Functions of Deity: Ethics 2 - Don’t Call Evil What God Calls Good

A Sermon by Nate Wilson for Christ the Redeemer Church, Manhattan, KS, 02 May 2010, and 12 May 2024. Scripture texts from Matt., Heb., 1 Pet., and 1 Cor. are translations made by Nate; other scripture texts are adapted by Nate from the 1901 ASV. Greyed-out text can be omitted to bring presentation time down to about 45 minutes.

REVIEW:

We are in the middle of this sermon series on the four things all gods do and how we as Christians can combat the postmodern American view that humans can be gods.

We started with Epistemology and studied how God defines truth from falsehood – reality from fiction.
1. When people start trying to do that for themselves, we make wrecks of our lives – and of other people’s lives – because we know way too little and are too easily-deceived.
2. We need the all-knowing God of the Bible to reveal to us what is true and real.
3. We must therefore submit to God and live according to reality as He defines it.
Secondly we looked at Ontology, considering the claims of Materialism vs. the claims of the Holy Bible.
1. We saw that science cannot prove that everything came into being through natural causes, and furthermore, we read in the Bible that Yahweh-God claims to have created everything supernaturally.
2. We also saw that only by being created in the image of a personal God can we have any meaningful thought, morals, or justice. (Chemicals don’t care about any of that!)
3. So, if God made you, you are not God.
4. And if God made the world, we should not treat the world as though we own it, but rather as stewards of what He made.
5. Furthermore, that means we must submit to God as our Master and let Him show us what He wants to do with the life He gave us.
Now in this third subject-area we started last week, we’re exploring Ethics.
1. So far, I mentioned that our understanding of right and wrong comes from what some person likes and doesn’t like – be it ourselves or some group of people or some spirit-being, or the God of the Bible – ethics is based on the character of some person, and that person plays the part of god in a given worldview.
2. We also noted that whoever gets to make the rules also gets to judge everybody’s compliance with the rules.
3. I pointed out problems with worldviews that try to come up with a system of right and wrong apart from the God of the Bible:

Radical Libertarianism inevitably leads to fights and infringements on the rights of others, because everybody’s making up their own rules.
Darwinianism (“Might makes right; let the fittest survive.”) ultimately leads to the murder of all those who are deemed unfit.
Utilitarianism trusts experts to decide what’s best for everybody… but how do the experts know?
And then there’s Marxism: Whatever advances the cause of socialism is right, and the end always justifies the means, so it always rationalizes lots of theft and murder.

In contrast, we saw how God gave laws to Adam, Noah, and the Israelite nation, and continued to give commands through Christ Jesus and the Apostles, and the Bible promises that Jesus will return to judge the world.
Finally, I explained that embracing the God of the Bible as the standard of Ethics means that:

We will enter a system that is just and fair,
The rules won’t change because God doesn’t change,
You don’t have to be afraid of anybody anymore, because they aren’t making the rules and they can’t judge you,
and finally, you will experience blessing for walking in the commands of Jesus.

In today’s sermon, I want to warn you about ways that you may be tempted to compromise on Ethics:

Problem #1: Calling evil what is not evil (or calling good evil)

When enough people put pressure on us to call something evil, even if our ethical standard does not call it evil, we have a tendency fudge and call something evil when it isn’t really evil.

For instance, back in February 2010, Sean McDowell (son of the Christian apologist Josh McDowell, and now a nationally-known Christian apologist in his own right) debated on the topic of ethics against his fellow high school teacher James Corbett, who was an atheist. In the course of the webcast debate, Sean brought up evidence that atheists have no ethical grounds to assert that the Holocaust was bad (an argument similar to what I brought up in my last sermon – which Clay humorously took out of context – about materialism giving no basis for saying that anything is right or wrong). Corbett knew that the audience would side against him if he was consistent with his atheistic view on ethics, so he agreed with McDowell that it was bad for the Nazis to kill all those Jews; he caved in to peer pressure in order to keep from losing the debate.^¹
But Christians do the same thing. Here’s an example that might be shocking at first: slavery.

