Christian Ethics in a World of Confusion
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Prayer Request
OPENING PRAYER
I want to begin with some brief remarks about the way I teach. From a Christian perspective we are more blessed in our age than ever before with a very deep and wide body of knowledge of not only who God is but what has been discovered about the early church over the last 2000+ years. And this continues to increase. So as I teach two things that I try to do are to expose you to some of that knowledge. And to provide references for the good resources and information that is out there. As many of you know that what there is an ever increasing body of knowledge. At the same time there is an almost endless supply of misinformation. And I believe that part of what make for good Bible study is knowing where to look. Both inside and outside the Bible. So what you will not get with me is just personal commentary. Now I may give you my insights on things. But we stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before us and done the exhausting work of grappling with issues both past and present, so that we can learn and grow in our walk with Christ.
Lastly, this is not just an information dump. This is a dialogue. Not a monologue. So I want it to be interactive. I have some information that I want to get though. But I want you also to have your questions answered. So my plan is to pause at certain times to ask you questions. And for you to ask questions of me or the text.
As an important additional note you can get the referenced information from this lesson on my website.
www.patternsofthebible.com
www.patternsofthebible.com
So what I would like to do over the next 2-4 weeks depending on how things go is talk about Christian Ethics. Now maybe that is a new term for you. Maybe you think you understand what it means. But what I hope to do is to try to give you a framework to help you naviagte some of the seeming strange situations we find ourselves sometimes. And help you see how these situations can fit into the grand narrative of God and His impact on our lives.
So I would like to begin with John 13. If you have a copy of God's Word with you, John 13. I'd like for us to start reading with verse 31 and read on down into chapter 14. This is Jesus after he's washed the disciples' feet, after he served them. Gospel John says this.
"When he had gone out, Jesus said, 'Now is the son of man glorified, and God is glorified in him. If God is glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and glorify him at once, little children, yet a little while I am with you. You will seek me, and just as I said to the Jews, so now I say also to you, where I am going, you cannot come.
A new commandment I give to you that you love one another just as I have loved you. You also are to love one another. And by this, will all people know that you are my disciples if you have love for one another.' Simon Peter said to him, 'Lord, where are you going?' Jesus answered him, 'Where I'm going, you cannot follow me now, but you will follow me afterward.' And Peter said to him, 'Lord, why can't I not follow you now? I will lay down my life for you.' Jesus answered him. 'Will you lay down your life for me? Truly, truly, I say to you, the rooster will not crow until you have denied me three times.
But let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my father's house are many rooms. If it were not so, I would have told you. Would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and take you to myself, that where I am, you may be also, and you know the way to where I'm going.' And Thomas said to him, 'Lord, we do not know the way where you are going. How can we know the way?' Jesus said to him, 'I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the father but through me.'"
Want you to think about, in your imagination, just for a minute, for those of you who are Christians in the room. Maybe others who are not Christians, but I'm speaking now specifically to Christians. Imagine you're in the context of your church, maybe you're at a small group, a Bible study, or maybe you're just talking to a fellow Christian maybe somewhere. The person says to you, "I'm wrestling with a decision. I don't know what to do."
He says that he's signed up to serve in an intelligence role overseas on behalf of United States Intelligence offices. He says to you, "I'm really grappling with it because I have to assume a different identity. And so, I have an entirely different backstory that I'm supposed to give to people when I'm overseas, a name that is not my name, a birthplace that is not my birthplace, an entire family history that's not my family history. All this is necessary for me to be able to harvest the kind of intelligence information that we have to have. But as a Christian, I'm conflicted as to whether or not I ought to be doing that since I'll be lying. Should I do it or not?"
Just think for a minute, what you would say to this person, that whether or not he should do that? Then complicate it a little bit more. He says, "Not only am I going to have to have a different identity, a different backstory, I'm also going to be going into an Islamic country where I'm going to have to pretend to be a Muslim in order to fit into the environment around me, which means not only when people ask me, 'Are you a Christian?' am I going to have to say, 'No, I'm a Muslim,' but I'm also going to have to be a convincing Muslim.
