AI is Intellectually Ethical

Jesus Condemns Human Traditions

Please turn in your Bible to Matthew chapter 15, that can be found on page 820 if you're using the Pew Bible. Matthew chapter 15, when you have that, please stand. Then Pharisees and scribes came to Jesus from Jerusalem and said, Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders?

For they do not wash their hands when they eat. He answered them, and why do you break the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition? For God commanded, honor your father and your mother, and whoever reviles father or mother must surely die.

But you say, if anyone tells his father or mother what you would have gained from me is given to God, he need not honor his father. So for the sake of your traditions, you have made void the word of God.

You hypocrites, well did Isaiah prophesy of you when he said, This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. In vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.

And he called the people to him and said to them, Hear and understand. It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth that defiles a person. Then the disciples came and said to him, Do you know that Pharisees were offended when they heard this saying?

He answered, Every plant that my heavenly father has not planted will be rooted up. Let them alone, they are blind guides, and if the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit. But Peter said to him, Explain the parable to us.

And he said, Are you also still without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth passes into the stomach and is expelled? But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person.

For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile anyone. Amen.

You may be seated. Dear Heavenly Father, we pray that you would open our ears and eyes and hearts today as we receive your word. We ask that you would give us understanding and wisdom, that we would be able to apply this to our own times.

The topic of today's message may be somewhat different than many are used to. Not being so much about timeless things, but being focused primarily on a here and now application. I pray that you would help us to still be receptive, knowing that your word speaks to all things.

And God, we pray that you would make us like the men of Iskar, men who understood the times. In Jesus' name, amen. Well, this is a passage about the traditions of man. The traditions of man must be understood.

If you do not understand them, they will become to you like the law of God, and the one who elevates them to the level of the law of God will find himself not upheld in righteousness, but upheld in unrighteousness, blind to the true word of God.

He speaks here of the tradition of the elders. What's meant by elders is not those authorities that existed at that time, but those previous generations who had carried on teachings, many of these supposedly being oral tradition from Moses, ostensibly so, though almost certainly not in many cases, in most cases.

And he gives these examples. We have the example of hand-washing. Of course, there were purity laws for Israel that they must not eat any unclean thing, and so to protect themselves in fulfilling this, they had developed the tradition that they must wash their hands before the meal, because if they had become ceremonially unclean, and they touched any food that was clean, that food would be unclean, and then they would be eating an unclean thing.

And so it was required that they would wash their hands even by submersion, not merely just pouring a little on and doing that, but submersing their hands in water. And this was taken so seriously that there is a story of one first and second century rabbi, he lived around the late first century, early second century, who had been imprisoned in Rome, or imprisoned by Romans, and he had a meager ration of water, and he was so concerned to uphold this law that he used his water to wash his hands, because he would rather die of thirst than not to uphold this tradition of the elders.

The other example here we have is something that in Mark, in the parallel passage, is called korban, this thing that is given by God. The word korban in Mark is the Aramaic term that is not translated into Greek.

Here we have the translation into Greek, given us by Matthew. So Matthew just says, it is given to God. This refers to something that you would have where instead of helping someone else, you would instead swear an oath or a vow to God, devoting it to him, such that it didn't have to be given to another person.

Now, this vow did not mean that you had to immediately give it to God, it just meant that eventually you would give it to God. So that freed you up to use it indefinitely, not helping others with that thing.

So these are the two traditions, the tradition of hand-washing and the tradition of korban. Korban meaning given or devoted or being brought near to God. And Jesus' response to all this is that they are hypocrites.

Human Righteousness and the Abuse of Religious Tradition

He says, He goes on to describe what real cleanness comes from. Real cleanness does not come from these ceremonial things that God has given to signify cleanliness. Real cleanness comes from obedience to God.

Real cleanness is a righteousness that operates according to God's standards, not one that operates according to man's standards. And when man makes his standards and elevates them, then it can be said, Now, no doubt you have taken a look at this bulletin and you have seen that this is in our series on A Biblical View of AI.

By the way, this is the final message on that. Lord willing, unless I think of something else that I would like to bring forward to your attention. And this sermon title is AI is Intellectually Ethical.

