Doing What’s Right in the Eyes of God

Often it seems as though few in our culture know right from wrong anymore.  I’m not speaking of knowing what is legal, but rather abiding by an absolute moral code, specifically the Bible.

When the United States was founded, the Bible was revered, church-going was normative, and nearly all of the people (including the vast majority of the founders) were Christian.  It is no wonder that many of our founding documents contain principles from the Scriptures.  Even those who would debate these facts would have to admit that the founding generation would be shocked at some of the behavior that is tolerated today.  To them, most of us would be rude, crude, and socially unacceptable.  We’re not totally devoid of our morals, but we are far from where we should be.  Without a moral code, a people will drift aimlessly as the Jews did in the book of Judges.

Judges 17:6 In those days there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes.

I won’t cover the complete chapter and certainly not the entire book of Judges in this article, but suffice it to say that the affects of people determining right and wrong on their own did not work out very well.  Theirs was a morally bankrupt culture.

Notice in the verse above and in Judges 21:25, it reads, “there was no king in Israel”.  God has ordained government to protect the people and punish evildoers (Romans 13:1-4; 1 Peter 2:14).  In Israel, the king had a moral responsibility to uphold God’s Law as well.  Without the king (representing the government), people were free to do as they pleased, for good or for ill.  When this is the case, the culture as a whole invariably degenerates towards chaos and corruption.

Christians must uphold righteousness as God defines it in the Bible.  This is our absolute standard for right.  We must pray for our governmental leaders at the federal, state, and local level (1 Timothy 2:1-2) and vote for those who will stand for what’s right.  These are the first steps towards bringing our culture back to where it should be.