Man needs morality because without it we have chaos, and in fact we cannot deny the reality of morality because we spend our lives either excusing or accusing behaviour (Rom. 2:14,15). We have found Hammurabi’s code dating from about the time of Abraham and of course we are more familiar with Moses’ law which came five hundred years later. Hopefully we are even more familiar with Jesus’ law in the New testament.
Wherever man has gone he has taken morality with him and the more civilized the society the more thorough and more codified it has become. Morality is a part of our constitution although there have always been those who say you can’t legislate morality. This is patently false for if it was true we could have no laws against murder, theft, rape etc. etc. Do such people really mean it? If such were robbed at gunpoint and heard the Police say “you can’t legislate morality so there is nothing we can do”, they would have a change of tune. If they mean that laws won’t make everyone conform then they are right, but we still maintain our laws. Prov. 16:6 is an appropriate observation at this point: By the fear of the Lord men depart from iniquity. Laws, by themselves, cannot do this.
The famous ex-basketballer, Wilt Chamberlain said he has slept with 20,000 women! What can stop AIDS, VD, jealousies, divorces, unwanted pregnancies and a host of other problems in that kind of environment?! When another ex-basketballer, Magic Johnson was declared HIV positive a congressman said, Magic, we need you now more than ever. We need you to remind us that government must take the lead in stopping the spread of AIDS! Really? Did the government give AIDS to Johnson?
What do people mean when they say “:You can’t legislate morality”? They mean this: you can’t pass a law against the particular immorality I wish to engage in or approve of in others. Who says this? The gambler, the drunk, the homosexual, the adulterer, the prostitute, the abortionist, the pornographer, the drug pusher, the drug user etc. The leader of the Texas Human Rights Foundation says it when he says What people do in the privacy of their own home is not anyone’s business, particularly the State’s .
In effect the whole question of morality is reduced to this: WHOSE MORALITY SHALL WE LEGISLATE? Morality is a crucial issue for governments and nations…and it is a crucial one for Christians too – will we follow a multitude to do evil or will we stay with the Book? One doesn’t have to be a pessimist or a cynic to see that things have changed. Attitudes have changed, legislation has changed, behaviour has changed. Why? Because the basis of our morality has changed. As to the basis for morality we have two basic choices – God or man. Ps. 127:1 reminds us that except the Lord build the house they labour in vain that build it. Leave God out and what do you have? Jean Paul Sartre (French atheist) wrote everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself….Nor, on the other hand, if God does not exist, are we provided with any values or commands that could legitimize our behaviour.
Judges 21:25 records a time in Israel’s history when everyman did that which was right in his own eyes, quite contrary to what God had commanded. Rom. 1:28ff shows that when we reject the knowledge we don’t want, we lose the knowledge we do want. All we can do is live by the law of the lowest common denominator. This trend did not happen overnight. Back in 1965 a progress report was submitted to the Governor of Colorado. In the introduction it included this: The tendency away from “absolutes” seems to be a prevailing mood of the day. We have fallen into the trap of living by averages. We survey the amount of time the average student ought to study. We “Gallup-poll” our attitudes on any number of issues to discover where we stand in relationship to the “average” man. We study Kinsey reports to learn how our chastity compares with the “average”. We are in danger of drawing a median line through the behaviour of society in the hope that, finding ourselves one shade above the average, we shall be justified. The danger is that, with averages depressing themselves more and more, we shall live by lowering standards. Joseph Wood Krutch wrote, “Society may be expected to require less and less of its members who are pursuing the normal as it descends to lower and lower levels.“
And so it is popularly believed that law is evolving. At a “Human Rights Campaign Dinner” for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people, the then President Clinton said moral law is evolving: We are defining in practical terms the immutable ideas that have guided us. Now, by the way, immutable means “not capable of change”. Moral law, of course, does not change but the President wanted to change what he himself called the immutable!?
At the Nuremberg Trials after World War 11, a dispute arose concerning the laws by which the accused Nazis would be tried. Hitler’s men argued that they had not broken any laws:- they could not be charged with murder, because personhood had been defined to exclude Jews and other minorities judged to be obstructing the advancement of the Third Reich. They were simply following the laws made by the Government and enforced by the courts of the day. Robert Jackson, chief counsel for the U.S. claimed there was a higher law than that of transient courts and nations. He won the day and their judgment was just. But I am afraid that if these trials occurred today, the Nazi argument would be successful. Note that we have done exactly the same thing in removing the status of personhood from the unborn, and so we live in a State where the final solution is to kill the children.
When morality is cut off from God we end up with what can be called a cutflower morality. A flower cut from the garden and placed in a vase of water may retain all the appearances of life for a few days, but it will not improve – rather it will wither and die. That is good commentary on the age in which we live. We stand on the shoulders of those who went before and many people don’t know why we are blessed. (They believe it must be democracy and so they see the advancement of the world will be accomplished by the export of democracy! However, the achilles heel of democracy is democracy itself – if a nation is Biblically illiterate it will vote in injurious laws which will destroy it, democracy notwithstanding) Gal. 6:7 – we reap what we sow, and the fruits are ripening and there’s more to come. Marshall McLukan used to ask If the temperature of the bath water rises one degree every ten minutes, how will the person taking the bath know when to scream? Professor Budziszewski of the University of Texas told of being approached by a student who had spent months researching contemporary works of ethical and political theory. The student told him he had been thinking about God, something he had never done before. He asked Do you think I’m crazy? The professor said no and the student was greatly relieved. The professor then asked, What first made you think of God? The student replied, None of these writers say anything about Him, and it seems to me that they’re building their theories on nothing.
C.S. Lewis coined an expression chronological snobbery, which essentially is the art of despising the past as naive and unsophisticated. It is much like Job’s rebuke of his friends – surely wisdom will die with you. Solomon said there is nothing new under the sun and that’s true of morality. The more we change the more we stay the same. Man speaks of a need for a new morality for a new millenium but when you examine it, the new morality is nothing different from the old immorality. (cf. Isa. 5:20). We use ‘weasel words’: it’s not murder, its pro-choice; it’s not adultery it’s an affair; its not homosexual, it’s gay; its not murder, it’s euthanasia: it’s not adultery, it’s marriage. Where will it lead? – brave new world or another dark ages? Christ and His light or paganism?.
God’s laws can’t be changed. Lewis again: The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of imagining a new primary colour, or, indeed, of creating a new sun and a new sky for it to move in. All the colours in the universe come from just three primary colours – yellow, red and blue. Other colours are just combinations of these three. Man can’t invent a new morality; all he can do is call good, evil, and evil, good; the very thing Isaiah warned against in 5:20. Man can’t break God’s laws, but rather God’s laws break man. Hosea lamented the state of his nation in 4:6, declaring My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. The proverbial writer warned in 14:34, righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people, and when we remember that Ps.9:17 declares The wicked shall be turned to the grave, as will all nations that forget God, it may be later than we think.