

The second factor is that we as mortals have a spiritual dimension, which is unique to us; it is internal and intrinsic to our existence.  The story of secularism, materialism, and reductive Darwinian evolution questions this spiritual and intrinsic value and instead sets survival as the only measure of evolution.   No wonder that three major 19^th c. philosophers who affected the whole course of Western civilization: Mill, Nietzsche, and Marx set hedonism and will-to-power as two major motifs for human existence.  For Mill and Marx, at best our spiritual dimension, if we can use this term, is confined to a sense of human solidarity or species-being or variations of humanistic-naturalism.  But thousands years of scriptures have heralded and cultivated the message that we are more than beasts, desire for survival, or nature.  We have a spiritual destiny.  And this spiritual destiny can be fulfilled the best if we set our moral conduct on intrinsic value of our action rather than focusing on consequences.  Not strange that all major religions such as Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Vedas and Upanishads, and Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and even indigenous religions, and philosophers Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Neo-Platonists, even Stoics and Kant reject consequentialism based on hedonism and urge us to attune our internal disposition to “doing good” for its own sake, for its intrinsic value.  This non-consequentialist and intrinsic moral conduct says something essential about our finitude both in terms of our existence (survival and death, pain and pleasure) and lack of foresight and limited knowledge.  As well, the imperative of pursuing the intrinsic value of our moral actions hints to our spiritual destiny and growth. 

So, human ethics is essentially intrinsic, which means I ought to do good for what it does to my inner sense of self, because I have freedom of the will to violate this inner sense or to aid it.  In another word, I am not an angel or a miraculous extraordinary creature such as Khidr.  As well, due to our existential limitedness we don’t have knowledge of far future.  So, we ought to do good, in a non-consequentialist sense, because we become what we do.  If I do good, I purify my inner disposition and create a character.  As Aristotle puts it, virtue is a matter of habit (Ethos=habit): while what we do serves our survival, and in religious terms, it serves our salvation, our body-soul absorbs whatever we do into its dispositional structure.  The strange insight is that there is no becoming or being, as we know it, in God.  In this sense, God is ineffable to us as the ground of Being does not belong to the world of becoming and contingency.  As, ancients said, God’s essence or inner disposition is God’s existence.  Or more accurately, there is no duality between God's action or bringing about things into existence and God's essence.  God’s actions are consequentialist: to bring about the good outcome out of divine will.  God’s actions have no intrinsic value for God, because they can’t affect God’s essence: the divine value is God’s doings; there is no becoming in God.  God and good is the word-deed of God and the word-deed of God is God and good. 

The Story of Moses and Khidr 

“Moses said to his servant, ‘I will not rest until I reach the place where the two seas meet, even if it takes me years!’ but when they reached the place where the two seas meet, they had forgotten all about their fish, which made its way into the sea and swam away. They journeyed on, and then Moses said to his servant, ‘Give us our lunch! This journey of ours is very tiring,’ and [the servant] said, ‘Remember when we were resting by the rock? I forgot the fish– Satan made me forget to pay attention to it– and it [must have] made its way into the sea.’ ‘How strange!’ Moses said, ‘Then that was the place we were looking for.’ So, the two turned back, retraced their footsteps, and found one of Our servants– a man to whom We had granted Our mercy and whom We had given knowledge of Our own.  Moses said to him, ‘May I follow you so that you can teach me some of the right guidance you have been taught?’  The man said, ‘You will not be able to bear with me patiently. How could you be patient in matters beyond your knowledge?’”  Moses said, ‘God willing, you will find me patient. I will not disobey you in any way.’ 70 The man said, ‘If you follow me then, do not query anything I do before I mention it to you myself.’” (18:60-70)

This is the strange story of Moses and Khidr in the Quran.  The first part reminds me of Tarkovsky’s movie The Stalker (Guide), where the scientist forgets his knapsack and leaves Stalker and the writer going back to find it.  The writer says we should wait for the scientist.  Stalker (the guide) asks the writer to proceed as the Zone constantly changes and they can’t wait or go back to find the scientist.  After going through a cave-like water shed, they find the scientist on the other side with his knapsack.  The scientist wonders how they got there, because he had to crawl on his four to get back to find his knapsack and Stalker is scared of this strange story and can’t find confidence for the time being to go forward.  He asks the scientist and writer to stay there to rest for a while and indeed it is the moment of reflection for all. 

