Morality: How Do I Know Right from Wrong?
“Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth.”
John 17:17
Ladies, all the answers to the big questions seem to radiate out from my God belief. Certainly that is true about the moral question: how does one know right from wrong? Standing on God’s truth gives the believer solid footing, compared with the slippery slope of the flat-out untruths and half-truths of secular insight.
In His John 17 prayer Jesus pleads with the Father to make us holy (sanctified) with the truth found in God’s Word, seeing as we live in the morass of the world’s ways. The buzzword goes like this: that may be true for you, but it’s not true for me. How so? Truth is truth. Right is right; wrong is wrong. Are there any possible exceptions?
Yet the exceptions, the qualifiers, the what-ifs, are what the one who does not know God adamantly argues. Why am I surprised? The Man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned (1 Corinthians 2:14).
The Bible does not waver as to the absolutes of the Ten Commandments (Deuteronomy 5:6-21), subsequently embraced by Jesus in the Law of Love (Matthew 22:37-40). Nor is Scripture inconsistent regarding divorce (Matthew 19:3-9), abortion (Deuteronomy 5:17), and homosexuality (Romans 1:26-27). Then too the gospels are loaded with the “I tell you the truth” statements of Jesus: “I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again” (John 3:3); “I tell you the truth, he who believes has everlasting life” (John 6:47). We can rest easy on the big things. It’s those other questions that pop up in our everyday lives that are not found in our Bible indices.
That’s when we search the Word: your word is a lamp to my feet and a light for my path (Psalm 119:105).
That’s when we kneel in prayer, eager for the Spirit’s insight: “when he, the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come” (John 16:13).
That’s when we consult godly others: Let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds (Hebrews 10:24).
Whew—thank you Jesus. I cannot imagine how many times your Word and your Spirit have rescued me from wrong, then pointed me in the right direction!
Nancy P
