The Functions of Deity: Ethics 1 (God Decides Right From Wrong)

A sermon by Nate Wilson for Christ the Redeemer Church, 25 April 2010 & 5 May 2024. Scripture quotes from Matthew, James, 1 Peter, Isaiah, Psalms, and 1 Samuel were translated by Nate, all others are adapted by Nate from the ASV.

Opening Illustration

To frame this section on ethics, let me present a picture of my toddler in the kitchen. Imagine that toddler being left to do whatever she wanted: Eat cookies all day long, randomly turn on stove burners, run water and splash it on the floor, let her do whatever she wants. Will that make her a happy person in the long run? No. She does not have enough knowledge to determine what is best for her; she will naturally choose junk food that will make her sick; she will naturally choose to make messes, leading to unsanitary conditions and disease. It is not good to let a child do whatever she wants; God gives parents to children to teach children how to submit to a higher standard outside of themselves. Children, your parents are a gift from God to train you how to follow God’s rules.

Why do things in this order?

Following God’s rules instead of making up our own rules is what I want to talk about today. This is a natural progression from the things we talked about earlier:

1. So far we have come epistemologically to the Bible as the source of truth,

• then we have opened the Bible to the first book (Genesis) to see ontologically that God is the source of everything that exists, and that God has a purpose – a telios for all that He made.

• Now we move on into the second chapter of Genesis and into the second book of the Bible (Exodus) to study ethics and see that God is the one who decides what is right and what is wrong.

2. We also see a parallel to this progression in the Lord’s Prayer:

• What is the ultimate source of truth? Jehovah/Jesus/the name of God, so we first ask for that name and all that is associated with the person of God to be honored as holy.

• Then what should come into being in this world? The kingdom of God. So let that be the focus of what we want to see come into being. “Let Your kingdom come.”

• Then what should be done in this world? The will of God, so we ask for God’s will to be done next. It is God’s prerogative to decide what should and shouldn’t be done. That is one of the functions of deity.

3. We also see these three issues bundled together in Jesus statement, “I am the WAY, the truth, and the life…” (John 14:6)

How do we get ethics?

Ethics is inherently personal.

• At the root of ethics/morality is a god of some sort who likes certain things and dislikes other things, and who defines good and evil based on his personal nature.

• That is why worldviews that claim the universe to be the result of impersonal matter and energy suddenly switch away from that impersonal matter and energy when it comes to defining right and wrong, and they define it personally in terms of their own preferences or in terms of some sort of group-consensus among persons.

• Biblical Christianity, on the other hand, places the prerogative for deciding what is right and what is wrong in the hands of Jesus, the personal God of the Bible. It is a function of deity – the god of any given system gets to decide what is right and what is wrong. Jesus’ nature defines right and wrong. Whatever He likes is good – and therefore right – to do, and whatever He doesn’t like is bad – and therefore wrong to do.

• I met Dr. Robertson McQuilken in the early 1990’s when he was president of Columbia Bible College in South Carolina and I was teaching in their annual Campus Missions Workshops. Several years later, I studied McQuilken’s textbook on Biblical Ethics in seminary. He defined “moral law” as “God’s expressed will concerning what constitutes likeness to God,” and added that the basis for ethics is God’s demand: “Be holy as I am holy” (Lev. 19:2, 1 Pet 1:16). Law is the expressed will of God that people be like Him morally.¹

What’s more, God not only has the right to decide what is right and what is wrong, He also has the right to hold every inferior accountable to His standard of ethics.

• Old King Solomon in his wisdom saw this: Ecclesiastes 12:13-14 “This is the end of the matter; all has been heard: fear God, and keep His commandments, for this is the whole duty of man, for God will bring every work into judgment, with every hidden thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil.”

• So it is the privilege of God to be both “Law-giver and Judge,” as James 4:12 says, and by contrast, James asks, “So who are you who condemn your neighbor?” If you’re not God, then you can’t judge anybody using your personal opinions of right and wrong.

A History of Biblical Ethics

In every new beginning of mankind throughout the history of the Bible, Jehovah-God spoke His law-will into the culture of His people.