So when conversations come up about the claims of Christ, I'm going to have to convincingly argue as though I deny the deity of Jesus and the gospel. I'm going to have to be in situations where I'm going to have to be in Muslim worship services, where for everyone else around me, it will seem as though I am worshiping as a Muslim. Is that all right? Can you do that as a Christian?" Think about your answer to him on that.
Maybe he complicates it a little bit more. And he says, "Not only am I going to have to be under this assumed identity with this assumed religion, I also am going to have to have an assumed family in this other country, with a wife who will know nothing about the backstory, potentially children who are coming that may know nothing about the backstory. I already have a wife and children here in the United States, but in order to keep my cover, I have to live out this kind of life. Is that okay for me to do?"
He says to you, "I'm really torn because if we're going to have a military and an intelligence apparatus, you can't walk right in and say, "Hey, we're from the United States. We're here to find out what you all are doing." On the other hand, here I am a Christian trying to grapple with the fact, 'Can I, for the sake of my country, be sexually immoral, deny the name of Christ?'" Any number of other things.
How are you going to navigate the sort of answer that you're going to give to this person?
How are you going to navigate the sort of answer that you're going to give to this person?
Now, here's why that's important. You're probably not going to encounter a situation just like that. But it's important to think about that sort of thing because every single day, all of us are coming up against all sorts of choices and decisions about actions that we're making, that we don't have ready, concordance answers to. There are a lot of things that you have cognitively the answers too. Here's what I would do in this situation, or you know how to find those things out in terms of scriptural revelation.
But most of the definitive things that are going to happen in your life, that really are going to choose the direction that you're going to go are things you have not thought through, or they're going to be things that you're thinking through for the first time in a time when you have a major stake emotionally, maybe spiritually, in the outcome of that decision.
What can happen is that you can find yourself in the situation where you can be paralyzed, or you can find yourself in a situation where bearing one another's burdens can lead to a kind of paralysis.
Tonight I want us to think through issues of how we even start to frame some of these questions and to see these things as more significant and more important than the debates that we have on Facebook and on social media, where really what's happening is not a grappling with a real decision as a Christian. Instead, there's often simply an ethical question or a decision that's being put forward as a way just to identify who everybody's tribe is.
And so, you immediately know where you are on those particular questions, and the decision itself is just a stand-in. That's not where you're going to be most spiritually impacted. Where you're going to be most spiritually impacted are going to be in situations that feel very unfamiliar to you. You have to ask, "How do I follow Jesus in this particular way?" Now, this is exactly what is happening in the text that we read just a few minutes ago.
Jesus is standing up and talking about the living of the Christian life. He's preparing his disciples for what life will be like once he ascends to heaven. He says to them, "I'm going away. I won't be here with you, and where I'm going, you can't come with me. But you will come afterward, and you already know the way now." The confusion that has to hit in the room is one that I would have immediately felt as well, which is to say, "Lord, wait a minute. When did this conversation happen where you gave us the code as to how we are to follow you? Maybe we were asleep somewhere while you were praying. We don't understand where that is. Lord, where are you going and how do you expect us to know the way?"
Jesus's answer here is actually I think the key to the entire biblical revelation, "I am the way."
What do you think Jesus meant when He said, “ I am the Way?”
What do you think Jesus meant when He said, “ I am the Way?”
What you have here is not Jesus Christ as a means to an end, to forgiveness of sins and reconciliation with God, and as a teacher who is giving us directions as to how to live our life, although all that's true. Jesus Christ is himself the way and the pathway toward not only final consummation with God, but also to the living out of our lives to the degree that the Apostle Paul will talk about later, "The life that I live is the life of Christ being lived out in me."
