“You won’t die!” the serpent replied to the woman. “God knows that your eyes will be opened as soon as you eat it, and you will be like God, knowing both good and evil.”
Genesis 3:4-5 NLT
To say that violence and strife arise from the refusal to worship the Lord Jesus Christ is sure to ruffle some philosophical feathers. But long before fists or bullets fly, truth has been suppressed. Simply put, we don’t get bloodshed unless we first have irrationality. And nothing is more irrational than the belief that man can be his/her own god, that is, the final judge of right and wrong.
Think about it: if there’s no personal God as the final standard of reasoning and ethics, then there’s no true way to know truth.
This means, necessarily and logically, that the only true way to arrive at truth for the atheist is to literally duke it out. In other words, might makes right in a God-less world because power must be the final standard. To claim that violence isn’t the final standard of appeal in an amoral universe (one without the personal and transcendent God) is preposterous. Many say that bloodshed and raw force isn’t as “productive” as cooperation. That’s brazen nonsense. Tell that to Mao. Or Stalin. Or Jack-the-Ripper. Convenience or practicality are not morality. As far as that argument goes, if a man chooses violence over the practicality of cooperation he’s not doing something immoral. The tyrant and criminal aren’t wrong in a godless universe, they’re just impractical.
The hard truth is that once we jettison the word of God as our final standard of right and wrong, we abolish right and wrong altogether. If there is no absolute moral authority, there is no morality at all and it’s merely the mechanism in which the weak try to keep the strong from slaughtering or enslaving them.
The human race is full of all sorts of folly. The early American Idol auditions come to mind. I once thought I was the next Steve Perry of Journey. Granted, I was 11. The next year, I was sure I was a Jedi. People really thought the Yankees had a chance in theWorld Series this year. But what folly can be greater, what level of irrationality higher, than all of us universally ignoring the plain fact that it’s impossible for us to be the final standard of authority? And if there’s no final standard of authority, there’s no authority downstream either. It’s all just illusion so that people don’t recognize the hard truth that violence is the final standard.
The thing to be clear on is that all debate and reasoning presupposes a final standard and that standard, to be logically consistent, must be both personal and ultimate. This is why all of us know the truth about God – not only through the beauty and power of the created earth, but also because we presuppose His moral purity and divine power every time we reason (Romans 1:19; Psalm 19:1-7).
About anything.
If anything is true, there must be Truth.
If anything is moral or immoral, there must be the Righteous One who is absolute morality.
If anything is right or wrong, there must absolutely be a moral Judge.
Conflict and violence abound for the very reason that this argument must be made! Unless and until a man or woman will submit to the Lord and His word, there will not be peace on earth, nor in homes, business, or cities. A conflict of truth can only be settled by appeal to the final standard and a debate over whether vanilla is better than chocolate is of no concern to us in regard to morality. But violence is on the bloody horizon when that debate turns to rights.
Who we determine is the final authority decides all the rest of it.
Truth suppression is mankind’s greatest talent. Atheists everywhere pretend that we and everything else are accidents but that these accidents have absolute meaning. Or we pretend to be God-fearing but certainly don’t mean that because if we did we’d certainly never presume to steal His divine prerogative. That God is ultimate and His word-law, the Bible, is the final standard of authority would radically alter a good many things if truly believed. The area at hand is conflict and violence and that certainly would be radically changed if professing Christians lived by and practiced the basic principle of the Lordship of Jesus Christ, which is that He alone is allowed to issue ethical commandments.
The problem of the church is that so many attend but live their lives and run their affairs – their families and businesses – according to the principle of atheism. The central conflict in life is man against God and this spills out into every other relationship. The mark of the Christian is that there is true peace with God (Romans 5:1) through the gifts of grace and faith. This leads to men and women living in the principle of that faith and more and more rejecting the temptation to live as our own god, determining good and evil on our own terms.
That atheists fear a Christian government, that is, one that’s grounded and guided in Scripture, via faith, is due to the syncretism in the church and not to God’s true nature. Where Christ is there is liberty (2 Corinthians 3:17) and sin is so bad that only God can bridge that infinite gap between Himself and us. This is the unknown ideal of our time…of all time, and exactly why each generation needs to learn the gospel anew.
The Father sends His sun on the just and the unjust at this very moment (Matthew 5:45); He lavishes with blessings everywhere, with friendships and health and art and beauty…all of which are meant to lead sinners to repentance (Romans 2:4). No man-made law will ever bring a sinner to love God, nor make them right with Him! Only the gospel of Jesus Christ can do such a miraculous thing.