• In the beginning of time, God told Adam what to do and what not to do:

1. “Be fruitful and multiply and take dominion” (Gen. 1:28),

2. “Eat from the trees of the garden (Gen 2:16), but do not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (2:17).
   Right from the start, Adam had a list of laws to follow.

• After God wiped out mankind with a flood, Noah and his family stepped off the ark and God started giving commands: (Gen. 9:3-7)

1. “You may eat the animals now,

2. but don’t kill other humans,

3. And keep being fruitful and multiplying and filling the earth!”

• What about the Israelite nation as they emerged from Egypt as a new nation? It’s not long before God is giving the 10 commandments (Ex. 20) and explaining their application to all of life throughout the rest of the law written by Moses:

1. God will not tolerate competition – no other gods, no worshipping idols, no careless use of His name. He is uniquely God.

2. Honor the 7^th day to keep it holy. God rested on the 7^th day, so it is right to do what He did.

3. Honor your parents – Jesus the Son honors His Father, and we should be like Him.

4. Do not murder – don’t even hate them and wish that they would die unjustly.

5. Do not commit adultery – God is faithful, so you should be faithful also.

6. Do not lie – God is truthful, so we should be too.

7. Do not steal, and don’t even wish in your heart to have what belongs to someone else.
   These are the 10 Commandments.

• Revivals under Josiah (2 Ki. 22:8ff) and Nehemiah (ch. 8) involved the re-discovery and reading out loud of the law. (Which was to be read every 7 years anyway to all the people. – Deut. 31:10)

• Jesus also came, giving authoritative commands:

1. He summarized the greatest commandments: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, and… love your neighbor as yourself” (Mt. 22:37ff)

2. Then He said, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (John 14:15)

3. “This is my command”: “Abide in me”, “love one another”, “bear much fruit.” (John 15)

4. And He gave the Great Commission: “…Make disciples of all nations, baptizing them and teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you…” (Matt. 28:18ff)

5. He also promised to come back to separate those who are blessed from those who are cursed, based on their obedience to His commands (Matt. 25:31ff).

But Isn’t Morality a Private Matter?

• Many Americans think that ethics is a private matter, something which can be kept to oneself.

  • I’ve had neighbors tell me, “Hey, if you’re a religious person, that’s fine, what’s good for you is good for you, but I could never be like that – it wouldn’t be good for me.”

  • “It is not possible to judge another’s truth.” ~Shirley MacLaine²

  • This statement begs the question and assumes that each person has the right to be god and de­cide what is right and wrong for themselves. How did they get a right to that function of deity?

• The problem with everyone walking around like a little god deciding for themselves what is good for them and what is bad for them is that all these autonomous little gods start bumping up against each other and offending each other.

  • For instance, you get terrorists who believe that it is good to bring a gun into a classroom and kill the children in it. If you demand that everyone decide for himself what is right and wrong you have no basis to declare terrorism wrong or to put a stop to a murderer.

  • The book, Light In The Shadow Of Jihad, counters the myth that morality is a private matter, saying that “demagogues such as Osama bin Laden believe that morality is a totally public matter, interwoven with religion, and that their followers are doing the world a favor by ridding it of any culture that privatizes religion and morality… [Meanwhile] The relativist who argues for the absence of absolutes smuggles absolutes into his arguments all the time… Hidden somewhere in the words of everyone who argues for complete relativism is a belief... that there are, indeed, some acts that are wrong… It is true, by the way, that in the past century more people were killed under the banner of irreligion than by religious fanatics.³”

• Morality is not a private matter. Even though it starts in the heart, it necessarily flows into outward actions and becomes public. (More on this later.)

When Humans make the Rules

What is the result of following your own personal likes and dislikes to define right and wrong? (You get the same result, by the way, if you let another human define what is right and wrong for you.)

• I went to a Chamber of Commerce luncheon in our town to hear a speaker on business ethics. If I recall correctly, he was a Presbyterian pastor, so I was curious to find out what he would say. He said that since nobody is going to agree on a religious text to determine everybody’s morality, we must pick things that everybody agrees on. “People are basically good,” he said, “and they will agree on the basics.” I was horrified! What a departure from the original Scottish Presbyterians who spoke out against the ways their kings and queens violated Biblical law, even at the risk of death! Might does not make right. Consensus does not make right either.