The Word of God is coming in and affecting us in ways that are not just cognitive and directive, "Here's what you do. Here's the way that you go." That's true. But primarily, the power of the Word of God is at work in you when you are not seeking the answers to particular questions, which is why you need the entire scripture. You need Leviticus, even though you look through it and think, "What does Leviticus have to do with the way that I'm living my life out right now, with the sort of decisions that I have to make with my prayer life? And here's all of this stuff about skin blemishes and scab cleansings and, and so forth."
The Word of God has an effect in shaping and reshaping the conscience and the intuitions in ways that are not immediately obvious to you. God is speaking to you through His Word, shaping and changing you through His Word in ways that often do not show up in your life until much later, and in ways that sometimes are not even obvious to you at the moment. You're joining yourself to the life of Christ, and the life of Christ is one that doesn't just operate at the level of mental belief, but also operates then in action that comes out of that belief, which is why...
Think of Hebrews 11, This is the great faith hall of fame.
Here it is talking about the faith that is acceptable and commendable before God. That faith is showing up in a whole series of actions that are being undertaken in Hebrews 11, pointing back to the Old Testament revelation. Everybody has a code of ethics. You cannot have any sort of society, you cannot have any sort of civil law if you don't have an understanding of ethics.
Even beyond that, you can't have movies, you can't have novels if you don't have some system of ethics where someone can violate those ethics in a way that can bring about narrative tension. Can't even have gossip. If people are going to gossip, they have to gossip about something that's being done wrong to someone else. You can't do that if you don't have a basis and a foundation for ethics. What's unique about a Christian view of ethics is that in the Christian view of ethics, there is a narrative arc that is leading toward judgment.
So there are those things that are hidden, those decisions that shape and form who we are in terms of our character, that are not going to remain hidden. This is a personal reality. Let me give you an example. There was some research done by someone who was doing a lot of work in the issue of corporate social responsibility. What he wanted to do was to come in and teach corporations how to be a socially active and socially conscious.
And so, we wanted to have data to demonstrate that this is a good thing. So he said they did surveys that demonstrated that really if you emphasize the corporate social responsibility of a particular company, it doesn't really have a lot to do with the bottom line in terms of how much money you make. But he wanted to demonstrate, but you will recruit better people and those people will work harder. And so, they set up two dummy companies. They had one that had a high emphasis to corporate social responsibility and said, "Here are the things that we do to help the community," another corporation that didn't.
He said that the data seemed to show exactly what he was saying. You got higher quality people. For the one that had a socially responsible corporation, you had people who were willing to work for less money than they did at the other company. Problem was what you also ended up having over a long period of time was much more theft in the corporation, that emphasized all the things that they were doing for the community. I said, "Why?"
He said, "Well, because psychologically, the way that that people typically operate is to justify actions that they're taking almost as though there's a ledger." And so if I think of myself as a good person, who's doing good things for the community, then I can feel a little bit better when I start stealing a little bit from the company. Or as one person who was being interviewed, she worked as a clerk at a grocery store. She said that when she would have a situation where she would have a lot of really hostile belligerent customers, she could justify to herself, "I'm working really, really hard. I have to put up with this. It's okay if I take a little bit out of the cash register to make up for my trouble there."
This researcher was surprised by that kind of dynamic going on. I'm actually not surprised by that at all, because I think that we see that kind of moral licensing taking place all around us, and often in our own lives all the time. Bible tells us that that's going to happen. There is a way that seems right to a person, Proverbs says, but the way that it leads to is death. So there are really very few people who sit around like super villains in a layer, plotting to be evil.
Most people have a way to reframe whatever it is that we want to do, and to find a way to do that while still thinking of myself as a good person. That's why these decisions are so perilous. Also because what we're dealing with in ethical and moral decisions in our lives is not just about the decisions themselves. The scripture speaks to over and over and over again the reality of an unseen, spiritual order, something that every culture has recognized in some way or the other, using language of spirits, or gods, or watchers, or beings, those beings in the universe that really do seek harm to people, to image bearers of God.
So what does it mean to bear the image of God?
So what does it mean to bear the image of God?
What does this mean in the context of spiritual warfare?