Because slavery is socially unacceptable in the Western world, and because we have been told all our lives how evil slavery is, Christians tend to call slavery evil unequivocally.
However, God has not called slavery evil. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that slavery is wrong. It certainly speaks out against components of the way human trafficking is carried out today; for instance, the Bible calls man-stealing a capital crime (Ex. 21:16), and providing for the freedom of mistreated slaves (Ex. 21:26), but it never calls slavery per se evil.
It is the worldview of Secular Humanism that has determined slavery to be wrong. The god of Humanism is the human being, so naturally Humanists object to subjecting one human being to another human being.
In the Bible, however, God teaches something different:

He teaches us in Exodus 21 that slavery was a valid course of action for someone who had experienced economic failure.
Furthermore, the Bible teaches us in Proverbs 22:7 that debt is slavery,
and throughout the Bible, we see God using slavery as a method of disciplining His people (Gen 15:13, 2Ch 12:8, Jer 25:14).
When Jesus came on the scene, He did not speak out against slavery either. In fact, almost all the “good guys” in His parables owned slaves².
Paul likewise returned a runaway slave to his master (Philemon) and told slaves who had become Christians to remain slaves until they could purchase their freedom, although he taught Christians to avoid becoming slaves in the first place, if possible³.
Slavery (including debt and labor-contracting, as the Bible defines it) is a necessary part of any economic system in this fallen world, because there are always going to be people who either fail at running their own business or who don’t want to run their own independent business and need employment, but in order for it to be good and not bad, it must be done according to the rules God gave in the Bible⁴.
Following God’s standards regarding slavery, such as not kidnapping people and selling them as chattel, and such as making labor contracts a matter of mutual agreement (Ex. 21), keeps it from becoming sinful and abusive. What’s bad, according to Christian thinking, is stepping away from God’s guidelines in any human activity.

Please understand, I am not campaigning to reinstate slavery as it was before the Civil War; what I am trying to do is use one example to challenge you not to allow other people’s opinions of what is right and wrong to influence you into calling something wrong which God never said was wrong.

This is the heart of legalism: calling something wrong that isn’t necessarily wrong.

In one Christian community I lived in, it was considered wrong for a woman to cut her hair. But did they all have extremely long hair? No. They found a loophole: they reasoned that if it’s a sin to cut their hair, then it must not be a sin to shorten their hair by some other means than cutting! So, most of the women in that community shortened their hair by burning the ends off, and thus they considered themselves good Christians. That’s legalism.

Reaching a little further back in history, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in his historical fiction book about the medieval White Company, tells the humorous story of a monk who was exiled from his monastery for rescuing a drowning woman because it was considered a sin to touch – or even look at – a woman, and he had obviously had to touch her in order to rescue her.
Legalism was alive and well back in Jesus’ day, too: When Jesus healed a man’s withered hand during a synagogue meeting, the Jews legalistically tried to accuse Jesus of breaking the Sabbath, because He had performed the healing on a Sabbath day when God had said to do no regular work (Mat. 12:10). Jesus said, “The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat… and they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men's shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with their finger.” (Matthew 23:2&4)
Christians are guilty of a million other ways of adding on to God’s rules: Three that come immediately to mind are:

prohibitions that some Christians have against dating someone of another ethnicity. Of course, if there are a lot of huge cultural differences, it could be difficult to find the kind of unity God calls for in marriage, and that is worth considering, but that’s a practical, wisdom issue, not a moral issue of right or wrong. There is no prohibition in the Bible against marrying someone from another ethnicity; the only prohibition that comes close is when the Bible says that Christians should not to marry non-Christians⁵.
Another example of legalism is prohibitions of some Christian organizations against all alcohol use. To be sure, the Bible warns against the abuse of alcohol, and those warnings need to be heeded carefully, such as not getting drunk (Eph. 5:18) and not drinking while on-the-job (Prov. 31:4-5; Lev. 10:9), but the Bible never prohibits alcohol completely, rather it encourages the use of wine and other low-alcohol-content beverages in appropriate circumstances, such as at religious feasts (Deut. 14:26, Mat. 26:27) or for legitimate health reasons (Prov. 31:6, 1 Tim. 5:23). What the Bible actually prohibits is being “led astray” by what you drink (Prov. 20:1).
And then there’s the prohibitions of whole denominations against certain ways of applying the water of Christian baptism. Nowhere in the Bible does it describe the ritual of how to baptize somebody. Some people were baptized in rivers: they “went down” into the riverbed and “came up” out of the riverbed, but it was inbetween the actions of “going down” and the “coming up” that they were “baptized,” and we aren’t told exactly how that was done (Matt. 3:16, Acts 8:36). The Apostle Paul was baptized standing up (Acts 9:19). He and Cornelius were baptized inside a house (Acts 10:47); the Philippian jailer was baptized inside a jail (Acts 16:33)! Thousands more were baptized somewhere within the walled city of Jerusalem, all in one afternoon (Acts 2). There is remarkable diversity in the New Testament baptismal accounts, so why do we create certain “right” ways of doing it which go beyond God’s actual commands and split up the body of Christ over it?

