There are those who would say that our moral absolutes come to us from instinct. Somehow the things that served our parents generation and previous generations so well in the past, will serve us as well, and therefore are ingrained in us as instinct. They would say it is this herd mentality that keeps us on the track of morality. However, the same moral truths that are given to us from God are evident in all societies; there are certain things, as the author J. Budziszewski would say, “we can’t not know”. There is a standard, and that standard is God. God created our standards and put them in place deep within our hearts, and it is this God given absolute standard that guides us in our daily lives. Unfortunately we live in a world that doesn’t always recognize the standards of God, and we live in rebellion. This rebellion pits us against nature itself since nature follows the laws created for it by God. There are too many examples of how our lifestyles that are in opposition to God’s standards have caused great upheavals in the natural world. Our poor stewardship of our resources has caused great pollution. Our inability to adhere to the covenants established by God for relationships between men and women have created a society where sexually transmitted diseases are running rampant, and where AIDS has become a pandemic across the continent of Africa and is growing all over the world. Famine is in places where there used to be plenty, often times because of poor stewardship of the water sources and of the earth itself. There is always a price to pay when we go against the standards and absolutes set in place by God and in today’s day in age we are reaping what we have sown.
God is by nature good and perfect, and in creating us he stated that we were very good. This must mean that he has in store for us a life that is good as well. God is interested in our rights as His creation, our human rights. He is the very author of those human rights as can easily be seen in scripture. God’s very nature is reflected in His laws and therefore His laws are good, loving and perfect. C. S. Lewis tells us in Mere Christianity that “The law of gravity tells you what stones do if you drop them; but the law of Human Nature tells you what human beings ought to do and do not.” We are, by our sinful nature, rebellious and in turn at odds with our Creator. When we assume to take God out of the picture when it comes to human nature, we find ourselves with a poor substitute, we find ourselves left with us. By claiming that we are the authors of the absolute truths we state that we are able to govern our behavior, we become our own judge. That being said, without God as the author, all is up for grabs when it comes to both the determination of the standard and the punishment for disobeying it. This also leads to a changing of the standard based on popular belief, this makes our standard no standard at all, and we fall into chaos. (Part 3 next week)
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