Question 3:  Is God Pleased With Just Any Goodness?

Perhaps the greatest misunderstanding the world applies to Christianity is that it’s a system of hierarchical control to make people behave a certain way.  So they buck against that perceived authority and go to great lengths to prove that they can be good people without the influence or coercion of the church.  They say things like, “I can be a good person without God.  I don’t need the threat of hell to act like a decent human being.  I can do good all on my own.”  And they aren’t wrong.  Lots of non-Christian people do good things every day.  They feed the hungry and shelter the homeless and comfort the hurting… all without the help or guidance of God. 

But there are a couple of fundamental flaws with this characterization of goodness.

First of all, we must determine who decides what is truly “good.”  We can all agree that a person can do what he thinks is right, but wind up ultimately doing what is bad.  British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain signed an appeasement agreement with Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany with the conviction that he was doing a good thing that would bring “peace for our time.”  In actuality, Britain’s reluctance to stand against Germany in 1939 only gave the Third Reich precious months to build up more planes and bombs to later shell London nearly to oblivion in 1940.  So, plainly, it is possible for us to be very wrong in our estimation of what is good and what is bad.  Our morals are flexible when situations become tense.  Our foresight is very short and we can’t see where our good intentions might take us.  What one culture calls good, another might call evil.  Our human morality is subjective from person to person, age to age, and culture to culture.  So is there any such thing as overarching, objective morality?

Because of these inherent flaws, human beings cannot be the authority on what is good or bad.  Only God, who stands above us, is the arbitor of what is truly right or wrong.  It stands to reason that the One who created the world and the people who populate it is the One who gets to make the rules of how it should operate.  Think of your favorite board game.  The person or company that invented the game is the one that writes the rule book.  I might try to play by “house rules,” but those subjective rules will change from house to house.  The true rules are printed by the one with the authority to make them.  Only God, the Creator, has the authority to determine what is good.

With this human shortsightedness in mind, we must admit that what we might consider “good” might not truly be good at all according to God’s standard.  The Bible reminds us that our righteous actions are as “filthy rags” before the Lord (Isaiah 64:6).  Even our best deeds are tainted by our sin.  Only God is truly good, and true goodness in our lives can only come through His presence in us. 

Secondly, Christianity is more than just a system of behavior modification.  Leonard Ravenhill famously wrote: “Jesus did not come into the world to make bad men good.  He came into the world to make dead men live!”  We are not saved to simply do good things, but to do Godly things… things that are glorifying to God, a part of His wonderful work, and will stand in eternity.  We can only do Godly things when the Holy Spirit of God works through us, and that begins by placing our faith in Jesus Christ as Lord. 

If we are in God’s family and living in the guidance and power of the Holy Spirit, we can’t help but to do good things, and those good things will be God-honoring because God Himself has worked His will through us.  I can meet a human standard of goodness on my own, but that standard is not the one God uses.  If I meet a false standard, what have I truly accomplished?  So if I want to meet God’s standard of goodness, I cannot do it apart from His Spirit working goodness through me.  And that only comes through relationship with Jesus Christ.

If I somehow strolled onto a military base and began shooting off the artillery, I would not earn my place in the battalion because I can do soldier-ly things as well as the enlisted men.  Instead, I would be arrested and punished for doing what I was not authorized to do.  In order to fire the artillery, I must first go to the recruiter, swear to defend the country, and commit myself to joining the army.  Only at that point can I have the authority to be on the firing range.  I might try to act like a soldier without the commitment of joining the military – and I might be really good at it – but it doesn’t mean I’m part of the team. 

God is not pleased when we set our personal standard of goodness and then keep it.  Our standard will always be too low.  His standard is the perfection of Jesus, and only through Jesus can we become the goodness of God that changes lives and ultimately changes the world.  Only God sets the standard for true goodness, and only He has the inherent righteousness to keep it.  But thankfully He shares His Spirit with us to see His will accomplished in this dark and sinful world.  Truly, as Jesus says, “apart from me, you can do nothing,” (John 15:5).