4 God'S Answer To Man'S Dilemma
With the Christian answer it is now possible to understand that there are true moral absolutes. There is no law behind God, because the furthest thing back is God. The moral absolutes rest upon God’s character. The creation as he originally made it conformed to his character. The moral commands he has given to men are an expression of his character. Men as created in his image are to live by choice on the basis of what God is. The standards of morality are determined by what conforms to his character, while those things which do not conform are immoral.
God can know about things that are not actualized. For example, he knew all about Eve, but she was not actualized until he made her. The same thing can be true in the area of morals. When man sins, he brings forth what is contrary to the moral law of the universe and as a result he is morally and legally guilty. Because man is guilty before the Lawgiver of the universe, doing what is contrary to his character, his sin is significant and he is morally significant in a significant history. Man has true moral guilt. This is entirely different from the conception of modern thought, which states that actions do not lead to guilt—a view within which actions thus become morally meaningless. Even the most degraded actions of sin have no final moral meaning. Ultimately “good” and “bad” actions alike are zero. This is an important factor in modern man seeing man as zero.
The Christian answer begins by saying that man is a moral creature made in the image of the Creator, that there is a law in the universe which, if broken, means that man is culpable. In this view, man is morally significant both as far as God is concerned and as far as his fellowmen are concerned. The modern non-Christian answer denies the legitimacy of moral absolutes, refuses to make any kind of final moral comment on man’s actions and thus reduces cruel and noncruel acts to the same level. With this answer not only is the concept of sin reduced to less than the biblical concept, but man is reduced to less than the biblical concept of guilty man.
If the modern explanation is accepted, then there ceases to be an answer to man’s dilemma—man is as he was in the beginning and ever will be. With the moral (in contrast to the metaphysical) explanation of man’s position in the universe and his consequent dilemma following the Fall, there is a possible solution.
If there is true moral guilt in the presence of a personal God (rather than a metaphysical intrinsic situation of what is and always has been), then perhaps there will be a solution from God’s side. And God says to man that there is a solution. That solution rests upon God saying that he is holy and he is love, and in his love he has loved the world, and he sent his Son. Now in history, there on Calvary’s cross, in space and time, Jesus died. And we should never speak of Jesus’ death without linking it to his person. This is the eternal Second Person of the Trinity. When he died, with the division that man has caused by his revolt now carried up into the Trinity itself, there in expiation, in propitiation and substitution, the true moral guilt is met by the infinite value of Jesus’ death. Thus Jesus says: “It is finished.”
Romans 3:26 is a verse that we tend to pass by too quickly in the midst of the structure of the first three chapters of Romans. These chapters tell us first why man is lost, and then the solution in the propitiatory death of Jesus Christ. At this point Paul can say: “that he himself might be just and yet [the force of the Greek construction] the justifier of him who has faith in Jesus.” On the one hand, because of the infinite value of Christ’s death, God does not have to surrender his absolutely holy character; and on the other, he does not have to violate man’s significance in order for him to be able to pardon guilt and restore man’s broken relationship to himself. This is the very opposite of the denial of antithesis and significance in modern man’s leap into the dark, which says that somehow we must believe, without reason, that God is love. A moral absolute remains, and yet there is a solution to man’s dilemma.
THERE NEED BE NO EITHER-OR IN LA PESTE
From the biblical answer flow four important facts.
First, the God who is there is a good God.
Second, there is a hope of a solution to the dilemma of man.
Third, there is a sufficient basis for morals. Nobody has ever discovered a way of having real “morals” without a moral absolute. If there is no moral absolute, we are left with hedonism (doing what I like) or some form of the social contract theory (what is best for society as a whole is right). However, neither of these alternatives corresponds to the moral motions that men have. Talk to people long enough and deeply enough, and you will find that they consider some things are really right and some things are really wrong. Without absolutes, morals as morals cease to exist, and humanistic man starting from himself is unable to find the absolute he needs. But because the God of the Bible is there, real morals exist. Within this framework I can say one action is right and another wrong, without talking nonsense.
Fourth, there is an adequate reason for fighting wrong. The Christian never faces the dilemma posed in Camus’ book La Peste. It simply is not true that he either has to side with the doctor against God by fighting the plague, or join with the priest on God’s side and thus be much less than human by not fighting the plague. If this were an either-or choice in life, it would indeed be terrible. But the Christian is not confined to such a choice. Let us go to the tomb of Lazarus. As Jesus stood there, he not only wept, but he was angry. The exegesis of the Greek of the passages John 11:33 and 38 is clear. Jesus, standing in front of the tomb of Lazarus, was angry at death and at the abnormality of the world—the destruction and distress caused by sin. In Camus’ words, Christ hated the plague. He claimed to be God, and he could hate the plague without hating himself as God.
A Christian can fight what is wrong in the world with compassion and know that as he hates these things, God hates them too. God hates them to the high price of the death of Christ.
But if I live in a world of nonabsolutes and would fight social injustice on the mood of the moment, how can I establish what social justice is? What criterion do I have to distinguish between right and wrong so that I can know what I should be fighting? Is it not possible that I could in fact acquiesce in evil and stamp out good? The word love cannot tell me how to discern, for within the humanistic framework love can have no defined meaning. But once I comprehend that the Christ who came to die to end “the plague” both wept and was angry at the plague’s effects, I have a reason for fighting that does not rest merely on my momentary disposition, or the shifting consensus of men.
But the Christian also needs to be challenged at this point. The fact that he alone has a sufficient standard by which to fight evil, does not mean that he will so fight. The Christian is the real radical of our generation, for he stands against the monolithic, modern concept of truth as relative. But too often, instead of being the radical, standing against the shifting sands of relativism, he subsides into merely maintaining the status quo. If it is true that evil is evil, that God hates it to the point of the cross, and that there is a moral law fixed in what God is in himself, then Christians should be the first into the field against what is wrong—including man’s inhumanity to man.