That might be a very odd sounding title. What is this talking about? Well, let me first of all warn you that this passage in speaking about the traditions of men, naturally, if it is to be applied faithfully, is going to be applied to those traditions that arise in our own day.

So many people, as they have heard this preached, typically hear it preached against battles that have already been fought and won, rather than those things that have reared their heads and no battle waged against it.

So if anything said today seems so out of the ordinary, know that a faithful application of this passage will do so. That is necessary if we are to apply this to our lives, we must be rooting out tradition.

And so what tradition is it that I speak of today? When people speak of whether or not AI is intellectually ethical, or this phrase that I'm using anyway to speak of AI being intellectually ethical, I'm sure there are all kinds of ways that someone could use it in a way that would be unethical, but what I have in mind is particularly the input and output of modern technology known as large language models.

You have many books that go into these things, and you have many words that come out. And one of the standard objections to this, or even just questions or criticisms about it, is one that does not come from a real understanding of God's Word, though it claims to.

It is one that simply comes from the tradition of man. And that is, for the input, the notion of copyright, that words are owned by man and therefore should not be going into these things, and secondly, plagiarism.

That ideas are so sacred in such a way that the credit must be given to anyone from whom an idea comes. You must ask yourself, because people, this is not just about AI. This is about the way that many Christians operate.

This is about the way that many ministries operate. And I want you to ask yourself, are these traditions biblical, or are they rather traditions of men that have been elevated to the law of God? I believe that as we will look, we will find that it is the latter.

How Human Traditions Claim to Reinforce God's Law

First of all, traditions of men ostensibly reinforce the law of God. If you look at this passage and what's happening, when we talk about hand-washing, what's happening, that is trying to reinforce a law of God, trying to reinforce something about ceremonial cleanliness.

What about Corbin? Well, that's trying to reinforce the notion of a vow. A vow is something very important that you don't go back on your word. Of course you should not go back on your word. And so that is trying to reinforce the word of God, the law of God.

And if you think about some other traditions you might be familiar with, the Roman Catholic notion of penance might seem something that's very detestable to you, and it should be, but think about where that came from.

If you have someone who has committed a sin, and in the courts of man it's necessary, in the courts of the church it's necessary that that person demonstrate his repentance. Let's say this person was someone who denied the faith under threat of persecution.

How do you know that person is truly repentant? Well, after enough service to the church, after enough time, they can demonstrate it, but it's not something where you just take someone back on their word immediately.

That is the origin of penance, and it's very reasonable. But that getting elevated from a reasonable way of going about human courts in the church to being instead a law of God by which man is made right in the sight of God is something where we've reversed the order of things.

And then this affects all kinds of things that people believe. Think about the Arminian notion of free will. That takes something that is very biblical, free will. We have that written down in our confession.

We believe in free will, yet what the Arminian does is hold that so highly and his own notion of free will so highly that nothing else can contest with it. And this then guides practices, whether it be altar calls or any particular method of evangelism or manipulation, etc., etc., that encourages all kinds of sinful actions.

The traditions of man ostensibly reinforce the law of God. And why is that? It is because they come when they have been so elevated that they are at the level of the Word of God. It is because they come from hypocrisy.

Hypocrisy, man wanting a righteousness, claiming to have the righteousness of God, but instead finding self-righteousness. That comes from either tightening or loosing the law of God. We've been looking at this recently in the afternoon messages as we're talking about moderation, how people either tighten or loosen the law of God in order to justify themselves.

If they come up with some additional laws, then they can measure themselves by these things and not the things that God has actually given, and they can compare themselves and feel good about themselves.

Or they loosen everything so that they feel good about themselves, that they have done no wrong. So, for example, hand-washing some additional things lets you compare yourself, gives you a sense of self-righteousness.

Corban, something that lets you reject the fifth commandment to honor father and mother, and instead say, well, I'm upholding the ninth commandment. I am not going back on my word, and I am upholding the third commandment.

I'm not using the Lord's name in vain. Taking something that ostensibly upholds God's word and hypocritically applying that to reject it. This is what is happening. This is the kind of hypocrisy that's happening when someone elevates the traditions of man up to the level of the law of God.

