A Hebrew Rabbi wrote an article some weeks ago in which he posited that mankind was inherently good. I only heard about the article; I did not read it, so I don’t know what his arguments were, but one might suppose that he argued that anything that God created must be therefore good.
Sadly, we all know that is true only in a limited sense. A King Cobra, undisturbed, might indeed be good. But if startled by an innocent human walking by, it will strike out with a killing bite. Thus, to that human, it is not innately good. Many other parts of God’s creation, though far less lethal than a King Cobra, are at the least irritants to us: thorns on roses and berry bushes, poison ivy and oak, weeds of all kinds. Thus, following the fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, they were forced out into a world that was no longer totally good because it had been tainted by sin.
But what of people? How many times have you heard of someone leaving a purse in a cart at Walmart and returning later to find the purse had been turned in to the office, every penny and credit card still there? Or in my case, half asleep and truly jet-lagged, I set my purse and luggage down in the Heathrow Airport in London and then when we decided to move where we could better see the arrival and departure screen, I picked up everything but my purse. Yet when I ran back frantically perhaps 10 minutes later, a kind British woman told me she had called a security guard to get it and then helped me locate the security office. Again, everything was intact. We hear of stories like these and we say, “Wow, most people are really good!” But what we should say instead is, “Wow, these people have been taught how to be good!”
Consider a baby. What happens if you take away its pacifier? It cries. What happens to toddlers who are playing together? They tend to fight over toys. They have to be taught to share. Being generous is not a natural human trait. It is a learned trait. Why today do we find people like Maxine Waters encouraging people to disrupt the meals of others simply because they serve an administration that she does not agree with? Why do we find people chasing Sen. Kyrsten Sinema into the bathroom, for Pete’s sake, to yell at her for not agreeing to change Senate rules that would literally destroy this country? Why do people dox a man and show up at his house, shouting and jeering, because he donated $10 to the defense of Kyle Rittenhouse, a teenager found not guilty of murdering grown men who were attacking him during a riot? Why do people stop talking to former friends because those friends are conservatives and don’t believe the lies that the mainstream media spews day after day? Why has our country become so uncivil? Could it be that the uncivil come from unchurched families that have never taught them Biblical morality?
Many would scoff at this (especially those whom I described above). Yet, Paul cautions the Romans, “There is none righteous, no, not one,” (Romans 3:10). And again in the same letter he laments “ For what I am doing, I do not understand. For what I will to do, that I do not practice; but what I hate, that I do,” (Romans 7:15). Paul explains that he wants to do good, and yet he finds himself doing the wrong thing, the very thing that the does not want to do. It is that evil nature fighting inside him as it fights inside each of us. But if you are not convinced of the evil nature of man, consider the following.
If man is inherently good, how do you explain an Adolf Hitler who accomplished the systematic murder of 17 million Jews, Romanis, and mentally retarded; a Stalin responsible for 23 million deaths; a Kim Il Sung of North Korea who murdered 1.6 million North Koreans; a Pol Pot in Cambodia (1.7 million deaths)an Ismail Enver Pasha, failed Turkish leader who murdered 2.5 million Armenians in retaliation for his own failures creating the term “genocide;” a Leopold II of Belgium who took over a portion of Africa and worked somewhere between 2 and 15 million Africans to death; or a Mao Zedong under whose rule 49 to 78 million Chinese died? And this does not consider rapists, mass murderers, serial killers like John Wayne Gacy, or a Jeffrey Dahmer who not only murdered young men but then ate them afterwards. We would like to call these men crazy, aberrations. But while they are all far more evil than (hopefully) anyone that we know, does not a bit of that evil reside in each of us? Not the urge to murder, but perhaps the urge to take advantage of others at times, to keep the ten dollar bill we find in front of the store rather than take it in and give it to the office in case the owner realizes he has dropped it and comes looking for it?
Could it be that we are not inherently good as the Rabbi argued?
Since God gave the Ten Commandments to the children of Israel in about 1446 BC until today, morality throughout the “civilized” world has been based upon the Word of God. What God says is good to do, we should do. What God says is bad to do, we should not do. Certainly, throughout history, people have had trouble adhering to this morality. But the point is that there has existed for well over three thousand years a firm and definite line between right and wrong. Laws have been based upon that morality and people have tried to adhere to it. Until now.
What happens when there is no moral standard that everyone agrees upon? Well then, you make up your own.
Carjackings in Philadelphia have skyrocketed. Crime is up in all large cities. Criminals are released with no bail. The police chief of San Francisco has advised tourists not to visit his city because his police department cannot ensure their safety. The homeless and the drug addicts camp on the city streets there and use the sidewalks for their toilet. California has made shoplifting less than $950 worth of goods per day a misdemeanor, so now roving gangs go from store to store and walk out with armloads of merchandise and no one even tries to stop them. Aberrant sexuality has become the norm and even some churches scold Christians to accept it because “the writers of the Bible didn’t understand sexuality.” No? Then why are there so many scriptures condemning sexual immorality and homosexuality? I think they understood it very well! But again, we have lost our moral guideline.
Those who identify as Christians in the U.S. are now down to 65% with 25% of Americans who consider themselves to be atheists, agnostics, or of other religions. As for Jews, only 64% of them are certain or fairly certain that God even exists, much less whether we should be adhering to His commandments. Adding Jews and Christians together, 31% never attend church or synagogue compared to 22% who attend every week. How do they expect to learn about what God expects of them if they never attend church? In Hebrews 10:24-25 we read, “And let us consider one another in order to stir up love and good works, not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as is the manner of some, but exhorting one another, and so much the more as you see the Day approaching.” God expects us to worship together!
Remembering that only 22% of Christians and Jews attend church or synagogue every week, 40% of Americans still consider themselves “very religious.” I wonder what God considers us?
And furthermore, if we are inherently good, why do we need a Savior?