When Paul wrote to the Corinthians he did not tone down his moral teaching to make it more palatable to Christians living in an immoral society. Today it is always a fatal mistake to attempt to tailor biblical teaching to the mood of the day.
When looking to the Bible for guidance on moral questions to do with the society in which God has placed us we have to be aware of what is permanently valid and what is culturally dated.
As we interpret the Bible we do not close our eyes to the particular situation, historical moment and geographical location in which it was originally given. The more we know about the social customs of the Old and New Testaments the better.
But just because we can point to many instances in the Bible which show that it is culturally dated does not give us liberty to reject its teaching. On the other hand, we are not meant to elevate biblical cultural behavior to the status of permanent validity.
Rather we should accept that the teaching of the Bible is permanently valid. At the same time we should translate its cultural setting into our own contemporary cultural terms.
For example, in John 13:12-17, Jesus ordered his disciples to wash one another's feet. "You should do as I have done for you" John 13:15. This was to be done as a mark of mutual love, which is quite happy to humble itself in the service of others. That is the principle that remains forever valid.
But it does not mean that we are to wash the feet of all Christians we meet. For in the West we no longer walk through hot and dust-filled streets. So foot-washing is not needed. But the need for humble service never ends.
About any course of action or moral dilemma we can ask the following four questions:
Chart: Checklist A: Overriding Considerations
| Checklist A: Overriding Considerations | ||
|---|---|---|
| Questions to ask | Scriptures to apply | |
| 1. | Will it bring glory to God? | So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God. 1 Corinthians 10:31 |
| 2. | Will this give the devil an opportunity? | Do not give the devil a foothold. Ephesians 4:27 |
| 3. | Is there anything in the Bible contrary to it? | To the law and to the testimony. If they [godless people] do not speak according to this word, they have no light of dawn. Isaiah 8:20 |
| 4. | Is it evil? | Avoid every kind of evil. 1 Thessalonians 5:22 |
| 5. | Is it right or wrong in itself? | All wrongdoing is sin. 1 John 5:17 |
| 6. | Can I do this in Jesus' name? | And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. Colossians 3:17 |
| 7. | Do I know in my heart that it's sinful? | If I had cherished sin in my heart, the Lord would not have listened. Psalm 66:18 |
| 8. | Can I pray about it? | ... in everything, by prayer and petition... Philippians 4:6 |
| 9. | What would my pastor think about it? | Remember your leaders, who spoke the word of God to you. Consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith. Hebrews 13:7 |
| 10. | Would I like to be doing this when Jesus Christ returns? | And now, dear children, continue in him, so that when he appears we may be confident and unashamed before him at his coming. 1 John 2:27 |
| 11. | How will it affect the world, and all who live in it? | The earth is the Lord's, and everything in it. Psalm 24:1 |
Chart: Checklist B: How will it Affect Others?
| Checklist B: How will it Affect Others? | ||
|---|---|---|
| Questions to ask | Scriptures to apply | |
| 1. | Will it make somebody else fall? | It is better not to eat meat or drink wine or do anything else that will cause your brother to fall. Romans 14:21 |
| 2. | Will it build up someone else's faith? | All of these must be done for the strengthening of the church. 1 Corinthians 14:26 |
| 3. | Some things do not edify others. | "Everything is permissible"—but not everything is beneficial. 1 Corinthians 10:23 |
| 4. | What about a person with a weak conscience? | For if anyone with a weak conscience sees you who have this knowledge eating in an idol's temple, won't he be emboldened to eat what has been sacrificed to idols? [ref?] |
Chart: Checklist C: How will it Affect My Relationship to God?
| Checklist C: How will it Affect My Relationship to God? | ||
|---|---|---|
| Questions to ask | Scriptures to apply | |
| 1. | Will this cause me to be tempted? | Do not think about how to gratify the desires of the sinful nature. Romans 13:14 |
| 2. | Am I trusting God or my own strength? | Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. Proverbs 3:5 |
| 3. | Would the Lord Jesus Christ do this? | To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps. 1 Peter 2:22 |
| 4. | Is it putting Jesus first? | ... for I always do what pleases him. John 8:29 |
| 5. | Will it help to make Jesus supreme? | He [Christ] is the head of body, the church... so that in everything he might have the supremacy. Colossians 1:18 |
| 6. | Will it defile God's body? | Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? 1 Corinthians 6:19 |
Paul is certain that it is possible that we can know God's will and that we can grow in knowledge of God's will. This is the way to really please God, says Paul "For the reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you and asking God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all spiritual wisdom and understanding. And we pray this in order that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and may please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God." Colossians 1:9-10
Well, we reply, we certainly should be.