Community, Authority, and the Reinforcement of Tradition

And think about how that is reinforced not just by people who want to self-justify directly, but by so many people who find their justification in community. This is something that has become apparent to me over the past few years as I've seen the way that people think and the way that people uphold the traditions of man.

You might think of them as being primarily directly targeted itself. I want to feel righteous about the way that I apply this particular law. That's often not what's happening. Often what's happening is people want to feel righteous by virtue of the community that they're in, or by virtue of the heroes that they have.

And just like in 1 Corinthians where someone says, I'm from Paul or I'm from Apollos, this is how they get their sense of status. This is how they get their sense of righteousness. And so they may not be so concerned because your rejection of a tradition affects them or their own personal direct righteousness, but because it implicates someone that they identify with, someone that they have placed themselves under or a community that they have placed themselves in where they are getting a sense of righteousness.

This is often the way that it happens. Now, think about the things that reinforce this. It is good authority that God has given to man that is used in a misguided way to encourage people to uphold the traditions of man more highly than they ought.

In your family, you might have different traditions that were told to you, your friends told you. Maybe it's things like it's not polite to talk about religion. And so people think that it's good to hide their light under a bushel, even though scripture says it's not to.

And it's surprising how many people I will talk to who think that is good and right, basically to uphold the traditions of man regarding this just because they were so reinforced by their family and friends.

It's obvious where that's coming from. And then many things are reinforced by political authorities that we have. Just consider what things are socially acceptable often come from what things are criminalized or not criminalized.

The drugs that are socially acceptable for recreational use, often it's just determined by what things are legal or what things aren't legal. And people are getting their sense of righteousness by proxy from these different authorities, even if the authorities aren't necessarily trying to delineate them in that way.

And this can even come, of course, from religious authorities like you have here. Many times pastors are conscripted to reinforce social norms. And it is incredible how much that happens. As you look at the literature from the past 50 years on marriage, a lot of it is basically using biblical language in order to reinforce modern ethics around gender roles and marriage.

It's essentially saying happy wife, happy life, but with some biblical terminology behind it. Or people will do this with their political theology too. It's really incredible. There's one book that I have read on political theology where the first half of it, I find so excellent.

Going to the word and seeing what it says about the nature of government and our relationship to it. And it's things where I'm reading this and I'm thinking this has radical applications for how we think about our relationship between us and the government and how we relate to each other.

And then the second half of the whole book is basically trying to explain why all of it reinforces just the current order that we have. It's wild how people will feel such an urge to uphold the traditions of man.

But that is what happens. Now, how are traditions discerned? Well, they are discerned by knowing the word of God and knowing it rightly. Jesus responds to them, God commanded, honor your father and mother, and whoever reviles father or mother must surely die.

He is citing Exodus 20, Exodus 21. He knows the word of God. So many people are unable to identify the traditions of man because they do not know the word of God in order to be able to identify those things.

Many phrases they hear around the church, they assume are biblical things just because they've heard them so often. They've not actually searched the scriptures to see whether any of those things are so.

You must know the word of God. You must know it deeply. If you are someone who has been a Christian for some time and you still have not read the whole Bible or you are not in it regularly, you must be in it regularly, or else you will be at the mercy of whatever traditions and whatever authorities come over you.

Secondly, this is something that must be practiced. Hebrews 5 .14 says that it is by practice that people are able to discern good from evil. It's not enough to just take in the word once, you must take it in many times and you must apply it many times.

You must go about the difficulty of practicing discernment between good and evil, truth and falseness. Do not neglect that duty to reinforce that practice. And you must submit to the word of God. Listen to what he says.

This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. In vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men. Isaiah 29, the passage that he's quoting also says the following.

It says, astonish yourselves. This is verse nine. Astonish yourselves and be astonished. Blind yourselves and be blind. Be drunk, but not with wine. Stagger, but not with strong drink. For the Lord has poured out upon you a spirit of deep sleep and has closed your eyes, the prophets, and has covered your heads, the seers.

And the vision of all this has become to you like the words of a book that is sealed. When men give it to one who can read, saying, read this. He says, I cannot, for it is sealed. And when they give the book to one who cannot read, saying, read this.