Similarly, the junction of two seas, where Moses will meet a special creature with divine foreknowledge, is not a static point.  It is a point where the fish, which they had prepared for food comes back to life and swims away.  It was revealed to Moses where the fish comes back to life is where the two seas meet.  Satan distracted them not to notice the fish coming back to life.  Moses and his servant had to go back to the rock where they forgot their fish, and there they found Khidr, a mystical miraculous man, who had certain non-acquired knowledge, laduni knowledge in contradistinction to Moses’ acquired knowledge through evidence and reason and God’s commands .  Here also we have two kinds of ethics.  The ethics of immediate results or what in Islamic literature is called knowledge of external standards of justice (zahir) and the ethics of foresight or foreknowledge, or knowledge of inward knowledge (batin) of unseen, what one might along with Kierkegaard call: teleological suspension of the [external=zahir] ethics for the divine [internal=batin] ethics.  This is a difficult spiritual food to digest, because of the following:

“They travelled on. Later, when they got into a boat, and the man made a hole in it, Moses said, ‘How could you make a hole in it? Do you want to drown its passengers? What a strange thing to do!’ He replied, ‘Did I not tell you that you would never be able to bear with me patiently?’ Moses said, ‘Forgive me for forgetting. Do not make it too hard for me to follow you.’ And so they travelled on. Then, when they met a young boy and the man killed him, Moses said, ‘How could you kill an innocent person? He has not killed anyone! What a terrible thing to do!’ He replied, ‘Did I not tell you that you would never be able to bear with me patiently?’ Moses said, ‘From now on, if I query anything you do, banish me from your company– you have put up with enough from me.’ And so they travelled on. Then, when they came to a town and asked the inhabitants for food but were refused hospitality, they saw a wall there that was on the point of falling down and the man repaired it. Moses said, ‘But if you had wished you could have taken payment for doing that.’”  (18:71-78)

Moses’ objections to Khidr represent the external [zahir] acquired knowledge of justice and ethics.  The ethical as that which has intrinsic value—i.e., we do it for its own sake not for any worldly result alone— is based on divine given ethics and human reason needs to fathom its inner logic.  The inner logic of divine and human ethics is the same, otherwise Moses and Khidr couldn’t later converse the issue of Khidr’s violations of ethical verdicts and come to agreement.  If the inner logic of divine and human ethics were not the same, Moses couldn’t even be sure that Khidr is a representative of God and not devil.  Moses and Khidr belong to the same divine goodness.  However, we are dealing with two different ethical apparatuses: human ethics and God-ethics.  These two share the same essential core but God-ethics is not smeared with evil in any sense, while human ethics is based on good and evil: we are engrained with good and evil, and the good repels evil or vice versa. 

So, human ethics is essentially intrinsic, which means I ought to do good for what it does to my inner sense of self, because I have freedom of the will to violate this inner sense or to aid it.  In another word, I am not an angel or a miraculous extraordinary creature such as Khidr.  As well, due to our existential limitedness we don’t have knowledge of far future.  So, we ought to do good, in a non-consequentialist sense, because we become what we do.  If I do good, I purify my inner disposition and create a character.  As Aristotle puts it, virtue is a matter of habit (Ethos=habit): while what we do serves our survival, and in religious terms, it serves our salvation, our body-soul absorbs whatever we do into its dispositional structure.  The strange insight is that there is no becoming or being, as we know it, in God.  In this sense, God is ineffable as the ground of Being does not belong to the world of becoming and contingency of matter.  As, ancients said, God’s essence or inner disposition is God’s existence.  Or more accurately, there is no duality between God's action or bringing about things into existence and God's essence.  God’s actions are consequentialist: to bring about the good outcome out of divine will.  God’s actions have no intrinsic value for God, because they can’t affect God’s essence: the divine value is God’s doings; there is no becoming in God.  God and good is the word-deed of God and the word-deed of God is God and good.   Thus, Khidr explains the wisdom of his actions to Moses in this way:

“He said, ‘This is where you and I part company. I will tell you the meaning of the things you could not bear with patiently: the boat belonged to some needy people who made their living from the sea and I damaged it because I knew that coming after them was a king who was seizing every [serviceable] boat by force. The young boy had parents who were people of faith, and so, fearing he would trouble them through wickedness and disbelief, we wished that their Lord should give them another child– purer and more compassionate–in his place. The wall belonged to two young orphans in the town and there was buried treasure beneath it belonging to them. Their father had been a righteous man, so your Lord intended them to reach maturity and then dig up their treasure as a mercy from your Lord. I did not do [these things] of my own accord: these are the explanations for those things you could not bear with patience.’” (18:78-82)

In explaining his actions, Khidr shows the goodness of the consequences of his actions.  He is purely consequentialist, because his inner divine disposition is immutable and his foreknowledge of the future is his only rationale of action.  Khidr did violate certain immediate human ethical verdicts for the goodness of saving righteous people.  We ought to do good, and the inner sense of “good” is the same for us and God.  Indeed, God endowed us with this inner meaning of “good”.  We ought not to hurt or to kill people, without justification or out of malice.  We ought not break our promises.  We ought to serve people, the destitute, children and elders.  Aristotle calls “good” as “the end” for the natural functional tendency of beings.  We are all here to fulfill our function as human-spiritual, and not merely natural, beings.  Although the telos=good=end is set for us by God, in our free will we ought to move towards that goal with God’s help.  We are equipped by reason and inner compass to realize the law of karma: whatever we do, it has external and internal effects.  We do something to other beings and through our very actions something being done to us. 

In the structure of the story of Moses and Khidr, we have a series of ethical violations of acquired knowledge of justice, i.e., we know that sabotaging a boat which belongs to another person, or more importantly killing a young boy without him committing any crime, are intrinsically wrong for us.  God’s commands also urge us not to commit such immoral actions.  However, Khidr commits those immoral actions, because of his knowledge of future.   There is a qualitative difference between us, mortals, and divine forces.   We are inherently limited to pain and pleasure, to vulnerability and death.  We need to take care of ourselves and survival can become as the sole purpose of one’s life, as a variation of falling in spiritual nihilism.  Historically we have evolved to see and experience ourselves as spiritual beings in addition to the demands of natural survival. Divine scriptures and messages have guided us to the steep direction of rising above our whims and our short term unbridled desires and pleasures and aim at spiritual growth and justice—with the declaration that we ought to liberate ourselves from the limited consequentialism of pleasures of this world, to achieve salvation in the world to come. 

As I argued before, humans are unable to see the future and their perception of consequences is limited and short sighted.  An ethics based on consequences, such as utilitarianism can be useful only for local policies not to be taken as a general ethical-spiritual principle on how to act in general.  For example, the logic of consumerism in capitalism couldn’t see far enough and in practice we polluted our oceans and air—and our soul.  W caused deforestations and destruction of natural resources, and fell into vanity of hedonism and will-to-power—or humanism at best.  Our excess and greed are responsible for the extinction of 20% of species on this plant and the pending global warming and environmental disaster.  So, we need to focus on God’s commands of goodness and act in terms of improvement of our internal disposition.  My argument is that Khidr and divine forces are essentially consequentialist, because their essence is infallible and immutable and because of their foreknowledge of unseen.  So, it is justifiable for Khidr to kill a young boy who will become wickedly rebellious for some good consequences, but it is not legitimate for us to do so.    