To be fair, I understand that often practices like these are developed by well-meaning people who are attempting to avoid bigger problems by being more restrictive than the Bible allows, but God’s word tells us that He wants us to learn “not to be above the things which have been written⁶” (1 Corinthians 4:6 “Now, brothers, I have adapted these things to myself and Apollos through you in order that you might learn this from us: not to be above the things which have been written, in order that it not be [this] one over [that] one, should y'all continue to be puffed up against the other.”)

What can we do about legalism? We must apply Jesus’ command: “Judge not, lest you be judged, for by the standard you judge, you will be judged...” (Matthew 7:1)

Now, this does NOT mean that we should abandon all attempts to decide whether certain things are good or bad by God’s standards. In John 7:24 Jesus commanded His followers to "...keep judging with righteous judgment."
What Matthew 7:1 does mean is that we shouldn’t judge others according to a standard we wouldn’t want to be judged by. Because we will be judged.
- Don’t speak out against someone for a sin which you yourself are indulging in – it will be bad enough to experience judgment for your own sin without also being condemned for hypocrisy! (Romans 2:3 “And do you reckon, O man, who judges those who practice such things, yet does the same thing, that you will escape the judgment of God?” Fat chance!)
- And don’t criticize others harshly or else, when you are judged, it will be with more harshness than grace. (Luke 6:37 “...do not condemn, and you will not be condemned; pardon, and you will be pardoned.”)
- And don’t play God in other people’s lives by making up rules that restrict their freedom to follow God’s word. (Romans 14:3-4 “... let not him who doesn’t eat [meat sacrificed to idols] judge him who does eat: for God has received him. Who are you that judges the servant of another? to his own lord he stands or falls...” Colossians 2:16 “Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of a feast day or a new moon or a sabbath day…” You’re not his Lord, and the Lord has given us a certain amount of freedom in our decisions about diet and holidays, so back off on being judgy in those areas.)

And yet, how often do our hearts want to rebel against God and take the final authority away from Him to judge what is right and what is wrong?
1. Jeroboam, the first king of the northern kingdom of Israel worried that if his people kept going down to the southern kingdom of Judah to worship God in the temple of Jerusalem, his kingdom would be threatened. “And Jeroboam said in his heart, ‘Now the kingdom will return to the house of David: if this people go up to offer sacrifices in the house of Jehovah at Jerusalem, then the heart of this people will turn again unto their master, even unto Rehoboam king of Judah; and they will kill me...’ At this the king took counsel and made two calves of gold, and he said… ‘It is too much for you to go up to Jerusalem. Here are your gods, O Israel, which brought you up out of the land of Egypt… And this thing was a sin…” (1 Kings 12:26-30) In other words, Jeroboam told his people that God’s commands regarding worship were “too much” and that they needed to worship idols to keep the nation together. Can we get away with fudging on what is right and wrong, in order to keep our job, like Jeroboam did? No way! “This thing became sin unto the house of Jeroboam, even to cut it off, and to destroy it from off the face of the earth.” (1 Kings 13:34)
2. “What? Destroy a whole family over getting people to worship the one true God, just in a different place? My god would never do such a thing! My God is love!”
  Have you ever heard comments like that? People who do not want to submit to the God of the Bible as He has actually revealed Himself, like to re-make Him according to their own liking, picking and choosing the parts of the Bible that say things they like about Him, and ignoring the rest. This may sound nice, but it is actually rebellion against God. God commands us to accept all that He says in the Bible, including passages like Habakkuk 3:12-13 “You [Yahweh] march though the land in indignation, threshing the nations in anger. You went out to save Your people…You crushed the head of the house of evil, Laying him bare from bottom to neck.” The God of the Bible cares about justice as well as mercy.
3. Maybe you aren’t trying to fudge on God’s ethics or ignore what the Bible says about God, but when evil gets personal, that’s when many people decide it is time to take over the role of God and condemn Him for causing pain in their lives or in the lives of their loved ones: “How could God allow my mother to become so painfully sick? If God is good, why didn’t He stop that cancer? He is therefore either not good or He’s is not very powerful…” (If you haven’t heard that line yet, you will before long, or you will be tempted to think it yourself.)

