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 read this paragraph in Malcolm Muggeridge’s Christ and the Media and thought I would share it without additional comment.
I had occasion once to take Mother Theresa into a New York television studio for her to appear in the Morning Show, a programme which helps Americans from coast to coast to munch their breakfast cereal and gulp down their breakfast coffee. She was to be interviewed by a man we could see on a studio monitor in living colour, with a drooping green moustache, a purple nose and scarlet hair. It was the first time Mother Teresa had been in an American television studio, and so she was quite unprepared for the constant interruptions for commercials. As it happened, surely as a result of divine intervention, all the commercials that particular morning were to do with different varieties of packaged food, recommended as being non-fattening and non-nourishing. Mother Teresa looked at them with a kind of wonder, her own constant preoccupation on being, of course, to find the wherewithal to nourish the starving and put some flesh on human skeletons. It took some little time for the irony of the situation to strike her. When it did, she remarked, in a perfectly audible voice: ‘I see that Christ is needed in television studios.’ A total silence descended on all present, and I fully expected the lights to go out and the floor manager to drop dead. Reality has momentarily intruded into one of the media’s mills of fantasy – an unprecedented occurrence. Somehow it gave me an extraordinarily vivid sense of what it must have been like all those years ago in the Temple at Jerusalem, when the money-changers were chased out, and their tables overturned. In the studio normal proceedings for the Morning Show were soon resumed, just as I am sure the money-changers were back in their places the following day. Indeed, they are there still. Both incidents, however, bear out the saying with which Solzhenitsyn concludes his Nobel lecture: ‘One word of truth outweighs the world.’
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.
I ran across this quotation from Nicholas Wolterstorff while reading Philip Yancey’s book Vanishing Grace:
When we have overcome absence with phone calls, winglessness with airplanes, summer heat with air-conditioning – when we have overcome all these and much more besides, then there will abide two things with which we must cope: the evil in our hearts and death.
I run into very few people who speak and act as if this life is all you get and there is nothing beyond death. It is often said of someone who is deceased, “he (she) is in a better place.” This belief persists in spite of efforts of those who subscribe to a completely materialistic world view.
The evil in our hearts is an even more difficult problem. When I read of war crimes, it is too easy to think that I would have responded differently. Would I do better? Perhaps not.
Why is it that so many New Year’s resolutions fail? Why is it that none of us live up to our own standard of behavior? Why is it that I can take the opportunity to change lanes into the smallest of breaks and then get mad at the guy who does the same in front of me? The potential for evil lies in my heart and self discipline can only force it below the surface.
Philosophers can tell us that we are simply products of our DNA and our responses are preprogrammed, but we know better. There is a part of us that knows that this is a cop out. The evidence points that way because nearly all of us have the desire to be better than we are.
It is to these issues that Christianity is uniquely qualified to speak. Christianity does not offer behavior modification (if we properly understand the Gospel). We do not explain away the evil. We worship the one who gave his life to conquer the evil inside us.
Christianity does not offer platitudes about life beyond the grave; we worship the one who demonstrated power over death by raising himself from the death. We do not need to fear the evil inside us, we need to surrender to the one who is uniquely qualified to remove that evil and replace it with his Love.
Today we celebrate Jesus’ victory over death and evil. It is this event that gives us hope that the power of death and evil can be broken in our own lives.