Divine Mercy Intervenes in the Destiny of Individuals at the Disposal of the Telos of History

Based on my own personal experience and according to scriptures, Khidr and divine forces are at work here on the earth and in the whole universe.  The story of Khidr and Moses clearly shows that God actively intervenes in the world.  Khidr makes a hole in a boat to help the owner of the boat from an aggressive King.  He kills a young boy whose nature and future is known to him as wicked.  He would become a rebellious son who would put his pious parents in trouble and God wanted a better son, purer and more compassionate for them.  Khidr repairs a wall to hide the treasure beneath it for the orphans of a righteous father as a mercy from God.  What is strange is this individuation of care and mercy toward humans by God.  God intervenes to help the orphan children of a righteous man.  God kills a young boy, who would become wicked, to help his pious parents.  God helps the poor man to save his boat from a tyrant.  There is an intrinsic value in God’s intervention: it is justice, care, and mercy for the righteous and believer.  There is an extrinsic value in God’s intervention: it is spiritual growth of believers individually and as a whole, based on God’s predestination, plan, and intervention. 

However, the intrinsic and extrinsic value of God’s intervention and guidance is qualitatively and existentially different from our consequentialist and non-consequentialist moral behavior.   We can’t imitate God in these relations.  And this is an important lesson that we forget.  We experience and desire mercy as God’s intrinsic value is mercy, the giver of mercy, to give us the gift of life and to help us to spiritually grow, to deserve God’s company.  And the intrinsic value of divine mercy of guidance includes suffering and “punishment”.  God’s infliction of suffering is mercy too.  It is not difficult to understand that we suffer from poverty of existence compared to God.  We can’t help and sustain ourselves.  Based on God’s foreknowledge, God may decide to erase a generation of wrongdoers.  There would be so many children and young boys and girls among this destroyed generation.  We are unable to measure God’s behavior based on our human scale.  It is not difficult to understand that our scales are so different.  We are focused on our pain and pleasure and at best our species being or an affection for all living beings.  God is the eternal force who has created all beings and based on God’s knowledge of unseen, God might decide to destroy part or all a species.  Who are we to judge?  We ought to abandon the arrogance of protest and pretense of knowledge.  We should remember constantly the poverty of our existence and the fact that we can’t imitate God’s actions.    

God’s intervention and action, beside sustaining the order of the worlds in universe, is for our growth, not for God’s growth.  God’s extrinsic actions is consequentialist or teleological but the telos is the divine foresight and foreknowledge of the outcome of all events and God actively participates in history to take us to that direction, individually and collectively.  Our existence and wisdom, mercy, and love in our heart are gifts of God to us.  In that sense, we carry the spirit of God or we are the image of God.  But we shouldn’t get confused about the meaning of this inherent mercifulness and call ourselves “God” or try to imitate God based on our limited understanding.  So, we ought not to try to act like Khidr to kill a young boy as he did, because we don’t have knowledge of his future.  God’s order to us is not to kill any human or living being without justification and reason, as life is sacred.  But Khidr is not bound by this order.  Because Khidr has a different kind of knowledge, the knowledge (laduni) of future, and thus he implements God’s order, which is based on the intrinsic value of mercy for the righteous.  The life of a wicked person, even if he is a young boy, even if he has not committed any crime now, might be taken by God, and the act of killing doesn’t have an intrinsic effect on Khidr, while the act of killing an innocent or even not innocent person has an intrinsic effect on us.  We are not Khidr, we are humans with limited existence and knowledge.  God’s command to us is different from God’s command to Khidr.  We ought to digest this completely and clearly while reading this story in the surah The Cave, otherwise we may fall into atrocity.

But one may object that “if God kills a young boy who hasn’t committed any crime in the story of Khidr, what is divine justice?”  Once, I wrote the following.  Where do you think I fell astray?

 

