The New Morality

I read in a Reader’s Digest where a Miami Beach thief snatched a necklace from a tourist and took off.  He was arrested when he returned to berate the victim over his “fake” jewelry.  Such a thing is really hard to get my mind around as it by-passes logic, common sense, and my understanding of moral rights and wrongs in basic thinking.  Yet, I find myself in the same dilemma often when trying to understand today’s society.

How can someone who has stolen something from someone else believe it is that person’s fault that they can’t sell the jewelry for more money?  How can a man who texts lots of other women and commits adultery believe it’s his wife’s fault and that they, and I quote, “are just bad at relationships”.  How can someone believe that everyone of a certain skin color has an unequal advantage and they should be penalized for their skin color, or gender?  How can someone who receives free food, free cell phone, free rent and who doesn’t pay taxes believe other people should pay more?  How can anyone believe that someone who has committed a crime, been found guilty, and is in jail should have the right to do, well, anything?

And if we look around, these examples just pile up higher and higher and higher, so much in fact that I can’t contemplate them anymore so I stop looking at them in a seemingly apathetic manner.  But it’s not apathy, it’s an overwhelming inability to change the course of the ship’s direction.  The extent and infusion of this “new morality” regarding what is right and wrong, what is acceptable and unacceptable, is so deceptive, so corrosive, and so extensive that I can’t engage in a forward fight, but am entrenched to just defend what I know and to reassure myself what is truth.  It seems almost daily know that we have to remind ourselves we aren’t crazy.  The truth is still the truth. 

Today’s society wants us to believe that all truth is relative.  In other words, the truth for you might be different than the truth for me depending upon our heritage, our society, our family, or our experiences and more commonly in today’s society, our race (which I find mind-blowing considering we have a black President - race issues are 10x worse now than any time in my lifetime – so much for the celebration of equal achievement).  But this is false.  There is an absolute truth just as there is an absolute authority just as there is only one true living God. 

Jesus said in John 14:6, “I am the truth”.  God is the truth.  He is the righteous – Him and Him alone.  The truth comes through God’s Word, His son Jesus, and through the Holy Spirit.  2 Timothy 3:16 says “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.”  Jesus instructed in John 16:13), “When He, the Spirit of truth comes, He will guide you into all the truth … and He will disclose to you what is to come.” 

The simple solution to our society today is the adoption of God and His Word as our point-of-reference.  Our society has and continues in every possible way to move the cornerstone of the foundation of its existence.  It can and will fall.  The time table is set only by how quickly and forcibly that cornerstone is removed.  The answer is really that simple.  The answer has always been the same whether we want to believe it or not.

The answer is Jesus and it always will be.

Lord, please help me to desire to know Your Word, Your precepts, Your instruction.  Help me to listen to Your guidance and to follow Your Spirit in my heart.  Lead me to stand on Your right and wrong and to be able to sort out the world’s new morality so it does not corrupt me.  Protect me from this world.  In the only answer Jesus I pray.  Amen.