And he says, I cannot read. Isaiah describes the people who on one hand can read, but the book is sealed. It is sealed to them. Why? It is because they have honored God with their lips, but their hearts are far from him.

They are not able to understand these things because they are not really submitting to his word. The kind of people that Jesus is talking to in Matthew 18 are not people who are unfamiliar with the Old Testament.

They are people who are very familiar with the Old Testament. Now sometimes people will wrongly take that observation and kind of self-righteously apply it to themselves and feel pretty good about the fact that they haven't studied the word that much.

That is not the application. You still must go to the word and study it, but you will not understand it rightly apart from real submission to that word. And what submission to that word looks like is submitting to the authority that gave it, understanding God's purposes so that it's not something that you stand over and learn how to manipulate, but is rather something that you stand under that is controlling you, that is sovereign over you.

And there is a very different posture between these things. It is a posture that will lead you to understand what are the weightier things of the law and order when two things from God's law ostensibly go against each other that you would be able to resolve which needs to be held highly.

Is it not the case that a vow should be broken if you cannot uphold your duty to your parents? And it will also lead you to search out what the origin of things are. If you look at the Bereans in Acts, the Bereans go and they search the scriptures to see if the things that Paul is saying are true.

They're not willing to accept these things on the word of man, and they're not disinterested in where the words come from, just weighing them out for themselves. They are weighing do they correspond to the authority of God.

And if you do that, you're going to find yourself looking into the origin of ideas. There are many traditions of man, and the word tradition is not a bad word. It's a word that comes up in scripture positively a number of times.

Things are handed down. There are words that we use that are handed down. The word Bible is not in the Bible. The word Trinity is not in the Bible. Yet these are good words that describe good things. But someone who is interested in submitting to the word of God will desire an awareness about where different things come from to know is this truly according with God's word, or to what degree, if any degree at all, is this something that is designed to contend with God's word or has become something that contends with God's word.

You could take all kinds of things. You could take the fact that we have a Wednesday night prayer meeting. You know where Wednesday night prayer meetings, from my understanding, they started in Geneva under John Calvin.

He had Wednesday night prayer meetings. These got adopted during many churches in the Reformation, the Puritan era, and now many churches today still have Wednesday night prayer meetings. Prayer is a good thing.

This is something that reinforces the law of God. He tells us to pray. That's a good thing. But if we were to raise that to the same importance as Sunday, the day that God is actually called holy, if we were to defend that at all costs with a religious fervor as something that God has given rather than something that man has given in his devotion to God, this would be something contrary to God's word.

The other way that you can go about discerning traditions of man is by expecting them. This is important because so few people actually expect the traditions of man to rear their head. They are basically operating with the assumption that everything is going to go fairly smoothly and I shouldn't be on the lookout or being watchful about any traditions that are going to rear their head in my circles because we've got the word.

The Pharisees had the word. They were the good guys. Read through Acts. Paul identifies as a Pharisee against the Sadducees, those who are really rejecting the word. Traditions will rear their head. He says, Well did Isaiah prophesy of you when he said, This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.

In vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men. Jesus had this verse on his mind. He was expecting these traditions to rear their head. If you are not expecting, you will not be watchful.

If you are not watchful, you will not discern. It's important to know the word in order that you can expect appropriately and know where these things rear their head and also what exactly you should be looking for as you measure it up against the word of God.

Copyright, Bible Translation, and the Public Use of God's Word

So traditions of man, when they are held as highly, compete with the law of God. Now there is a place, as I mentioned, for laws of man that are designed to reinforce the laws of God. There is a place for something like having the tradition of Wednesday night prayer meetings or talking about the nature of God with the language of the Trinity.

These things are good things. But if they are permitted to be a source of righteousness itself rather than guides that are submitted to and underneath the word, or if they are something that is permitted to be pitted against God's word so that you can justify disobedience to God's word by them, then they are of no use at all.

And they necessarily, in that case, will pervert justice. If you think about this passage, it's talking about the righteousness of God. The righteousness of God comes from God. The righteousness of man just comes from man.

If you... Let me explain it this way. Deuteronomy 16, 20 tells the people of Israel that as they are about to go into the land, if they are to live long in it, that they must pursue justice and justice alone.

