These days various news media often report of sexual scandals – paid sex with underage girls, sex for contracts and more recently, a student posting his own sex videos on social media. Responses by netizens clearly underscored the different moral values between the older generations versus the younger ones. What has gone wrong today? Personally I must say our morality is under attack today. Our moral values are being eroded at the base. Christians today are confronted with many conflicting views of morality. People have different opinions concerning what is right and wrong. What once was generally accepted as good and true is now challenged. Robert Fitch, in Christianity in Crisis, put it like this: We live today in an age when ethics has become obsolete. It is superseded by science, deleted by psychology, dismissed as emotive by philosophy. It is drowned in compassion, evaporated into aesthetics and retreats before relativism.
How have we deviated so that immorality is becoming law in this world? For example, abortion is now legal and many are advocating homosexual marriages. Why? The good people are silent. We need to speak and no longer be silent. We need to become Christian leaders and lead others to the Truth. Remember that we will be rewarded by the good we do and judged by the evil we have caused because of the good we did not do. Let us honor God with our bodies as 1 Corinthians 6:18 – 20 reads: “Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sina person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body. Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.”
Ravi Zacharias, in A Shattered Visage: The Real Face of Atheism, sums up his analysis of the situation today: The logic of chance origins has driven our society into rewriting the rules, so that utility has replaced duty, self-expression has unseated authority, and being good has become feeling good. These new rules plunge the moral philosopher into a veritable vortex of relativisations. All absolutes die the death of a thousand qualifications. Life becomes a pinball game, whose rules, though they be few, are all instrumental and not meaningful in themselves, except as a means to the player’s enjoyment.Having come loose from our moral moorings in the brave new world, we find ourselves adrift in uncharted seas and have decided to toss away the compass.
The growing crime rate in many countries is one of the consequences of this lack of moral values in society.Someone expressed the vagueness that exists about moral values today in the following verse: It all depends on where you are;It all depends on who you are;It all depends on how you feel; It all depends on what you feel; It all depends on how you’re raised; It all depends on what is praised; What’s right today is wrong tomorrow; Joy in France, sorrow in England; It all depends on points of view; Australia, or Timbuktu; In Rome do as the Romans do; If tastes just happen to agree, Then you have morality; But where there are conflicting trends, it all depends, it all depends.
In 1987, Harvard professors James Wilson and Richard Herrnstein came to similar conclusions in their book Crime and Human Nature. They determined that the cause of crime is a lack of proper moral training among young people during the morally formative years, particularly aged one to six.The very fact that we appoint judges and courts points to the fact that we are not happy with the idea that everyone should make their own rules about what is right or wrong. Generally, the younger generation today speaks of the practice of freedom. Without freedom, we cannot speak meaningfully about morality or moral responsibility. God gave us intelligence and the capacity to act freely. Ultimately, human freedom lies in our freedom of choice. In contrast, many people today understand human freedom merely as the ability to make a choice, with no objective norm or good as the goal.
Every moral act consists of three elements: the objective act (what we do), the subjective goal or intention (why we do the act), and the concrete situation or circumstances in which we perform the act (where, when, how, with whom, the consequences, etc.).For an act to be morally good, one’s intention must be good. If we are motivated to do something by a bad intention—even something that is objectively good—our action is morally evil. It must also be recognized that a good intention cannot make a bad action (something intrinsically evil) good. We can never do something wrong or evil in order to bring about a good. The rules to follow for us Christians are found in the Ten Commandments, they are commands from God not the Ten Choices of Man which are summarized by Jesus Christ in the Great Commandment in Matthew 22:37-40:
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”