The fundamental ethical problem with statements like this is that they steal from God the right to decide what is right and what is wrong. It is a way of saying, “I don’t trust you, God, to make choices in discerning good from bad; I want my preferences to decide what is good and what is bad.”
It’s like the toddler in the kitchen saying, “Mom, I hate green beans, I don’t trust you to feed me good food anymore; I’m just going to eat from the candy jar from now on.”
In God’s perspective, the problems with this world are not a result of any inability on His part to stop bad things from happening; the problems are because we humans want to rebel against Him and make ourselves out to be gods. In other words, the problem is not with God, the problem is human sin against God.
Was it bad that Joseph in the Bible was kidnapped and sold as a slave by his brothers? Yes!
Was it bad that Joseph was falsely accused and thrown in jail for years? Yes!
Was it bad that Joseph was separated from his family and sent to Egypt? No! Joseph himself said to his brothers later, “You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.” (Gen 50:20) Joseph recognized that even though evil was intentionally done to him, God was intentionally doing good to him – and ultimately to his entire family and nation.
Like Joseph, we can compare what God says in the Bible with the actions of people and declare whether or not they are doing what God says is right, but we must not say that God has done what is bad; that would be to usurp the place of God and stand in judgment over Him. We don’t know all the good that God will bring from the painful things that are happening to us right now.
"Everywhere a greater joy is preceded by a greater suffering, " wrote St. Augustine in his Confessiones.
God is not helplessly standing by, wringing His hands and wishing the people would quit being so mean. Psalm 2 paints a rather different picture, “What have the nations clamored for and peoples vainly meditate for? ... The one sitting in the heavens laughs, the master mocks at them... saying ‘I anointed my king over Zion, the hill of my holiness.’” (Psalm 2:1-6) King Jesus is unlimited in His power, and God laughs in derision at people who think they can control the world.
The Apostle Paul also taught that God is sovereign. Despite being flogged, stoned, shipwrecked, imprisoned, and being the object of assassination attempts, Paul still confidently stated in Romans 8:28, “God⁷ works all things together for good.”
Often, painful things in our lives are God’s method of discipline. No one is so perfect that they could not use some refining. Suffering is God’s way of maturing us – forcing us to leave our remaining idolatries and cling to Him alone. We may feel that the refining suffering is far more intense than we would expect for ourselves or for our loved ones, but who are we to judge what is just in our own discipline? (Does your toddler have a good sense of how much discipline it will take to set him straight when he gets into the forbidden candy jar?)
Hebrews 12:6-11 “...it is the one whom the Lord loves that He trains, and He whips every son whom He accepts. Keep persevering for the purpose of training. It is as to sons that God is being offered to y'all, for what son is there which a father does not train? But if y'all are without [the] training of which all [sons] have become partakers, then y'all are illegitimate and not sons. Furthermore, we have indeed had the fathers of our flesh [as] trainers, and we were chastened. Will we not much more submit ourselves to the Father of our spirits and live? For, on the one hand, they were training for a few days according to their reckoning, but on the other hand, He [will train] on the basis of what bears together into our partaking of His holiness.” Just because something painful happens does not mean that God is cruel; He may be bringing discipline out of love.

But what if you have done what is right and painful things happen? This does not make it right for you to start taking over the place of God. Job’s haunting question to his wife bears consideration, “Shall I accept good things from God and not bad things?” (Job 2:10). Jesus promised that we will suffer if we follow Him (Mark 10:30, John 15:18-21), so the Apostle Peter taught us to entrust ourselves patiently to our God who judges justly (1 Pet 2:20-24 “…if, when you do good you also were to endure suffering, this is gracefulness alongside God. Why, it is for this purpose that y'all were called, because even the Christ suffered on our behalf, leaving behind an example for you in order that y'all might adhere to His tracks – ‘Who never committed a sin, nor was deceptiveness found in His mouth,’ Who, while being insulted was not insulting back, [and] while suffering was not threatening, but He was giving [it] over to the One who judges justly. Who Himself ‘carried our sins’ in His body upon the tree, in order that we might live in His righteousness after dying to our sins, of Whom [it was written] ‘by His stripes y'all were healed.’” It is only through trusting Jesus to take care of our sins that we can be healed.
I think it’s interesting that other theistic religions don’t seem to have a problem with submitting to the decrees of a god who is greater than them:

The ancient Greeks took it for granted that their many gods were powerful and capricious and sometimes did mean things to people. In Homer’s Odyssey, it is taken for granted that if the sea-god Poseidon had a bone to pick with the main character, Odysseus was going to have a difficult trip on his raft, and there was little he could do about it.
Similarly the animistic cultures of our modern world who recognize the power exercised by the spirit world on the natural world, accept, as a matter of course, that sometimes the spirits want things that are undesirable to the human community. Sacrifice a woman and her child in order to end a drought? Well, if that’s what must be done, then it must be done.
The Hindu religion has a similar mindset with its doctrine of karma, and the Muslims submit to the will of Allah, for after all, the word “Islam” means “submission.”
However, these other religions do not have a doctrine of sin, discipline, and righteousness like what God teaches in the Bible, so when something bad happens, it just happens. “It is the will of God.” You can’t restrain the hand of a god, nor should you disturb the cycle of karma by helping a poor, sick person. Hindus believe bad things just have to be endured so that maybe a future life will be better.

Such fatalism, however, is not what the Bible teaches. The Bible teaches humility, patience, and trust before a perfectly good and just God, but it also teaches us to intervene against evil.

Abraham expressed it correctly when he was horrified to hear that God was about to wipe out an entire town that his nephew lived in. He begged God to withhold this severe judgment for the sake of the few righteous people still living in the city, but at the end, he stated his faith that God knows what is best, saying, “Will not the judge of all the earth do right?” (Genesis 18:25)
In the book of Job, after chapters of struggling to trust God despite a host of troublesome events, God says, “Shall he that finds fault contend with the Almighty? ... And Job… responds, “…I put my hand over my mouth.” (Job 40:1-4) Nevertheless, Job spoke up and reprimanded his visitors when they said things that weren’t true.
David, despite any elaborate justifications he may have worked up to make himself feel o.k. after committing adultery with Bathsheba, said in Psalm 51:4 to God, “Against You, You only, have I sinned, and done that which is evil in Your sight, for you are just when You speak, and right when You judge.”
In other words, as my seminary professor, Dwight Zeller, paraphrased it, “It is against you, God, especially you, that I have committed this sin and done evil – and you are the one calling the shots, that it is indeed evil. All of which (my confession, your determination of what is evil, and my petition for forgiveness) will ultimately demonstrate that you are the just One, when you speak condemningly, and you are entirely without blame, when, and in the way [that], you judge… I am the king of Israel and do often judge, but in this case, you alone are my judge, and I have done sinfully, and you are the one who will be vindicated, not me.^⁸”

Conclusion

Some people are tempted to call good evil because everybody around them is upholding some legalistic standard. But we must be careful not to add man-made moral ideas to the Biblical law that God has already established.
Other times we are tempted to call good evil because, in our hearts, we want to stand in the place of God and judge Him when some injustice has come our way and inconvenienced us. We must not give in to the temptation to think of God as unjust when He allows suffering to come our way. Trust that He will bring discipline to make us more like Him and yet that He will ultimately bring greater good out of our painful experiences.
A third and more-insidious form of calling good evil is Antinomianism: the denial that any outside law should be imposed upon us. I want to address that next week along with the problem of calling evil good, and conclude this study on ethics with that.

But for now, let me close by affirming the basic truth of the Bible that God is good.

“Jehovah is good to all; And his tender mercies are over all his works.” (Psalm 145:9)
- “Jehovah is good unto those who wait for Him, to the soul that seeks Him.” (Lam. 3:25)
- Will you repent of being suspicious of the quality of God’s providence for you and repent of being afraid of the future? Will you seek Him and accept His tender mercies for you, even if they include excruciating times of refining?
“Oh taste and see that Jehovah is good: Blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him.” (Psalm 34:8, cf. 100:5)
- “Jehovah is good, a stronghold in the day of trouble; and He knows those who take refuge in Him.” (Nahum 1:7)
- Since God is good, will you run to Him and take refuge in Him? Will you keep your trust and hope in Him to protect you from all that is evil in this world?
“Praise Jehovah; for Jehovah is good: Sing praises unto His name; for it is pleasant.” (Psalm 135:3)
- Will you offer prayers of praise to God, believing that He is good? Will you sing praise to Him this week?