What does this mean in the context of spiritual warfare?
Biblically speaking (and when we discuss supernatural darkness, we should indeed be speaking biblically), spiritual warfare should not be defined as soliciting angels, engaging in shouting matches with supernatural powers, or blaming our failures on demons. Rather, spiritual warfare is fundamentally about the conflict between two kingdoms, a conflict within and without for every true Christian, whether he or she discerns that or not.
Scripture speaks of these realities as principalities and powers or as rulers and authorities, and says that this dynamic is at work all around us all the time in ways that are invisible to us.
Several years ago, I was reading about this divorce case that became really inflammatory because you had three ex-wives of the same man. They were all involved in a custody dispute with him. The issue came down to a tattoo that he had on his arm, because the three ex-wives said, "We don't want to send our child over to his house on the weekends because he has an upside down cross on the side of his arm, that he put on his arm because he's a satanist. And it's terrifying to send a child over to a Satanist with the emblem of the upside down cross on his arm."
The man got up and talked in his own defense and said, "This isn't as scary as you think, because the upside down cross does indicate the church of Satan. I am," he says, "a part of the church of Satan." He said, "But I don't actually believe that there's a devil. So this isn't scary devil worship in the way that you think of it." He said, "Instead, the upside down cross represents the fact that I believe in the ego, being freed from any demand to serve."
He said, "So the cross is an emblem of a servile humanity that is bending its will to someone else. The church of Satan teaches me to be free from all of that, to free the ego, and to serve oneself, and to exalt oneself, and to seek power and glory." Now, I disagree with him about the existence of a personal devil. But apart from that, he does have a pretty good read on what Satanism is, the freeing of the self and the freeing of the ego in a way that is the opposite of the way of the cross.
That's why when you have the New Testament saying that the sorts of encounters that you're going to find in your life, where you're going to have decisions that you have to make about going this direction or going to that direction, and often you feel pulled to go in a direction that is contrary to the Word of God. Jesus has been tempted in every way that we are, yet without sin. The scripture defines what that looks like. You have Jesus in Matthew 3 and 4 encountering the devil in the wilderness during an extended period of testing, in which Jesus is being questioned continually on his identity and on his inheritance.
"If you are the Son of God, turn these stones into bread. If you are the Son of God, demonstrate it by proving the scripture right, that you will be delivered from death. If you are the Son of God, bow down to me and I will give to you all of the kingdoms of the world." What is the devil seeking to do? What the devil is seeking to do is to bypass the way of the cross in order to seek to ask Jesus to grasp for all of these good and healthy appetites, just outside of the provision of God.
It's good for Jesus to eat bread. He promises he will eat bread with us in the kingdom of the Father. It's good for Jesus to be vindicated in front of the world as the only begotten of the Father. That's what happens at the resurrection. It's good for Jesus to be ruler over all of the kingdoms of the world and their glory. But only by pouring himself out, Philippians 2, as a servant, and receiving those things from God. That is the way that spiritual warfare actually works, is the questioning of your identity, questioning of, who are you really?
Do you really have a God who has said of you, "This is my beloved child in whom I am well pleased"? Do you really have an inheritance, or are you really moving towards something that God is preparing you in your life right now, in all of your conversations, in all of your friendships, in all of your hardships, in all of your obstacles, preparing you to rule and reign with Christ? Or do you need to somehow grasp and grab for whatever it is that you desire and seek, whether that's ambition, or whether that's pleasure, or whether that's the appetites, or anything else?
Now, that is fundamentally more than just the question of whether or not you're going to make decisions that are good or bad, although that's true. Ethics defined Christianly is more than just violation of rules. The question is, are you following in any of these specific instances, the way of the cross, or are you following then the way of the self?
References
https://realfaith.com/win-your-war-foreword-michael-heiser/
Adapted from: Christian Ethics with Russell Moore
https://erlc.com/resource-library/capitol-conversations-episodes/christian-ethics-with-russell-moore-part-one/
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