The Problem with Valuing Moral Values
The more I consider the political and cultural landscape of our country the more concerned I become that many professing Christians are confusing the fight for moral or traditional values with the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. Are we as followers of Jesus Christ to be engaged in what even some Christian leaders are calling the culture wars for “moral values?” Certainly, the Gospel runs against the grain of our secular and post-modern western culture. Yet where the lines seem to be increasingly drawn is on the political front where the Red states are viewed as “Christian land” and the Blue states are viewed as “Pagan land.” Now I know that a great deal of those who would identify themselves as walking with a left leaning gait imbibe a pagan ideology, which is a worldview that the Gospel confronts and challenges. Yet it is biblically naïve to conclude that all those who walk with a right leaning gait are “the righteous in the land” whose values comport with the Gospel simply because they wear red. Does not the Gospel of Jesus Christ run against the grain of conservative ideologies and values also?
Advocating moral values that are not rooted in the grace of God that comes to sinners in Christ is just as antithetical to that grace as is godless secularism. The solution to liberal ideologies is not the advocacy of generic moral or traditional values. The solution to both is the Lord Jesus Christ. To rely on one’s esteem of traditional values, moral values or family values can be as godless as atheism or paganism. What we as professing Christians need to guard our hearts and minds against is to see ourselves as being somehow superior to the liberal elite and the Hollywood media because we hold to the Bible, or to morality or even to Jesus. We can easily turn Jesus into a political and cultural billboard that declares our moral illumination over our culture and this means that we will have turned our hearts away from Jesus as the savior of sinners of whom we are the chiefs!
The Jews of Paul’s day saw themselves as the guardians of moral values. They saw themselves as taking the moral high ground and were thus in a superior position to give guidance to those poor liberals of Greece and Rome! Yet in their pride they were failing to see that simply possessing God’s Law and having circumcision did not make them culturally or morally right. In fact what Paul is saying is that unless in themselves they could obey all God’s Law, then relying on the Law and circumcision put them on equal footing with all the pagan Gentiles who had neither. What seems so similar between the moral party of Paul’s day and many today, who are waving the flag of moral values, is this air of superiority and pride that comes across in the public square of cultural discourse. Now the problem with the conservatives of Paul’s day and many today is not in their valuing of the teaching of God’s Law, nor even in the particular traditions that are valued. Rather the problem lies in the failure to understand the problem of the human heart and how all men and women are sinners in need of God’s grace. This is the message of the Gospel. Even we who value God’s Law cannot keep it in our own strength. We need God’s grace and the work of the Spirit to give us new hearts. We are to use the Law as that which exposes sin (our own as well as those we are seeking to reach) and provides the deep spiritual diagnosis we all need but it is never the path to redemption but rather the school master that leads the broken sinner to Christ. Ministering to our culture with humility holding out truth and grace is what is needed!
Holding to moral values changes no one’s heart. Paul said to the conservatives of his day, “Because you have in the law the embodiment of knowledge and truth – you, then, who teach others, do you not teach yourself? You who preach against stealing, do you steal? You who say that people should not commit adultery, do you commit adultery? You who abhor idols do you rob temples? You who brag about the law, do you dishonor God by breaking the law? As it is written” God’s name is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you.” (Summary highlights from Romans chapter 2). Generic or even Biblical moral values offered as what will save the culture is not the commission that Jesus gives the church. The Gospel enters the culture wars not as an ally to either the blue or the red but to the King who said that his kingdom is not of this world. The Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ alone is what confronts our culture with life-changing power and hope.