• Utilitarianism is another way to arrive at ethics without appealing to a supernatural source. John Stuart Mills promoted this concept in the 19^th Century: “Whatever does the most good for the most people is therefore good.”

  • Here’s an example of Utilitarianism in action: Say you enter the hospital with a broken bone, but with functioning kidneys and eyes and heart. In that same hospital there are three other patients: One needs a heart transplant in order to live, one needs a kidney transplant in order to live, and one needs a corneal transplant in order to keep from going blind. What does Utilitarianism tell us to do? Don’t waste resources on the broken bone, instead kill you and use your body parts to benefit three other people. That’s what does the most good for the most people. It’s admittedly an extreme example, but I’m not sure I can trust other people to decide for me what does the most good for the most people.

• If, however, you accept human sovereignty in deciding what is right and what is wrong, there is no objective standard outside of ourselves to determine right from wrong.

  • The French Marquis DeSade was famous for taking this doctrine of humanism to its logical conclusion. “If nature is the absolute, cruelty equals non-cruelty”⁴ The cat which tortures the mouse is not being cruel; it is just being a cat.

  • Likewise, if there is no God, there is no moral difference between stopping your car to let an elderly woman cross the road in front of you or running her over in order to get to your destination without having to wait for her⁵.

• Another way men apart from God have conceived of ethics is through the paradigm of Darwinian “survival of the fittest.”

  • Robert Heinlein, the father of modern science fiction, explained in his book Starship Troopers that morality is the extension of the survival instinct for the whole human race.

  • This is the kind of thinking that leads to taking the life of sick and elderly people intentionally, because the weak members of the human race have less fitness and therefore don’t contribute well to survival, according to Darwin’s theory.

    • Is it extreme to state that ethics based upon survival of the fittest leads to killing off weak people? No. According to one survey, 9% of the people in the Netherlands who died in 1990 died by euthanasia, and half of them were killed without even gaining their permission.⁶

    • Euthanasia (also known as physician-assisted suicide) was legal, by the way, in three U.S. states in 2010, legal in 10 states in 2023, and poised to double again in the next year, (although in our state of Kansas, it is encouraging to see that a bill was passed this month criminalizing the act of assisting someone with suicide)⁷.

    • Killing off all but the fittest is a logical outworking of ethics apart from the God of the Bible, if all we have to go on is survival of the fittest.

  • In fact, Friedrich von Bernhardi, in his book, Germany and the Next War, went so far as to suggest that killing people off one-by-one isn’t enough. Wars should be manufactured to kill off large segments of undesirable people. He wrote, “War is a biological necessity; it is as necessary as the struggle of the elements of Nature; it gives a biologically just decision, since its decisions rest on the very nature of things.⁸”

  • Many of the great wars of modern history have been influenced by the philosophy of Karl Marx. David Nobel commented on this in his book, Understanding the Times: “According to the Marxist dialectic, everything in the universe, including society, is in a state of flux or constant change. This change in society is a move upward toward the elimination of all social and economic class distinctions. The next social advance in history will be the move from capitalism to socialism. This will inevitably result in a change in society’s ideas about morals… Nikita Khrushchev state[d], ‘So as long as classes exist on the earth, there will be no such thing in life as something good in the absolute sense.’ …[Also in Marxist philosophy] the end justifies the means. Regardless of what you do, it is moral if it brings the world closer to eradicating social classes.⁹”

• Another result of using man as the measure for ethics is a constantly-changing standard of right and wrong.

  • Notice what one spokesman for Planned Parenthood says about technology making the seventh commandment obsolete: “Historically, a primary reason for the enormous importance given to [marital] faithfulness and unfaithfulness was the lack of reliable birth-control techniques. Now that those techniques, including abortion, are generally available, this importance [of a law against adultery] has more and more diminished.¹⁰”

  • This is also evident in the rather nebulous concept of impersonal, evolving Natural Law that John Locke promoted. Contemporary followers still hold that, “The discovery of the natural law is a continuously unfolding enterprise.¹¹” They point out that homosexuality, assisted suicide, and abortion all used to be very illegal in the USA, but now they are legal and promoted by the U.S. government as downright virtuous. Do you want to live in a society where right and wrong are constantly changing?

