Bryan Melugin
[Originally published as God and Isaac Newton | Sunday School for Sinners and Saints #4]
Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. Hebrews 13:8 NIV
I the Lord do not change. Malachi 3:6 NIV
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We know from creation that God is the maker of the heavens and the earth. He is the creator of everything that is, and even space and time itself. When considering the nature of objective morality, the only answer that makes any sense is the anchoring of objective morality in the unchanging, eternal character and nature of God. We must anchor objective morality in God because He is unchanging and eternal. He is literally the only possible fixed point.
Furthermore, God has made us in his image. We are intended to be like him. Just as a portrait is good because it resembles the person in whose image it was made, we are good when we reflect the character and nature of God, and we are bad when we reject His image.
In an important sense, the answer to defining objective morality is literally, “What would Jesus do?”
God is the eternal, unchanging standard of good. God is perfectly just and loving. God is holy and wise. God is eternal and omniscient. The character and nature of God is the standard by which right and wrong must be determined. No other standard is eternal and unchanging.
What is logically deduced from this fact is that God does and must exist, and everyone knows it as Paul describes in Romans chapter 1. Everyone knows that objective right and wrong exist. While we may debate the proper application of these principles, the human race has always known that good and evil are real things.
But right and wrong require a fixed, unchanging point of reference. Right and wrong in relationship to who? The only answer which makes objective morality possible is Jesus Christ. Because we all acknowledge that right and wrong are real, we are already acknowledging the truth of the biblical worldview, even if we don’t realize that we are.
Skeptics will question the existence of God, and demand evidence for his existence. But we all, skeptics included, already have absolute assurance of God’s presence based on facts we can know first hand. In a strange sense, we all know that God exists with more certainty than we can know the speed of a rolling onion.