“If I were the sojourner of Khidhr I would not be perplexed by his making a hole in a boat, because I could imagine there was somehow longer term goodness in this action.  Remember Khidhr is the representative of a benevolent God whose actions may seem violating some ethics (like making a hole in a boat) but still it is for a further ethical goodness.  I would be patient when Khidhr asked me to make a wall in the middle of nowhere, again because I believe in his goodness and farsightedness and extraordinary vision and wisdom of future.  But when he killed the child or before committing the crime I would hold his hand and would adamantly tell him this could not be the command of God, as Moses did, and this is Devil’s teeth, as Moses didn’t.  Khidhr would argue with me that, no it is all godly because this little child will become an in-obedient indolent and insolent adult and his parents will suffer from his denial of religion and criminal character [80. “As for the youth, his parents were people of faith, and we feared that he would grieve them by obstinate rebellion and ingratitude.”]  I still would say to Khidhr: this argument is so loose and groundless that I doubt it has come from God.  You say because this child will become, say, Hitler, Antichrist, or Dajjal, so I have to kill him now.  I say this is not godly and God doesn’t ask for it.  God doesn’t ask you to kill a child, who has not yet committed any crime, for his possible future crimes.  If everything about our lives is so determined then there is no point of making a choice and act for betterment or even repent.  Secondly, we don’t punish people for what they have not yet done but is likely to do in the long run.  Even preeminent wars have rules.  The ethical act has INTRINSIC and KARMIC value, not committing murder has INTRINSIC and KARMIC value.  To repent from killing and harming has an intrinsic and karmic value. They are not INSTRUMENTAL only for some further good.  Therefore, if you, Khidhr, kill this child now, it is Unjust and God cannot be unjust.”

In the light of what I said up to here, it should be clear now where I went astray.  My major argument is this: “You say because this child will become, say, Hitler, Antichrist, or Dajjal, so I have to kill him now.  I say this is not godly and God doesn’t ask for it. God doesn’t ask you to kill a child, who has not yet committed any crime, for his possible future crimes.  If everything about our lives is so determined then there is no point of making a choice and act for betterment or even repent.”

In the story of Khidr and Moses, Khidr argues “The young boy had parents who were people of faith, and so, fearing he would trouble them through wickedness and disbelief, we wished that their Lord should give them another child– purer and more compassionate–in his place.”  This is a concrete reason for a concrete action.  And who knows if this is not also God's mercy to this boy, whose wicked actions in future would bring hell upon him.  The story insists that God has foreknowledge of all events, but it doesn’t say that God would kill ALL would-become-wicked boys.  So, the argument about Hitler and Antichrist is irrelevant, because there are all sort of wicked people in the world and God let them be, because they perform a part in God’s plan. 

Moreover, I was unable to understand the point of divine justice.  I measured this justice according to human intrinsic value.  As I discussed above, the divine intrinsic and extrinsic values are different from ours.  We, humans, ought not to kill any human being, without justification and before they commit any crime.  This is a divine decree in the Quran, Bible, and Torah.  But this is not applicable to God, because God’s justice might be to kill a would-become-wicked-boy, even if he hasn’t committed any crime, if for example he might cause so much pain for their righteous believer parents.  In the story of Khidr, the saving of boy’s parents from the ills of their son, as well as letting Hitler or possibly Antichrist emerge, fit within God’s destination for us—to cultivate us.  One should remember that our being here on the earth, according to scriptures, is the field of test and for our cultivation, otherwise God already knows the result of the test.  Roughly speaking, it is like we want to save an endangered species and create a proper habitat for them.  We might already know how many of them will flourish and procreate, but our knowing doesn’t change the fact that the saved individuals of this endangered species must flourish and procreate in practice and for their own survival.

The second part of my argument also falls apart.  I wrote: “Secondly, we don’t punish people for what they have not yet done but is likely to do in the long run.  Even preeminent wars have rules.  The ethical act has INTRINSIC and KARMIC value, not committing murder has INTRINSIC and KARMIC value.  To repent from killing and harming has an intrinsic and karmic value. They are not INSTRUMENTAL only for some further good.”

I forgot that, yes, “we—humans” ought not to punish people for what they have not yet done, but God’s measure of justice is different from human justice.  We know that generations of children and families might die in wars and famine or natural disasters.  This is indeed one of the major arguments about the problem of evil in the world and God’s justice.  The fact is that if a crop of wheat is infected, so many young bushes also might die or we might burn them.  But as we speak about ourselves, it seems so grave if God deems to destroy a generation or a city of humans altogether, according to God’s wisdom.  The point of story of Moses and Khidr in the surah The Cave is that “we are not  able to understand God’s action, because we don’t have knowledge of future.”  And while God is just, we are not able to fathom the depth of God’s behavior due to our lack of knowledge.

