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THE HOLINESS OF GOD #5
WHO TELLS GOD WHAT'S RIGHT AND WRONG?
Even a devout atheist, who thinks, "There is no God," watches
the World Trade Center towers come down, and says: "That is madness;
that is wicked." But where does this innate idea of WRONG come from
if there isn't an eternal, divine RIGHT somewhere beyond, defining good
and evil?
It's one of the sweetest letters you can imagine: a mom's last note to
her two little boys, Bobby and Mike. Knowing they would have to grow up
as orphans, she wanted these final words to be jewels they would carry
in their hearts for a lifetime.
"Eventually you too must come to believe that life is worth the
living," she writes. "Your lives must teach you, too, that good
cannot flourish in the midst of evil; that freedom and all the things
that go to make up a truly satisfying and worthwhile life, must sometimes
be purchased very dearly."
This brave young mother also had an intensely vibrant marriage; she
loved her husband ardently and was always faithful to him. She mentions
him in this last paragraph of her letter:
"We wish we might have had the tremendous joy and gratification
of living our lives out with you. Your Daddy who is with me in the last
momentous hours, sends his heart and all the love that is in it for his
dearest boys." Now notice this, and I'll explain: "Always remember
that WE WERE INNOCENT and could not wrong our conscience. We press you
close and kiss you with all our strength. Lovingly, Daddy and Mommy."
Isn't that a beautiful letter? And written by a mother whose conscience
was completely clear. "We are innocent; we have done nothing wrong."
That was written by a 37-year-old mom named Ethel, on June 19, 1953. Just
a few hours after she wrote that, prison officials strapped her into the
electric chair at Sing Sing Prison and executed her for the crime of espionage.
The first jolt of 57 seconds didn't kill her, so they strapped her down
again and hit her with the deadly voltage a second and third time. Ethel
Rosenberg, the first woman executed in the United States since Mary Surratt
conspired to assassinate Lincoln, joined her husband Julius in betraying
her country, selling atomic bomb secrets to the Russians which helped
escalate the Korean War and cause 50,000 needless deaths. In 1997, declassified
papers known as the "Venona Cables" established beyond dispute
the guilt of this New York couple; in fact, a Soviet agent named Feklisov
came forward and admitted that it was all true. Julius was code-named
"Liberal" by the KGB and met regularly with them. And young
Ethel, going to the electric chair, writes in her last note to the boys:
"We were innocent and could not wrong our conscience."
Well, it's a dismal, wrenching story, and as we keep on with our study
of the holiness of God, we grapple, as the human race always does, with
the question of right and wrong. Back on Monday, we set forth the proposition
that God isn't simply holy He DEFINES holiness.
"Holy is the way God is," A. W. Tozer writes. "To be
holy He does not conform to a standard. He IS that standard."
But says who . . . besides Dr. Tozer? Have you ever wondered that? Christians
and Jews and Muslims all believe that God is good. But who is to say that
the things God says and does and IS . . . are good?
Back in September of 2001, when those magnificent towers in New York City
came crashing down, the world was baffled by the terrorists' claims that
THEY were right, and that the rest of the world was wrong. "Our cause
is just" seemed to be the mantra coming out of the catacombs of Afghanistan
and airing on that Al-Jazeera TV network. "The Taliban insists that
ITS power really lies with God and the Afghan people," Newsweek quoted
them as saying. America and its allies immediately wanted to say: "We'll
pay you back," and the terrorists were responding: "No, this
was us paying YOU back. You sinned first." Suicide bomber Mohamed
Atta's last prayer, which investigators found in his luggage, seemed to
invoke the name of God and the hope of Paradise as HIS reward for the
"holy" deeds he was about to commit. In these madrasas, the
religious schools that indoctrinate young men in violent Islamic fundamentalism,
the concept of killing infidels and waging jihad are daily taught as good
and noble goals.
If you react from your gut, you say in response: "Well, I know that
the things I believe in are right . . . because I just know they are."
A Christian says, "I believe these things are right love your neighbor,
the golden rule, the Ten Commandments, the Beatitudes because they're
in the Bible, and I believe the Bible is right." But what if the
Bible is not right? What if God Himself, however you define Him, is not
good. Where does it end?
In the early chapters of his book, Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis who
slowly and painfully grew out of atheism himself grapples with the question
of a good God being behind the moral blueprint we all sense as we watch
innocent people being killed.
"My argument against God [when I was an atheist,]" he writes,
"was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust." Does it
ever especially lately. "But how had I got this idea of just and
unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of
a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called
it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to
speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself
in such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he falls into
water, because man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet."
If there is no God out there who IS holiness, who IS the benchmark of
good . . . then where do we get this idea that some things we see on CNN
are wrong? Why is destroying the World Trade Center wrong, if it serves
your political aims? Why is adultery wrong if it feels good and brings
you some short-term emotional comfort?
Lewis goes on to explain a philosophy or theory that many people call
"dualism."
"Dualism means the belief," he writes, "that there are
two equal and independent powers at the back of everything, one of them
good and the other bad, and that this universe is the battlefield in which
they fight out an endless war."
And you say: "That sounds familiar lately! And the battlefield
has been my back yard." Even without giving either of these "powers"
or forces or entities a personality or name like "God" and "Satan,"
we sense that the firefighters were good and the New York City police
were good, and Mayor Giuliani was good, and that Osama bin Laden and his
terrorist cell mates were bad. But what makes one side good and the other
one bad? Just because we happen to prefer the firefighters' side?
"The two powers, or spirits, or gods the good one and the bad one
are supposed to be quite independent." I'm quoting again. "They
both existed from all eternity [in this dualism theory.] Neither of them
made the other, neither of them has any more right than the other to call
itself God. Each presumably thinks it is good and thinks the other bad."
That's precisely what we have in the world right now. "One of them
likes hatred and cruelty, the other likes love and mercy, and each backs
its own view. Now what do we mean when we call one of them the Good Power
and the other the Bad Power? Either we are merely saying that we happen
to prefer the one to the other like preferring beer to cider or else
we are saying that, whatever the two powers think about it, and whichever
we humans, at the moment, happen to like, one of them is actually wrong,
actually mistaken, in regarding itself as good. Now if we mean merely
that we happen to prefer the first, then we must give up talking about
good and evil at all. For good means what you ought to prefer quite regardless
of what you happen to like at any given moment. If being good' meant
simply joining the side you happen to fancy, for no real reason, then
good would not deserve to be called good. So we must mean that one of
the two powers is actually wrong and the other actually right."
Accordingly, there would be, regardless of our politics or where we
were born, one viewpoint or set of moral rules that is actually RIGHT.
Never mind whether you like it or ascribe to it; the one side just IS
. . . RIGHT. But that takes us to the conclusion of Lewis' essay:
"But the moment you say that, you are putting into the universe
a third thing in addition to the two Powers: some law or standard or rule
of good which one of the powers conforms to and the other fails to conform
to. But since the two powers are judged by this standard, then this standard
or the Being who made this standard, is farther back and higher up than
either of them, and He will be the real God."
And that's where we are in Christianity. God is behind it all, and His
holiness which is simply HIM defines good and bad and right and wrong
for the entire universe. Right is right because He IS it and because He
SAYS it. For those who subscribe and also for those who choose not to.
Those 19 bombers honestly believed, on September 11, that they were going
to meet up with God. And they will.
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