Monday, June 20, 2016
501 - God's Still Here
Spirituality Column No. 501
June 21, 2016
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary
God’s Still Here
By Bob Walters
June 21, 2016
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary
God’s Still Here
By Bob Walters
“More states have
perished by the violation of their moral customs than by the violation of their
laws. – Baron Montesquieu, France, 1734
Morality is
always a hot topic in the civilized world.
As simple as Jesus Christ and the
Bible try to make it, throughout history any number of governments, religions,
doctrines, sects, philosophies and, these days, social science, academic
despotism and cultural fashion have regularly conspired to define morality away
from the eternal absolutes of God.
Humanity insists on capturing – redefining, really – a piece of God’s
action. It’s a story as old as Adam, Eve
and Satan chatting in the garden.
Godly
morality might be just simply this: to live one’s life in productive, creative,
humble freedom for the overarching purpose of God’s glory; confessing faith with
unwavering trust in Jesus Christ; by loving God, our neighbors, our enemies and
the poor in coachable fealty to the Holy Spirit’s leading; and by holding reverently
fast to confidence in the Bible’s truth.
Morality needn’t be as difficult to
pull off as humanity again and again –and
still – shows it to be.
Montesquieu,
one of the 18th-century thinkers whose glowing philosophical
intellect fueled the cultural firestorm of the Enlightenment, was no Christian
moralist. He and many others espoused the
Enlightenment theology of Deism, asserting that in the beginning God did indeed
institute His own set of physical and natural laws but then receded from
earthly involvement leaving the laws of men up to the minds of men.
See what
they did there? They paved a humanist avenue
defining morality without the encumbrance of, you know, actually worrying God
was paying attention. As we are now
roughly three centuries into witnessing the behavioral fruits of kicking God’s
plainly voiced morality into the subservient intellectual backwaters behind spuriously
ascendant philosophical, political and economic systems far-removed from the
primacy of God’s love … how would you say that’s going for us these days?
Granted,
the United States is unique in that our founding documents avow humanity’s
rights and freedoms to be ordained not by government but by God. It says so – their Creator – right there in the first line of the U.S.
Constitution. Nonetheless today’s public
moral discussion fiercely combats the assumption, presence, suggestion or mere
mention of God’s uncontested eternal authority in moral truth. The Enlightenment proclaimed that the proper
behavioral underpinnings of culture were manmade “moral customs,” not God’s
truth and love.
So I agree
with Montesquieu’s observation, but say “Huh?”
to his truth.
Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) thought a moral discussion was timely. Also, he never before knew how to spell
“Montesquieu,” who by the way in the above quote was writing about the fall of
the Roman Empire. Feels familiar…
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