Any kind of thing that goes in addition to justice will necessarily pervert it. Okay, this is true in human courts, right? If the judge is evaluating, okay, am I going to declare this guy innocent or guilty based on justice plus a little bit of something else?

That's not going to be justice. It's necessarily going to contradict justice. The same thing is true in divine courts. If we are going to try to pursue justice on God's justice, God's sense of righteousness, and then just add a little bit more, what does that do?

It undermines the whole project. Galatians 5, 4 says that you are severed from God, you who would be justified by law, you have fallen from grace. You who think that obeying various ceremonies or having your own kind of righteousness is going to uphold you in God's court, it will not uphold you in God's court.

And so it ends up competing. Okay, the hand washing, it ends up competing. The Corban Law, it ends up competing, telling you that you're allowed to dishonor father and mother. The tradition of penance ends up competing, telling you that you can have forgiveness just by outward contrition without inward contrition.

The tradition of free will in the Arminian sense leads to all sorts of crazy things where you reject the sovereignty of God despite the many passages that talk about predestination, election, et cetera, so that you are able to uphold the notion of free will alongside of the other things that God has spoken.

Now consider the things that we have before us, the primary application that has given occasion for this message, copyright and plagiarism. Copyright, does it not ostensibly reinforce the law of God? God has given us the Eighth Commandment.

Thou shall not steal. Property is a good thing. The Bible says that a worker is worthy of his wages, and while that is spoken of pastors, it is a general truth that applies to all that workers are worthy of their wages.

And so doesn't this seem like something that's going to reinforce the law of God? And yet, if you look to the origin of these things and where they come from, you will find that it is a novel legal concept that has only been around for 300 years, started in 1710, and the purpose of it was never designed to uphold property.

You read the English laws when it originally came. You read the American laws when they were written. It is for the encouragement of creative works, not for the upholding of property rights. And then, real property, according to God's word, is something that can be passed down as an inheritance.

A man leaves an inheritance to his children's children, Proverbs 13, 22. Yet copyright, there is hardly any copyright law in the world that has perpetuity assigned to ideas. They recognize that this is not property in the ordinary sense.

Property is something that can be dispossessed. It is something that can be stolen, right? If you, and people use that word stolen, but the person it was stolen from, an idea was stolen from, is not dispossessed in this case because it's not taken from their own mind.

It's like fire coming from one candle to another. You don't lose the fire from the one candle as it goes to another. And think about the way that people apply this in the church. They apply it to the Bible.

The Bible itself. These different translations, copyrighted. If you wanted to put the ESV into your own format and print it, or you wanted to put it in your own application if you're a software engineer, and redistribute it, you would not be allowed to because of copyright law.

And I'm not just talking about the law. It's because the organizations, the supposedly Christian organizations that promote this kind of stuff, tell you that you are not allowed to share the word of God in the format that they have given it.

So here you have this notion of property being held up highly so that you're contradicting a more primary, a more primary ethic, that the word of God go forward without hindrance. Our confession speaks of the importance of Bible translation appealing to Colossians 3 .16.

Colossians 3 .16 says, Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing another with all wisdom, singing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs with melody in your heart to God. Think about each aspect of that.

Okay, you are to, you are to let the word of Christ dwell in you richly. That requires access to the word. You are supposed to, you are supposed to then teach and admonish it with all wisdom. Okay, you're supposed to share it.

And then you're supposed to sing it as well. That requires an adaptation of it. Did you know that those are the three aspects of copyright law? It's access, and then the ability to redistribute, and then the ability to adapt.

Those are the three things that copyright law controls. Now, most modern translations will let you access a copy, but they will not let you share it in whatever format you want. If you want to write a tract, there's a limit on the number of verses that you're allowed to put in there, and then they threaten you otherwise.

And they do not let you adapt it. You cannot just put it in your own commentary or something like that, or if you were to, let's say, you know, for example, the psalms that we've been singing are ones that were written a long time ago.

One of these, I believe, was from the late 1800s. This one that we sang is from 1650. They're very old, so they're out of copyright, but if we took the ESV and then made, let's say, an ESV psalter for singing, that is something that would come across litigation because people have so taken this notion of property and then held that higher than what God commands about the Word of God being proclaimed, not being hid under a basket.

