Musing

This musing considers the question of moral relativity. I am amazed at the excuses that people use for their bad behavior. So often you hear that this wasn’t as bad as that. We can all look back in history and pick characters that we’d all agree deserve eternal punishment for their atrocities. Everyone (except maybe the Iranian president) can agree that Adolf Hitler was responsible for the deaths of over 6 million Jewish souls, but we often forget the other 17 million elderly, infirm, blacks, handicapped and otherwise “impure” as well as pastors, teachers and priests that dared to object to his policies. We can all point to him and say, “I never did anything as bad as he did, so I’ll be OK”. We look at other countries and cultures and mentally place them on a balance. As long as we feel like we come out “morally better” than the next guy, we figure that we have no peril. We aren’t so bad so we must be “good enough”. God surely won’t condemn us, right? We do this sort of “self-exam” that goes through our mental list of sins and hold them each up against some other person, decide that we’re not so bad and certainly haven’t done anything bad enough to deserve eternal punishment, so we must be OK. The problem with this is that our picture of what is perfect is very different from what God’s picture is. And since we try to shrink that picture down to something we can at least get close to, we mentally shrink God right along with it. For many of us, God is so small and powerless, He fits in a little Sunday-sized box and doesn’t even have the power to fix a parking ticket! The wakeup call comes when we begin to read His word and grow in our understanding of just what that word says. It says that our very best is like filthy rags to God! So if I know I’m not being my very best because I’m just trying to stay a little better than the next guy, then where does that leave me in God’s eyes? When I was younger, a pastor used the analogy of swimming from California to Hawaii. Everyone might start out swimming pretty well, but sooner or later, only the strongest swimmers would be left and even they would fall hundreds of miles short of the goal. So how would anyone ever get there? God’s word tells us that Jesus is the living Son of God. It says that He lived among us without sin and made the ultimate blood sacrifice. Because of His work as the great High Priest, He offers atonement for all the mess that we’ve made of our lives. And He doesn’t offer that atonement based on anything we can do or can earn! We have eternal life in Him and it is a free gift! Will we ever mess up again? Sure will! But that doesn’t mean that we’ll be condemned for it. He listens to the repentant heart and understands our human frailties. The hardest thing to do is to believe it, and if you can’t, simply pray, “God, if this stuff is true, give me the faith to believe it”. Then spend some time reading what God’s word says about who He is. You too, can be as amazed as I am, that He can save you and change you into a new person. Not somebody who’s a little better than the guy next door, but somebody who will be known as a child of the Living God! Moral relativity becomes irrelevant, praise God!