Chart: Checklist D: How Will it Affect Me?
| Checklist D: How Will it Affect Me? | ||
|---|---|---|
| Questions to ask | Scriptures to apply | |
| 1. | Am I in two minds about doing this? | But the man who has doubts is condemned if he eats, because his eating is not from faith; and everything that does not come from faith is sin. Romans 14:23 |
| 2. | Am 1 doing it out of selfishness? | Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Philippians 2:2 |
| 3. | Am I showing off about my own spirituality? | Now a man named Ananias, together with his wife Sapphira, also sold a piece of property. With his wife's full knowledge he kept back part of the money for himself. Acts 5:1-2 |
| 4. | Am I denying myself? | If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself... Luke 9:23 |
| 5. | Am I deceiving myself? | Do not deceive yourselves. If any one of you thinks he is wise by the standards of this age, he should become a "fool" so that he may become wise. 1 Corinthians 3:18 |
| 6. | Am I justifying my action in the sight of men? | You are the ones who justify yourselves in the eyes of men, but God knows your hearts. What is highly valued among men is detestable in God's sight. Luke 16:15 |
But we know that this is all too often just not the case.
A survey conducted by the Roper Organization found that behavior deteriorated after "born again" experiences.
While only 4% of respondents said they had driven intoxicated before being "born again," 12% had done so after conversion.
Similarly, 5% had used illegal drugs before conversion, 9% after.
2% admitted to engaging in illicit sex before salvation; 5% after.
Most people agree that every society needs some kind of morality to live by. But if we were to go by the morality communicated by many of the tabloid newspapers and many of the TV soaps we would end up by living by the law of the jungle.
There are many moralities around and it is of vital importance that we choose the "right" one.
"IMPROPER" MORALITY
"But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity, or of greed, because these are improper for God's holy people." Ephesians 5:3
THE RIGHT WAY
"Better, though difficult, the right way to go Than wrong, tho' easy, where the end is woe." John Bunyan
JESUS' TEACHING
"How is it that nobody has dreamed up any moral advances since Christ's teaching?" Michael Green
AN IMMORAL ACT
"Give up money, give up fame, give up science, give up the earth itself and all it contains, rather than do an immoral act." Thomas Jefferson
A WORLD WITH NO SENSE OF GOOD AND BAD
"If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilized morality to savage morality, or Christian morality to Nazi morality. The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other." C. S. Lewis
A MORAL FAITH
"Lord, give us faith that right makes might." Abraham Lincoln
A MINORITY OF ONE
"Right is right, even if everyone is against it; and wrong is wrong, even if everyone is for it." William Penn
Paul likened the Christian life to a spiritual battle: Ephesians 6:10-18. As we consider many of the moral problems that surround us it would be unwise to forget the battle that rages within us.
One of the most neglected parts of the teaching of the Bible concerns the moral battle that rages inside every Christian. To deny it is to be dishonest and to be untrue to the teaching of the Bible. While Christians are forgiven sinners they can still identify with Paul when he says:
"For what I want to do I do not do,
but what I hate I do...
For I have the desire to do what is
good, but I cannot carry it out.
For what I do is not the good I want to do;
no, the evil I do not want to do—
this I keep on doing."
Romans 7:15-19
VERY FAR GONE!
"Man is very far gone from original righteousness."
Book of Common Prayer
TOTAL DEPRAVITY
"Our nature is not only completely empty of goodness, but so full of every kind of wrong that it is always active."
John Calvin
EICHMANN
"Eichmann is in us, each of us."
Dinur
OUR EVIL SPIRIT
"It is easier to denature plutonium that to denature the evil spirit of man."
Albert Einstein
COOKING A GOOD OMELETTE
"No clever arrangement of bad eggs will make a good omelette."
C. S. Lewis
A MONSTER OF DEPRAVITY
"If I wrote down every thought I have ever thought and every deed I have ever done, men would call me a monster of depravity."
