Miss-Communication

Lessons from the Aware non-saga

Sunday, May. 10, 2009 Posted: 6:42:25PM HKT

There is always a rare opportunity to share the Gospel, as the Bible proclaims in Ecclesiastes that there is a time for everything and Christians need to be sensitive to the spiritual situation of people and look out for that window of disappointment with self and searching during which it is possible and effective to share the Good News.

Different Reactions towards the Morally Reprehensible

Like it or not, everyone has an idea of what is moral or more simply what is right.

In his classic work on Christian apologetics, C S Lewis said that this can be easily proven when any individual experiences any form of injustice in his or her life. While a person may claim to hold no particular view of a universal morality, this conviction quickly crumbles down when he or she is done any wrong by someone else.

Likewise, most people here, if not every Singaporean, believes in morality, even those who teach others that these were simply shaped by one’s unique socio-cultural upbringing and environment.

But not everyone agrees on how the morally reprehensible are to be treated. The majority of mankind believes that wrongdoers have to be punished for their transgressions. This is not to enter into an argument of whether capital punishment or any legal penalty for that matter should be meted out to criminals. Whatever the conclusion to that debate, experts in that field are beginning to discover that retributive punishment is not necessarily the only and best way to go about deterrence.

Perhaps for this reason there has been an aversion especially in the postmodern era of the concept of sin and morality, in the order of unpopularity. Most people these days don’t like to talk about sin; because they don’t want to punish others nor do they want to be punished. For much of the non-Christian world, the acceptance of the idea of sin comes naturally with the necessity for prosecution.

The modern-day refrain “do not judge” – not necessarily the way Jesus had meant it in His Sermon on the Mount – may well be rooted in the unwillingness to have to come to grips with evil when it actually appears, whether in ourselves or in others.

Much of the criticism that is leveled against Christianity today has to do with its idea of an absolute morality. Thus, its opponents quickly come to perceive the faith as one that is full of hatred against those people it believes are sinners, whether or not this hatred actually exists.

A world devoid of God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ cannot help but deny its moral wrongs in order to escape the judgment it understands it so rightly deserves.

But God has a better way – one that only He could have actuated – of dealing with the unbridgeable chasm evil places between Himself and His beloved and created mankind. That answer is in the cross.

There was absolutely nothing in morally reprehensible mankind that could have obligated the one and only Son of God, the second Person of the Trinity, to perform even a single, smallest deed of kindness toward them. And yet, He paid in full with His own blood for the crimes the world had committed against its Creator from time immemorial. Because of the cross, sinful mankind can live and breathe again.

For readers who may not be Christians, there is no need to deny the idea of an absolute morality just so as to avoid punishment. God has already punished all our sins by taking them upon Himself in Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour.

Believers, on the other hand, need to learn to distinguish well between a faith motivated by fear and one that is motivated by the grace of the Gospel. The Christian faith calls its followers to lower and sacrifice themselves for others, especially those who may not have heard the Good News or heard it properly, to do everything they can to bring the Gospel to the world as opportunity arises and mourn in sorrow with God while it hasn’t.

Pages: 1 | 2 |

The Christian Post (Singapore)