Last year at our conference, we played some clips from an old movie about William Tyndale called God's Outlaw. There's one very moving part in there where John Frith, the martyr, says to Tyndale, would you print the Bible without a license?

And Tyndale responds, shall a mere license stand in the way of God? And so here we are, a people who would applaud these heroes of the faith of the past for sharing the Word of God even despite the sensibilities of that time about how the Word of God and yet we will, with our own lips, praise such things as being good, praise such restrictions as being good, as many do right now.

People who make Bibles, people who make Christian teaching, if any of you have done BSF, you know that they really emphasize this for some reason. They really emphasize, and I've heard they do this less now, but they used to do it a lot more.

BSF stands for Bible Study Fellowship. They will say, these are our copyright, do not share them. And nowadays they say you can share them a little, but they're really clear about how you're allowed to share them because they're really afraid for some reason of too much biblical teaching getting out there too widely.

I don't know why. Ligonier recently made an announcement that everyone praise the high heaven. R .C. Sproul's works now are available for free on their app and will be forever. And while that is a good thing in a lot of ways, I'm asking myself, why is it only now?

Why is it not the other teachers that teach for Ligonier? Why is it only on the app? Such that if you're in a country where there's very little internet connection and you would need to download it at a cafe or something and then read it elsewhere, you can't do that.

Why is that? Because they have other objectives in mind and they reinforce this all with the laws of man, with the traditions of man. It is really unreal. And it promotes an injustice. Think about it.

Many people talk about copyright as a matter of justice because you have a right to make a living off the things that you produce, etc. Not every work that someone does is something that they have a right to receive for.

There are all kinds of ways that you could improve the environment about you and if you're improving it in a public way that's not a private way, you don't have a claim on that thing. In fact, if you improve a public space, everybody has a right to that and you have no right to charge for that.

And that's what someone does when they disclose an idea to the public. They grant it to the public and then anyone who has an idea, by all accounts, in the word of God, as you see ideas go about, has every right to use that word as it has come to them.

So to say that, well, here's this additional thing that we would like for the encouragement is to add to justice and necessarily to pervert the actual justice, the actual right of the individual who has access to that thing to use it how he would see fit.

And there's so much foolishness that comes from this. Maybe you have heard the news that a lot of these AI companies are either burning or shredding books and usually the explanation given is that, well, one of the scanning methods in order to train is to slice off the spines of the book and then scan that way.

And that's true. That is one of the methods. But you know the real thing that's going on from what I understand is that you don't need to shred a book in order to scan it. The reason they are shredding books is because that makes their case better in court that they aren't illegally copying.

They're not making a copy. They're just transferring from a print form to a digital form because there is a destruction that is happening in the process. And so to uphold the laws of man, you do all kinds of destructive things, including destroying valuable property that God would otherwise want man to preserve.

People have a right to do with the things that they own, but clearly there's a stewardship involved in the things that we own. Now consider plagiarism. Plagiarism is something that ostensibly is upholding, you know, commandments against plagiarism, ostensibly upholding the Ninth Commandment.

Plagiarism, Attribution, and the Purpose of Christian Speech

Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. Okay? That is very important. It's very important also in an academic context where the importance of not plagiarizing is showing that you really are capable and deserving of the credentials that you're trying to go for.

And all that makes, all that makes perfect sense. But is not our society's view of plagiarism something that is very, very different than that command, not to bear false witness? Does it not operate under the assumption that anything I say I am making a claim that is, that it originated with me?

Why is that a necessary claim? Scripture itself says, 1 Corinthians 4, 7, what do you have that you did not receive? Ecclesiastes 1, 9, there's nothing new under the sun. Everything that has been will be.

Why should such, why should such a claim be inherent? And then you look at Matthew, Mark, and Luke. They're copying each other quite a bit. And the most credit you see is Luke at the very beginning saying that he, he read the accounts of others.

And that's it. You don't see Matthew or Mark doing that. And one of them's operating off the other. Let me read to you a passage. I'm not going to tell you where this is from. That's on purpose. It shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be established as the highest of the mountains.