But the church is secular when it opposes the doctrine of original sin/total depravity (that mankind’s default setting is hostile in mind to God’s law and is, therefore, dead in sin). It has fear of men rather than God. It believes the sad tales of psychology and humanism rather than Genesis 3. It refuses to see the grand atrocity and ugliness that is thinking the creature can determine right and wrong on its own terms, for it knows how offensive to rebels it is to say that they aren’t able to live as their own god. The church that “lays off” or “backs off” preaching the doctrine of total depravity because people can be pretty nice sometimes, is utterly unloving. We need straight truth of sin and righteousness by faith alone, through Christ alone, not feelings.
And the truth is that God is completely righteous and utterly sovereign. He is the great King and Creator God. We are His creation and, therefore, logically owe Him complete obedience. Let’s not gloss this over: all attempts by created beings to speak of right and wrong on their own terms is high treason against the great King. This is the central and primordial sin. It isn’t using too much salty language, listening to your music too loud, smoking, having a beer with your hamburger, going to a game on Sunday, wearing white socks with your suit, or anything else. Man’s central problem is that he’s a covenant breaker and a rebel who refuses to submit to God’s authority and seeks to establish his own.
We would like to classify sin on our own terms and everyone has their own list.
Don’t wear your shoes in the house.
Don’t burp at the table.
The religious folks don’t have a corner on this market of legalism.
The modern culture is replete with ethical commandments and blasphemy laws, though they assiduously avoid calling them by those names…and for obvious reasons. They say, “it’s not enough not to be racist…you must be anti-racist.” They say, “you must affirm gays and lesbians or you’re a hater.” Indeed, no greater contradiction can be seen than those who fervently believe there are no moral absolutes incessantly issuing ethical proclamations such as these.
All of this is legalism, pure and simple.
Only the gospel is fit and authorized to make rebels right with God. The tragedy of our time is that the church seldom preaches this for the dreadful reason that it doesn’t believe it. The glory of the gospel is that those who are dead in their rebellion are made right with God through faith alone (Romans 1:17). Only this accounts for righteousness (right standing with Him) and rules out the tyranny of legalism. Legalism isn’t a type of bad Christianity. On the contrary, it’s unbelief dressed in Christian robes. Legalism is the continuation of man’s war on God’s sovereignty by stealth and infiltration.
Only God is authorized to issue ethical commandments for the simple reason that He’s the final standard. Nothing is more confused, mixed up, glossed over, contradicted, ignored, and hated, than the gospel of Jesus Christ because of all that it means. When we “win” someone to Christ in the gospel, we have no control over them; the Holy Spirit does. All attempts to fix the problems of the world caused by sin with politics or psychology or medicine are like a madman using a fork to drain the ocean. It’s the power and genius of sin to deceive and destroy that requires the remedy of Christ alone. The attempt to use Christ and anything else, or something else altogether, is only a continuation of the original problem, which is the intellectual pride of presuming we can think without God (Proverbs 1:7; 14:12).
Mankind absolutely cannot fix himself, nor is he able to save himself or anyone else for that matter. The gospel of Jesus Christ shows both the incomprehensible righteousness and mercy of God toward those whom He saves (Romans 3:21). It obliterates boasting (Romans 3:27). It obliterates all attempts to gain God’s favor or live a righteous life on one’s own terms (Romans 3:31). There’s a crazy logic at work (speaking in human terms). The life of faith (Romans 1:17) proves God’s righteousness and the beauty of the Old Testament law by the very act of admitting that we’re incapable of attaining that law except through faith.
The peacemakers are not, therefore, those false prophets who tip-toe through life, using their inside voices, and supporting the right causes. The true peacemaker is the one who accepts God at His word and tells people the truth about life – that He is the Creator and now calls all people everywhere to repent (Acts 17:30). The peacemaker is the one who steadfastly rejects his own word-law, knowing that he/she isn’t fit to issue decisions on right/wrong outside of God’s word. He/she knows that decisions of where to go on vacation and what to wear to work are fully retained by the individual in the context of God’s sovereignty via delegated authority. But decisions on ethical matters, on good and evil, are purely and solely God’s!
This means, of course, that no man nor institution may bind the conscience in any way. Only God and His word are authorized to do that. This means that we preach a social/political gospel of liberty under God’s true law. Tyranny is from an old Greek word that means “man’s law.” In other words, all conflict is because men refuse to submit to God’s law and seek to establish their own. Liberty cannot mean “absolute freedom” because that would mean that men have no Creator. Liberty and peace are only possible when sinners repent and submit to the wonderful law of liberty in Christ (James 1:25). True liberty is life under the law of Christ; true peace is the deliverance from the great lie of self-worship.
We say we strive for revival but this is vacuous nonsense if we go on living and worshipping in the principle of Adam rather than Christ. We say we want peace, but such is a lie if not based in the truth about God and man. Mankind has a conflict and violence problem because of sin, which is to say, he insists that he can live by the principle – the lie – of Genesis 3:5. The remedy must address the malady.
Peace only comes through the preaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ because no lie is defeated with another.
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