Somerset Maugham
If we want to help other people we need to know the true nature of human nature.
If we want to become holy we also need to know what the Bible teaches about our human nature.
According to Paul, the acts of our human nature are obvious:
The seven deadly sins, all of which are found in the Bible, also show us what our human nature is like:
ANGER
"But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment." Matthew 5:22
"Be not angry, for anger leads to murder. Be not jealous or contentious or full of wrath, for of all these things murders are engendered."
Didache
COVETOUSNESS
"Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions." Luke 12:15
"The soul of the covetous is far removed from God, as far as the memory, understanding and will are concerned. He forgets God as though God were not his God, owing to the fact that he has fashioned himself a god of Mammon and of temporal possessions."
John of the Cross
ENVY
"Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy." 1 Corinthians 13:4
"Envy is the diabolical sin."
Augustine
GLUTTONY
"Their god is their stomach."
Philippians 3:19
"Gluttony kills more than the sword" Sixteenth-century proverb
LUST
"They are well-fed, lusty stallions, each neighing for another man's wife." Jeremiah 5:8
"Surely," we say, "such as verse as this must apply to ungodly, unregenerate people?" But no. Jeremiah 5:1 gives us the context, which is God's people, living in God's holy city: "God up and down the streets of Jerusalem." All the Christian moral principles in a book like this should be applied to us as individuals, and to Christian fellowships, before we dare to point any accusing fingers elsewhere. Consider the horrors of child abuse, and the cover up of such rank evil, that have been committed by cardinals, Christian ministers and Christian leaders.
PRIDE
"Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall." Proverbs 16:18
"He was like a rooster who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow."
George Eliot
SLOTH
The book of Proverbs warns us against sloth many times: Proverbs 10:5; 13:4; 18:9; 19:15.
"Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise!
It has no commander, no overseer or ruler, yet it stores its provisions in summer and gathers its food at harvest.
How long will you lie there, you sluggard? When will you get up from your sleep?" Proverbs 6:6-9
"If a man is lazy, the rafters sag; if his hands are idle, the house leaks."
Ecclesiastes 10:19
We may be more familiar with the verses about living by the Spirit, the fruit of the Spirit and keeping in step with the Spirit: Galatians 5:16-18, 22-25. But we should not ignore the verses in between.
John Newton once said: "I am not what I ought to be; I am not what I want to be; but I am what I am by the grace of God."
Knowing what is right, pointing others in that direction, and doing what is right ourselves, requires constant growth in our own sanctification.
The ethical teaching found in the New Testament is based on the ethical teaching in the Old Testament. And when we come to the teaching of Jesus, there is no suggestion that he started from scratch.
For example, Jesus summed up the Ten Commandments with the dual requirement that we should love God and love our neighbor: Matthew 22:37-39; Mark 12:30; Luke 10:27.
For Jesus, his ethical teaching, as with all the rest of his teaching, was based on two things:
Jesus' ethical teaching was based on his knowledge of what was and is good.
When Jesus assessed a person's character he did so by judging his inner motives. Jesus had endless clashes with the scribes and Pharisees because of the emphasis they put on meticulous attention to external acts while neglecting the inner condition. Jesus likened them to sepulchers which looked quite beautiful from the outside, but inwardly were full of rotting corpses, Matthew 23:27-28.
"You are like whitewashed tombs" Matthew 23:27.
Mere observance of ceremonial law was never commended by Jesus. Rather, he was concerned about weightier matters of the moral law; with things such as:
Jesus based his teaching on the inner character of goodness, rather than legislating on everything under the sun, and giving endless laws to obey. So when Peter asked Jesus how many times he should forgive his brother, Jesus said that he should not stop forgiving his brother before 490 times. In this way Jesus emphasized the importance of having the right moral attitude to a thing, rather than keeping some law, Matthew 18:22; Luke 17:3-4.
So, to obey Jesus meant much more than observing a set of laws, rules and codes; rather it meant to be devoted to the person of Jesus.
One result of Jesus' view about goodness was that he was outspoken in his condemnation of certain undesirable qualities. Anything that ran counter to the character of true goodness was in line for direct condemnation from Jesus.
