By Bob Beanblossom
24 July 2016
“Morality is the outward manifestation of religion,” according to Tolstoy.
Paul Kurtz, author of the Secular Humanist Manifesto I and contributor to II and II, disagrees. While rejecting all legislated morality, especially that that can be traced to the Bible, he writes that some undefined moral code can be taught by relativistic humanists with no absolute foundation and achieve a higher universal morality. His views are echoed by a growing segment of political and educational leaders. The Manifesto is a work in progress as the good-intentioned authors continue to revise it as they watch the power of individual greed and avarice overpower altruism in atheistic behavior. As their system gains ground, the moral decay intensifies. They don’t seem to have the answer that they had hoped for.
In stark contrast, God’s plan is both absolute and final. The Law given to Moses by God is, and has been, the foundation of national legal systems around the world. The Law was given as a means of man securing a relationship with his God. Man, however, found it impossible to keep the moral provisions of the Law. “Therefore by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in His sight: for by the law is the knowledge of sin.” (Romans 3:20)
We don’t like to be told that we are sinners. Today, in rebellion to that absolute law, we see that moral foundation being undermined by a shift to the relativism espoused by Kurtz. Individual and small minority ‘rights’ are displacing the rights of the community as a whole. Divisiveness and hate mongering by leaders intent on securing power from the people replace stability and equal standing under the law. Equitable treatment of all is replaced by ‘more equal’ treatment of select groups. Increasingly, elites flaunt their always existing exemption from the law of the common people.
The Law was but an introduction to a higher order of God’s relationship with man, His creation. Designed by God to show man his weakness and moral depravity–ideas repugnant to humanists–it worked well: “For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.” (Romans 2:23)
Jesus Christ consummated the Law by His death on the cross, and brought grace to mankind. Giving Himself once for our sins, He supplanted the ongoing sacrifices of the Law. Grace came, not instead of, but thru the living Word of God. Not as an afterthought or make-do measure of a God surprised by out failure to measure up to His statutes, but as the proposition planned even before the foundations of the world were laid.
Christ can say, without in any way compromising the continuity and integrity of His Word, but wholly displacing the recurring sacrifices of animals for sin, “For the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost.” (Luke 19:10)
“But these are written that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life thru His Name.” (John 20:31)