Pastor Phil McCutchen

Society, goodness & the resurrection of Christ

Everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself, just as he is pure. 1 John 3:3 (NIV)

For the last month, I have been studying the correlation between believing and behaving. In other words, does the resurrection of Christ from the dead and the hope of our subsequent eternal life have any impact on our current moral standards? Apostle John thought so, or why would he have penned 1 John 3:3, “Everyone who has this hope … purifies himself, just as he is pure.”

The new atheists such as the late Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins have all tried to say there is objective morality without God and Christianity. Old school atheists like Bertrand Russell would have objected to this, vehemently claiming there was no objective morality. Remember Joseph Fletcher and situational ethics? However, those who rejected the Christian Gospel and any other deity other than the “enlightened self” realized a few years ago that saying there were no moral absolutes meant they had painted themselves into a corner. Imagine saying to them, “I like to torture babies,” or “I think we should treat people with darker skin as slaves and subhuman,” or “I think we should hate gay people.” The rejecters of Christian morality wouldn’t say, “well, it’s not my place to judge you,” “whatever works for you,” or in the words of Joseph Fletcher, “to thine on self be true and thou cans’t be false to any man.”

Now, as a Christ follower, I contend that we cannot have a consistent morality without a stable source of moral knowledge and that mere humans can never be a source of moral knowledge. Just this week in a CNN interview, former Senate majority leader Harry Reid said he had no regrets in lying about Mitt Romney in order to help Barack Obama get re-elected. When asked if this was wrong, he said, “Romney didn’t win did he?” Do you see what happened here; because Harry Reid established himself as the arbiter of morality; he concluded that the moral objective of putting his candidate into office trumped the biblically defined evil of bearing false witness for any reason. You simply can’t have stable moral values without a stable source of moral knowledge. My premise is that Christ and his words are the only stable source of moral knowledge in the universe.

So, the reason that I proclaim that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is the hope of the world is not simply because trusting him gives eternal life, but also because it forever establishes Christ as the righteous judge of the earth and under his righteous judgments humans will flourish. The insanity of other gods, especially the new age god of the enlightened self, will continue to be exposed as an epic fail and Christ will continue to triumph over all our puny efforts to show that we cannot be good without his influence.

It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God–that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption. 1 Corinthians 1:30 (NIV)