Lee Moses
Have you ever known a person who was not terribly interested in following the Lord, yet seemed to have some sense of morality and decency? King Jehoram of Israel was one such person. True, “he wrought evil in the sight of the LORD; but not like his father, and like his mother: for he put away the image of Baal that his father had made” (2 Kings 3:2, emph. LM). Jehoram was not quite like his wicked parents, Ahab and Jezebel. He was not a godly man by any stretch, but he had a certain sense of decency. When a grievous famine struck Samaria, the capital city of Israel, a woman complained of her terrible plight to the king:
This woman said unto me, Give thy son, that we may eat him to day, and we will eat my son to morrow. So we boiled my son, and did eat him: and I said unto her on the next day, Give thy son, that we may eat him: and she hath hid her son (2 Kings 6:28-29).
Obviously, this is a scenario that would disgust you and me, and it did King Jehoram as well: “And it came to pass, when the king heard the words of the woman, that he rent his clothes; and he passed by upon the wall, and the people looked, and, behold, he had sackcloth within upon his flesh” (2 Kings 6:30). Jehoram’s sense of moral decency had been violated. But morality without godliness—reverence for God and adherence to His word—can never be consistent.
Morality without godliness cannot be consistent in its assessments. If one were to ask the 8 billion people in the world each to formulate his own system of morality, there might not be a pair of them to have identical systems. What we would essentially have is anarchy and chaos. We know that man cannot determine on his own what is right (Prov. 14:12; Jer. 10:23; Rom. 7:18). While we can generally agree that it is wrong for a mother to eat her son, why can we not agree whether it is wrong for a mother to kill her son before he is born? Some acknowledge it is wrong, but will gladly use the murdered babies’ corpses for stem-cell research. “Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever” provides a consistent and flawless system of morality (Heb. 13:8).
And without a Divine origin for morality, how should one respond when he believes the system of morality has been violated? Jehoram responded, “God do so and more also to me, if the head of Elisha the son of Shaphat shall stand on him this day” (2 Kings 6:31). He wanted to respond to murder with murder—and that of an innocent man of God. The Bible provides the general rule for conduct—the golden rule (Matt. 7:12)—and as well provides more specific rules to govern our responses when we have been wronged, or when we have known others to be wronged (Rom. 12:17-13:5; 1 Pet. 4:15-16; et al.).
A so-called “morality” without godliness, while it may cringe at some of the debauchery and atrocity in the world, tends to overlook one’s own shortcomings. When Jehoram heard what the woman said about her son, he blamed the situation on God’s prophet Elisha. Perhaps he should have considered whether his own wickedness might have brought on the famine Israel was suffering. But really, how can we assess our own morality without an external standard? As Longfellow observed, “Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning—an endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly bodies.” But once we have the word of God, we each have “a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path” (Psa. 119:105).
Without God and godliness, there can be no morality. Indeed, some would wish to rid us of God; but that is often because they more urgently wish to rid us of morality. Radical feminist Gloria Steinem said, “The art of morality is behaving as if everything we do matters.” But this morality is an illusion—True morality only exists if everything we do does matter. And indeed it does, because God exists, He has given us a standard, and He will judge us according to our works. One can observe that with the removal of God and His word from public bastions has come the degradation of morality. Morality is essential to the welfare of our society, and godliness is essential to the existence of our morality. Let us determine to see the promulgation not only of morality, but of godliness. “Godliness is profitable unto all things, having promise of the life that now is, and of that which is to come” (1 Tim. 4:8).