The end of my argument, where I talk about intrinsic value of the ethical, is completely irrelevant.  I wrote: “The ethical act has INTRINSIC and KARMIC value, not committing murder has INTRINSIC and KARMIC value.  To repent from killing and harming has an intrinsic and karmic value. They are not INSTRUMENTAL only for some further good.”  As I argued before, the intrinsic and extrinsic value of God’s ethics is different from the intrinsic and extrinsic value of ethical behavior for us.

To recapitulate: two major elements separate us from divine sources who have foresight and foreknowledge of future.  First, it is the fact that we are bound to pain and pleasure and these two are bound to our finitude and death, on the one hand, and grandiosity, greed, and will-to-power, on the other.  We can intensify our pleasures momentarily through sex and drugs.  We can take pleasure in luxury and ownership of palaces, towers, and cities.  As well, we can take an ascetic path and starve ourselves to death or to survive on the minimum, on the other extreme.  Khidr and divine forces, because of non-acquired knowledge of unseen, establish a completely different relation with their existence.  Their ethics is not grounded in how to deal with their limitation and lack of foresight, and because of their infallibility their ethics is purely consequentialist, i.e., what they do won’t affect their essence, and they do what serves the divine telos.  So, Khidr was ethically justified to kill a young boy who hasn’t committed any crime, but we can’t, because we have neither the essential nature of Khidr, nor his divine foreknowledge. 

The second factor is that we as mortals have a spiritual dimension, which is unique to us; it is internal and intrinsic to our existence.  The story of secularism, materialism, and reductive Darwinian evolution questions this spiritual and intrinsic value and instead sets survival as the only measure of evolution.   No wonder that three major 19^th c. philosophers who affected the whole course of Western civilization: Mill, Nietzsche, and Marx set hedonism and will-to-power as two major motifs for human existence.  For Mill and Marx, at best our spiritual dimension, if we can use this term, is confined to a sense of human solidarity or species-being or variations of humanistic-naturalism.  But thousands years of scriptures have heralded and cultivated the message that we are more than beasts, desire for survival, or nature.  We have a spiritual destiny.  And this spiritual destiny can be fulfilled the best if we set our moral conduct on intrinsic value of our action rather than focusing on consequences.  Not strange that all major religions such as Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Vedas and Upanishads, and Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and even indigenous religions, and philosophers Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Neo-Platonists, even Stoics and Kant reject consequentialism based on hedonism and urge us to attune our internal disposition to “doing good” for its own sake, for its intrinsic value.  This non-consequentialist and intrinsic moral conduct says something essential about our finitude both in terms of our existence (survival and death, pain and pleasure) and lack of foresight and limited knowledge.  As well, the imperative of pursuing the intrinsic value of our moral actions hints to our spiritual destiny and growth.  

So, human ethics is essentially intrinsic, which means I ought to do good for what it does to my inner sense of self, because I have freedom of the will to violate this inner sense or to aid it.  In another word, I am not an angel or a miraculous extraordinary creature such as Khidr.  As well, due to our existential limitedness we don’t have knowledge of far future.  So, we ought to do good, in a non-consequentialist sense, because we become what we do.  If I do good, I purify my inner disposition and create a character.  As Aristotle puts it, virtue is a matter of habit (Ethos=habit): while what we do serves our survival, and in religious terms, it serves our salvation, our body-soul absorbs whatever we do into its dispositional structure.  The strange insight is that there is no becoming or being, as we know it, in God.  In this sense, God is ineffable to us as the ground of Being does not belong to the world of becoming and contingency.  As, ancients said, God’s essence or inner disposition is God’s existence.  Or more accurately, there is no duality between God's action or bringing about things into existence and God's essence.  God’s actions are consequentialist: to bring about the good outcome out of divine will.  God’s actions have no intrinsic value for God, because they can’t affect God’s essence: the divine value is God’s doings; there is no becoming in God.  God and good is the word-deed of God and the word-deed of God is God and good.