Take the example of covetousness. Jesus condemned covetousness, just as the Old Testament did. Jesus told the parable of Dives and Lazarus as a commentary on the evil of covetousness. For the charge against Dives was not that he possessed wealth, but that he refused to use his wealth to help the poorest people on his doorstep, Luke 16:19-31. Dives' possessions had blinded him to people in need and so his social conscience and concern were destroyed.
In Jesus' ethical teaching he always went to the heart of the matter. He knew that self-centeredness was the root from which so many other evils sprang: evils such as:
Jesus said quite bluntly that those who keep life for themselves lose it, Luke 17:33.
Jesus taught that self-love was the great stumbling block in personal ethics. So Jesus told his followers that they had to deny themselves if they were truly to be his disciples, Matthew 16:24.
Jesus did not hesitate to condemn sins of the flesh. But Jesus did not just focus on the outward act of fornication, but explained that the desire to fornicate was against God's laws, Matthew 5:28.
In the same way Jesus never condoned the woman caught in the act of adultery.
But he made sure that her accusers realized their own sinfulness, John 8:2-11.
Jesus also condemned anyone who made another person sin, and said that one should go to extreme lengths to ensure that this never happened, Mark 9:43-48.
How can a 2,000-year-old book help us with our ethical dilemmas in the twenty-first century?
It is because God does not change: Malachi 3:6. He is the same yesterday, today and forever: Hebrews 13:8. God's Word does not change either.
Ah, but the Bible was written in a different culture, in a pre-industrial age. So how can it apply to us today?
Principles like right and wrong, goodness and evil do not change from one generation to another. Such principles remain and can be applied to us and to your great-grandchildren.
Have you ever wondered why Paul should say to Timothy that the Old Testament could equip him for every good work? See 2 Timothy 3:16, 17.
But won't this mean that we take things out of context, if we use such an ancient volume to guide us?
Yes, we have to watch out that in our interpretation of the Bible we do not mistake changing cultural habits for non-changing principles.
We need to be alert. First of all we have to identify the immediate cultural context and the immediate historical context.
But that's not all. Second, we have to see how the text applies to us today: Acts 28:25-27.
Hermeneutics, understanding how the text applies to us, goes hand in hand with exegesis, appreciating what the text meant to its first readers. This is not just true of the Bible; it applies to every ancient writing.
But if you do this, you'll come up with things that the original author never imagined in his wildest dreams!
Yes, we may well. In some senses the
Bible is unlike any other ancient document, but Christians believe that God is its author: 2 Timothy 3:16. So it's our job to see how God's unchanging principles do impact on our present day's problems. This is the case whether or not the original authors of the Bible were aware of this.
Isn't doing that kind of thing rather beyond your reach?
Not really. But it is often far from easy.
However it is vitally important. For as Christians we believe that we must obey God in the society God has placed us in. To say that we know God, 1 John 2:4, and love God, John 14:15, means precisely this. We are to use our God-given minds, Matthew 22:37, to work out how we should behave today, basing all this on God's principles laid down in his Word.
But you must surely agree that there are many other contemporary debates that the Bible is silent about.
This is just not the case. In fact the Bible has specific teaching about things like theft, murder, and adultery. The problem here is less to do with the Bible and more to do with the euphemistic names given to these evils. For example:
"Good conduct arises out of good doctrine." John Stott
There are many prohibitions in the Bible. But they do not come from a grumpy kill-joy, but are from the loving heart of our heavenly Father. He created us and has given us many guidelines to live by.
"And you have forgotten that word of encouragement that addresses you as sons: 'My son, do not make light of the Lord's discipline, and do not lose heart when he rebukes you, because the Lord disciplines those he loves, and he punishes everyone he accepts as a son.'" Hebrews 12:5-6
The Ten Commandments are cast in a negative form so that we are helped to keep on the straight and narrow. Here are ten tests to see if we have broken God's laws. If we are deliberately breaking God's clear commands, there is little point in trying to discover the right course of action about things we are uncertain about.
"Let him who takes pleasure in mauling the lives of the absent know that his own is not such as to fit him to sit at this table."
Augustine had this notice displayed at his dinner table.
"The soul of the covetous is far removed from God. He forgets God owing to the fact that he has fashioned for himself a god of temporal possessions." John of the Cross
Many, but not necessarily all, of the moral and ethical questions which face Christians would be alleviated greatly if we managed to live the kind of lives that we are instructed to live in the pages of Scripture.