El Fin No Justifica Los Medios in English means "the means does not justify the end". This principle was used during my law days when some of our professors mentioned it during lectures and I also read this in some decided cases. Anyway, why this title? This morning on my way to work that word came back to my mind "the means does not justify the end". As I pray and ask the Lord for wisdom to help me understand and apply the word appropriately for me today, various illustrations flowed out from my mind from natural to spiritual dimensions.
As to natural dimension, He gave me an illustration of a man who paid his tax using illegal means. From the illustration, though the taxpayer paid the tax which is legal however, the means he used to pay it was not legal. Ergo, the principle "the means does not justify the end" applies.
As to spiritual dimension, which really made a great impact for my walk in Christ today. The Lord reminded me of His principle and word in the bible in Romans 2:5-11 (The Message) - "You're not getting by with anything. Every refusal & avoidance of God adds fuel to the fire. The day is coming when it's going to blaze hot & high, God's fiery & righteous judgment. Make no mistake: In the end you get what's coming to you-Real Life for those who work on God's side, but to those who insist on getting their own way & take the path of least resistance, Fire! If you go against the grain, you get splinters, regardless of which neighborhood you're from, what you're parents taught you, what schools you attended. But if you embrace the way God does things, there are wonderful payoffs, again without regard to where you are from or how you're brought up......God pays no attention to what others say (or what you think) about you. He makes up his own mind".
Moreover, in Romans 8:1-11 (The Message) it is written: " With the arrival of Jesus, the Messiah, that fateful dilemma is resolved. Those who enter into Christ's being-here-f0r-us no longer have to live under a continuous, low-lying black cloud. A new power is in operation. The Spirit of life in Christ, like a strong wind, has magnificently cleared the air, freeing you from a fated lifetime of brutal tyranny at the hands of sin & death. God went for the jugular when he sent his own Son. He didn't deal with the problem as something remote & unimportant. In his Son, Jesus, he personally took on the human condition, entered the disordered mess of struggling humanity in order to set it right once and for all. The law code, weakened as it always was by fractured human nature, could never have done that. The law always ended up being used as a Band-Aid on sin instead of a deep healing of it. And now what the law code asked for but we couldn't deliver is accomplished as we, instead of redoubling our own efforts, simply embrace what the Spirit is doing in us. Those who think they can do it on their own end up obsessed with measuring their own moral muscle but never get around to exercising it in real life. Thos who trust God's action in them find that God's Spirit is in them - living and breathing God! Obsession with self in these matters is a dead end; attention to God leads us out into the open, into a spacious, free life. Focusing on the self is the opposite of focusing of God. Anyone completely absorbed in self ignores God, ends up thinking more about self than God. That person ignores who God is and what he is doing. And God isn't pleased at being ignored. But if God himself has taken up residence in your life, you can hardly be thinking more of yourself than of him. Anyone, of course, who has not welcome him, in whom he dwells-even though you still experience all the limitations of sin-you yourself experience life on God's terms. It stands no reason, doesn't it, that if the alive-and-present God who raised Jesus from the dead moves into your life, he'll do the same thing in you that he did in Jesus, bringing you alive to himself? When God lives & breathes in you (and he does, as surely as he did in Jesus), you are delivered from that dead life. With his Spirit living in you, your body will be as alive as Christ's!
"So, don't you see that we don't owe this old do-it-yourself life one red cent. There's nothing in it for us, nothing at all. The best thing to do is give it a decent burial and get on with your new life. God's Spirit beckons. There are things to do and places to go! - Romans 8:12-14 (The Message)
Hence for me, the means justify the end is correct IF the means are according to the will of God. However, if the means are not according to the will of God, the means does not justify the end!
