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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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