Seems Right

7/23/16                               Ramone                                        about 30

I asked a man out walking his dog what he believed about life after death.  He – Ramone – said he believes he will go to heaven.  I asked how he can be sure.  He answered, “I just try to be a good person.”   How does he determine what is “good”?  “I just try to treat other people as I want to be treated” he said.    Of course it is hard to argue with that kind of logic – after all that is what Jesus taught.  But Ramone went on to say that he also just does what seems right to him, that he doesn’t trust the Bible because it was written by corrupt people. 

A good percentage of people believe this – that their personal feelings or intuition of what is moral behavior is better than what the Bible teaches.  But let’s think about that for a moment.  Who is it that decides if any given behavior is “right” or “wrong”?  Should we trust in our own logic or common sense, or look first to God’s revealed truth?  And where does He reveal that truth, in ourselves personally or in a common source available to all?  Though we have been given a general sense of good and evil, why are we always making excuses to avoid doing what we know to be right or to do what we know to be wrong? 

This is the nature of sin – we make so many excuses for it that we convince ourselves we are somehow in the right.  We choose what we want to believe about God so much that we end up making a god in our own image rather than believing in God as He presents Himself in the Bible.  We choose to do that which seems right in our own eyes, rather than do that which is right in the eyes of the Lord.  We become, as Isaiah said “those who call evil good and good evil”.  No wonder the Proverbs 14 says “There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death”.

Ramone, however, chooses to discredit what the Bible says about good and evil, so I also appealed to his sense of logic.  He claims a non-judgmental attitude toward others when it comes to discerning good from evil, yet he believes his own sense of goodness is superior to one which has been the foundation of Christianity for centuries.  Is that not the very judgmental, arrogant attitude he claims to be above?  He wouldn’t concede on this point, but it did give him something to consider as we went our separate ways.