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The Bible Says
This article is somewhat an apology. I was asked, “What is your definition of a man?” And I answered, “A man is a little less than nothing!” My answer was not accepted, and rightly so. At best, I had given a one-sided answer. No matter how low we human beings degrade ourselves and contaminate our lives with the sins of this world, God considered the race a good investment when he made us (Gen. 2:31) and after man sinned, He still considered us worth dying for (John 3:16). It is true that we have no virtue that we can offer God as a ticket to heaven. Jesus Himself said, “There is none good but one, that is God” (Luke 18:19). In that statement He was saying, ‘Don’t call me good unless you are willing to acknowledge that I am the Son of God.’ “Good,” in this case stood for sinlessness and absolute perfection. In that sense none but Jesus qualifies. Nevertheless, “goodness” is one of the fruits of the Spirit (Eph. 5:9). Paul commended the Christians in the church at Rome for being full of “goodness,” and there are many other places in the Bible where people are said to be good.
Until the later years of her life, my mother was not a Christian, but she taught her family moral principles and her life was always that which we could be proud of. She believed in right and wrong and we knew better than to disobey those principles! In other words, my mother taught and expected character from every one of her children. Character alone will not take us to heaven but it will certainly make life on earth a little happier for us, our family, and all those with whom we associate.
Don’t we get it from our genes? If Dad was slow, we have an excuse for being poky. If Mom had a temper, we have an excuse for flying off the handle. If Dad cheated, we have an excuse for being crooked. If Mom stretched the truth, we would be expected to lie – “It just runs in the family.” According to that reasoning if Mom and Dad go to hell, we’ll all go to hell—we inherited our disposition from our parents and there is nothing we can do about it, right? Wrong! There is something we can do about it! Moreover, there is something God can do about it, if we permit Him to do it. True we inherit some of our nature from our parents, and they inherited it from their parents, but God gave every one of us a free choice.
First of all, he must learn to say NO. When I was eleven, two girls in my school tried to entice me to engage in sex. One was a couple of years older than I, and she tried every trick of the trade, but I steadfastly refused. At last they both gave up on me. I was not a Christian at the time but I still wanted to live by my mother’s standards. Even though I considered myself an atheist, I was determined to be a man and live a moral, upright life. That is pretty hard for an atheist to do seeing we get our moral code from the Bible and the Ten Commandments. One of the saddest days in American history was the time when our women lowered their standards. In bye-gone-days it was the mothers who taught their boys and girls how to live. In those days every boy wanted to be a man, and every girl wanted to become a lady. Now very few people know what those terms mean! Jesus compared our present day to the city of Sodom before the judgment of God fell, and to the wickedness of the world before the Flood (Luke 17:26-30). Someone has said, “It is human to stand with the crowd. It is divine to stand alone.” The Bible says,
“Come out from among them and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing, and I will receive you, and will be a Father unto you, and you shall be my sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty” (II Cor. 6:17,18).
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