My mention of truth leads me to fear that some people of postmodernist persuasion may be tempted not to read any further, unless of course they are curious to read (and maybe even attempt to deconstruct) a text written by someone who actually believes in truth. For my part I confess to finding it curious that those who claim that there is no such thing as truth expect me to believe that what they are saying is true! Perhaps I misunderstand them, but they seem to exempt themselves from their general rubric that there is no such thing as truth when they are either speaking to me or writing their books. They turn out to believe in truth after all.

John Lennox in God’s Undertaker

Every man has an imperative something within him which makes him say “I ought,” even in the most degraded specimens of humanity the “ought” is there, and the Bible tells us where it comes from—it comes from God. The modern tendency is to leave God out and make our standard what is most useful to man. The utilitarian says that these distinct laws of conduct have been evolved by man for the benefit of man—the greatest use to the greatest number. That is not the reason a thing is right; the reason a thing is right is that God is behind it. God’s “oughts” never alter; we never grow out of them. Our difficulty is that we find in ourselves this attitude—“I ought to do this, but I won’t”; “I ought to do that, but I don’t want to.” That puts out of court the idea that if you teach men what is right they will do it—they won’t; what is needed is a power which will enable a man to do what he knows is right. We may say “Oh I won’t count this time”; but every bit of moral wrong is counted by God. The moral law exerts no coercion, neither does it allow any compromise. “For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all” (James 2:10). Once we realize this we see why it was necessary for Jesus Christ to come. The Redemption is the Reality which alters inability into ability.

Can those of us who claim the name of Christ be honest and admit that we often find excuses to justify doing the wrong thing? Perhaps if we were more honest about this and less vocal about the failings of others, the world would see the church as something other than a bunch of judgmental hypocrites. Yes, I know that we are often unfairly criticised, but we need to own the times when the criticism is justified.

Also, we need to be more vocal about our inability to live up to any standard. As Chambers points out, our inability is why we need a savior. In Jesus we have a savior who “alters inability into ability.”

I want to share the following passage from Philip Yancey’s book Vanishing Grace:

The poet W. H. Auden, who left Europe in the 1930’s to escape the looming war, found his entire outlook shaken as he sat in a Manhattan theater watching newsreels of German atrocities. His belief in the goodness of human beings collided with the evidence of appalling evil flashing before him. He concluded, ‘If I was to say that was evil, I had to have a standard by which to do so. I didn’t have one . . . I’d spent all my adult life was an intellectual, destroying the absolutes, and now suddenly I needed one to be able to say that this was wrong.’

Auden left the cinema in search of some absolute, one stronger than liberal humanism, that would condemn the Nazis as well as defend their victims. He soon made his way to Christian faith. Only God could ask human beings, as he later said in a poem, to ‘love your crooked neighbor with your crooked heart.’

I like the last line. Not only does Christianity provide an answer to the evil that surrounds me, it provides an answer the evil that resides in my own heart.