  • Bertrand Russel wrote, “The non-existence of God… means that there is no absolute morality, that moralities are sets of social conventions devised by humans to satisfy their need.”¹²

  • Without God’s absolute standard of truth, there is no reason to tell the truth in a business contract or in a court of justice unless you think it will benefit the people you want to benefit.

  • The Late Dr. Paul Kurtz, the so-called “Father of Secular Humanism” predicted in the 20^th century that “We may end up with [a man] concerned with his own personal lust for pleasure, ambition, and power, and impervious to moral constraints.¹³” Well, Dr. Kurtz, I think we’ve arrived!

Let’s look at a couple of practical examples of what happens when man is the measure of right and wrong:

• First let’s look at the legalization of abortion.

  • The recent U.S. Supreme Court retraction of the Roe vs. Wade ruling leaves each state to decide for itself now whether it is a crime to kill an unborn child, so currently abortion is a crime in 14 states, and not a crime in the other 36¹⁴.

  • Christian philosopher Gordon Clark made these remarks at a pro-life demonstration in front of Erlanger Hospital in Chattanooga, TN somewhere around 1980: “...Having rejected God, they wish to assume His prerogatives… If Atheism is to be the law of the land, there can be no laws at all to support morality, for there is no morality apart from the laws of God. I would like to make it clear that sociology, statistics, psychology, or any empirical science can never determine moral norms. Secular science at best can discover what people do, but it cannot discover what people ought to do… [S]ocial consensus cannot determine what is right or wrong [either]. The social consensus of the Spartans in antiquity and of at least some Indian tribes in North America condoned theft and even praised it. Before the Belgians took over the Congo a century or so ago, social consensus approved of cannibalism. The fact that various societies have considered theft and cannibalism to be right do not prove that theft and cannibalism are right – nor the murder of babies, either… One can perhaps with relative ease discover what groups of people think is right, but social consensus does not make anything right or wrong. So far as I can see, the only pertinent difference between the abortionists here and the cannibals in the Congo is that the abortionists do not eat the babies… but I can see no reason why, on abortionist principles – or lack of principles – for prohibiting the eating of human flesh… But if the Supreme court can legalize the murder of infants, it can as easily legalize the murder of adults… The Supreme Court could legalize the murder of all who support the right of life and thus produce a unanimous social consensus. If anyone thinks that this proposal is extreme, be it noted that Hitler’s National Socialism and Stalin’s international Socialism attempted just that.¹⁵”

  • Do you see where consensus-based ethics can take us?

• Secular Humanist worldviews, as the late Dr. Francis Schaeffer observed, result in totalitarian­ism that tries to eliminate competing worldviews^16, (such as Christianity).

  • The Nazis, acting as their own moral authority, legalized the murder of all Jews, then intimi­dated, incarcerated, and even murdered every non-Jew who disagreed with the Nazi policy.

  • According to Dr. Randy Guliuzza, it is happening in American medicine now: On March 9, 2009, President Barak Obama ordered that federal tax money be used to promote medical research through harvesting the stem cells of – and thus destroying – human embryos. His rationale? To restore “scientific integrity.” That same year, Dr. Guliuzza commented on this in his article, “Consensus Science: The Rise Of A Scientific Elite.” He explained that “‘scientific integrity’ would not mean keeping the scientific process from going awry, but rather it meant keeping scientific outcomes in line with policy. How? By empowering an atheist scientific elite who will decree – without debate and by consensus opinion only – the scientific validity of all bioethical issues…”

  • A decade later, we saw it again in action as every scientist who disagreed with government COVID policy was silenced. On one occasion, my family watched in real-time as a collection of speeches from reputable medical doctors was uploaded to multiple outlets on the Internet and then systematically removed by government censors.

  • Candidly describing fellow scientists, the late Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard said, “Our ways of learning about the world are strongly influenced by the social preconceptions and biased modes of thinking that each scientist must apply to any problem. The stereotype of a fully rational and objective ‘scientific method’ with individual scientists as logical and interchangeable robots, is self-serving mythology.”

  • Please understand, my point is not to support a particular conspiracy theory; my point is that bias and injustice are hardwired into any government system which does not get its ethics from the Bible.

• This, of course shows how important it is to start with the right source of truth before you develop your understanding of life and the rules by which it should be governed!

So we’ve looked at some of the results of letting human beings make the rules without reference to the God of the Bible.

When God Makes The Rules

What is the result of accepting the God of the Bible as the standard of right and wrong?

1. The rules don’t change. They don’t evolve, and they can’t be explained away. This removes arbitrariness and injustice from ethics:

   1. Num. 23:19 “God is not a man, that He should lie, nor is He the son of a man, that He should repent. Has He said, and will He not do it? Or has He spoken, and will He not make it good?”

   2. James 1:17 “Every good gift and every perfect endowment is from above, coming down from the Father of Lights, in the presence of whom there is no fluctuation or shading due to revolution.”

   3. Malachi 3:6 “…I, Jehovah, do not change; therefore you… are not consumed.”

2. When God makes the rules, there is blessing. When we do what our creator likes, we will find ourselves in step with the design of universe rather than fighting it. Furthermore, we will find ourselves in step with God Himself and enjoying His positive favor.

   1. Deut. 6:18 “…Do what is right and good in the sight of Jehovah that it may be well with you, and that you may go in and possess the good land which Jehovah promised to your fathers.”

   2. 1 Peter 3:12 “… the Lord's eyes are on the righteous, and His ears are toward their request, but the Lord's face is against doers of bad.”

   3. Psalm 1:1-3 “Blessings to the man who didn't walk in the counsel of the wicked, didn't stand in the path of sinners, and didn't sit in the bench of the scornful; for his delight is in the law of Yahweh, And he meditates in the law of Him day and night. He will be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, who his fruit gives in its season, his leaf does not wither; and all which he does prospers.” There is blessing!

3. When God makes the rules, it removes the fear of man. That means about 8 billion¹⁷ people you don’t have to worry about what they think of you! The one true God is all that counts.

   1. Matthew 10:28 “…don’t be afraid of those who kill the body but are not able to kill the soul, but rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.”

   2. Prov. 29:25 “The fear of man brings a snare, but whoever puts his trust in Jehovah shall be safe.”

   3. Isaiah 8:11-14 “...Yahweh spoke thus to me as strength of the hand and instructed me away from walking in the way of this people saying, ‘...Don't y'all fear its fear, nor be in dread. Yahweh of hosts: Him hallow, He your fear, Him dread! Then He will become a sanctuary...”

4. God’s rules are Just and Fair. They alone bring true freedom.

   1. Micah 6:8 “Man, He has shown you what is good and what Jehovah requires of you: but to do justly, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God”

   2. The entirety of God’s law – the first five books of the Bible – is contained in a mere 294 pages in my Bible, a far less-burdensome library of law than the millions of pages of law generated by our humanistic government system. And God’s law is good and just because God loves goodness and justice.

   3. Psalm 19:7-11 “Yahweh's written-instruction has soul-returning integrity. Yahweh's testimony is trustworthy, causing the naïve to be wise. Yahweh's accountabilities are heart-rejoicing-ly right. Yahweh's command is sight-illuminating-ly pure. Yahweh's respect stands forever clean. Yahweh's judgments are altogether justly true... When keeping them there is a lot of reward!”

   4. Proverbs 14:34 “Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.”

CONCLUSION:

Well, there is a lot more ground to cover concerning ethics. But to close for now, let me return to the opening illustration of the toddler in the kitchen. Just like that toddler who would make all kinds of foolish and harmful decisions on its own, so, mankind does not have the capacity to come up with an adequate system of right and wrong without the aid of the all-wise and loving God of the Bible.

• This calls for trust in that God – whose name is Jesus – to do what is right.

• It also calls for submission to that God so that we willingly bow and call Jesus our Lord and Master.

In the mid-1600’s a man in Germany named Severus Gastorius, become seriously ill and was confined to his bed. His good friend Samuel Rodigast lived and worked in a different town, but he wanted to encourage his friend, so he wrote a poem and sent it to Gastorius, encouraging him to trust and submit to Christ. In the providence of God, Gastorius recovered from his illness and put his friend’s poem to music¹⁸. That is how we got the hymn: “Whate’er my God ordains is right: His holy will abideth; I will be still whate’er He doth; And follow where He guideth; He is my God; though dark my road, He holds me that I shall not fall: Wherefore to Him I leave it all...”