Do We Need God in Order to Be Moral? | Table Talk S03 E06

There was so much material and so much energy with our last conversation, so much energy.

We blew a light.

Blew a light. But we also just couldn't stop. And we felt like we were hurrying through a lot of very powerful biblical material.

That's true.

So we pretty much decided we need to just continue on with the conversation where we left off. And it segues nicely into another one of the questions that we just wanted to put forth, and that is, do we need God in order to be moral? Now, the reason we have this question on the table, there's a background to it. It might be worded here in a way that some people are thinking, well, what in the world does that have to. That's not a question that pops into my mind. But if you pay attention to some of the conversations that are going on among atheists, you have people like Richard Dawkins, people like Sam Harris and various others, highly educated scientists who are also atheists who are saying, we don't need God to be moral. We're moral. And I'm an atheist, and I'm not moral. I mean, I'm moral.

Excuse me.

I don't need God.

I don't need the big policeman.

I don't need arbitrary rules. I'm in an evolutionary process that has given me the development of a moral sense. I have morals, and I'm an atheist. So that's where the question comes from. But it goes all kinds of other places, I think, when we look at scripture. So do we need God to be moral? Well, I mean, I'm just putting the question straight to you.

Okay, well, let me. Before we put the question right, too, we can also say this isn't just something that's happening in the atheistic sort of academic circles. I hear this question. As an evangelist, I'll have people say to me, well, why should I come to your church or believe in your God? I know some of your church members, and I'm a better. I've had people say that. I know some of the people in your church, the way they do business, the way they. Whatever. And they're no better than me.

Well, let's fess up.

Well, they were actually talking about you. Ty.

The truth is, if we stop and we pay attention, we've all had friends or acquaintances that were unbelievers, who were decent people, better people, people. People who relate to their family with respect, people who are doing community service, people who are faithful.

Faithful to their spouse.

Yeah, I know people. I know people who are atheists who've given their whole lives to basically counteracting the sex slave trade. They've given themselves to a good moral cause because they have a very high sense of. The question is, is that high sense of justice something that developed through the process of evolution, or is that high sense of justice and the difference between right and wrong something that God originally created when he engineered the human being and then it was compromised through what the Bible describes as the Fall? But there's still vestiges of that sense of morality in every human heart. And God is leveraging it. He's saying, hey, you know the difference between right and wrong, not because you evolved this moral sense, but because you were created in my moral image. And it's still there. You don't even acknowledge me. You don't believe in me. But the fact is, I created you in such a way that you think that way, you feel that way.

You can't. Like the psalmist said, if I ascend into heaven, he's there. If I descend, God is ubiquitous. He's pervasive, he's inescapable.

That's right.

Just to sort of put some personal David Ashrick sort of vulnerability on this, one of the things that I've wrestled with in my life is that, okay, I didn't have a strong father figure early in my life. It wasn't until I was adopted the second time that I really had a dad. Prior to that, when I was about 12 years old, prior to that, the main father figure in my life was my grandfather.

Maybe the greatest man I've ever met. Maybe the best, most moral, kind, compassionate man I'd ever met. His name was Charles Oakley Atkins. My middle name is Charles. Named after him David Charles. My brother's Robert Oakley Atkins, and he was a big, wonderful, compassionate, but strong man. And his nickname, everybody called him Oak. Isn't that great?

That's a great name.

And he was the oak of the family. I mean, he just. There was a solidity to him. He was an anchor. And, oh, I could wax eloquent for one of the greatest honors of my life was to preach my grandfather's the homily at my grandfather's funeral. So here's the thing with my grandfather. After I became a believer, he. Let's see, I was 23. He would have passed away about four years later. So he would have known me as a believer. He would have known about my experience becoming a follower of Jesus. Going from a young kid who just wanted to be a professional skateboarder to this sort of what he would have viewed as a very Radical transition, which my whole family did. But my grandfather, unlike my grandmother, who was an overtly Christian person, Presbyterian, loved the Lord, loved God. Grandpa was.

I wouldn't say he was ambivalent about religion. I think that actually that is what I would say. He wasn't hostile, but he was ambivalent. He wasn't. He never had anything negative to say, but he didn't go to church. He probably couldn't have found any text in the Bible. But this man was one of, like I said, the best men I've ever met. And later in my life, later in my conversion, I should say, toward the end of his life, when my wife and I, Violetta, would go to visit.

He was getting old now. This would be a year or two before he'd pass away. And we would sing to what my grandparents, my grandparents loved. When Violeta and I would sing harmonies, I'd play the guitar. And without exception, without exception, when we would play the song Amazing Grace, my grandfather in his stoic, wonderful. He would have been almost 90 years old at this time. This father, this male figure in my life. He would just. Tears would just start to come out of the corners of his eyes. You could just see it. And my grandfather passed away, so far as I'm aware. Never made a confession of Christ or any what we would call verbal, outward, clearly Christian indication of faith. And I don't know. His case is in God's hands. I have complete peace about that. I know that God would not withhold salvation from anybody that he could save. But the point is that whether or not my grandfather. That's not the question I'm addressing, whether or not he's saved or not. The point is that this was a man who was Christian in every. Seemingly in terms of the conduct, but as far as the content, I think that's a good way of saying it. His theological content would have been non existent. His conduct absolutely Christian.

So.

Where does that come from? Is that an evolutionary process? Is that. No, that is the spirit of God. The revelation of Christ to my grandfather, to every human being, wooing him toward truth, Wooing him.

We were reading in John 1 where it says.

That he lights every man that comes into the world.

That's right. So my grandfather did. Okay, here's the question. Do we need. How did we say it? Do we need God in order to be moral? The answer is yes, but not for the reasons that some people think.

Not in the sense that you need to be a church going.

Bible believing Christian in order to do moral acts, but in the Sense that morality in essence flows from the very person of God. So if you were to remove God out of the picture, there'd be no such thing as this. Intuitive.

Let's look at the Bible verse moral.

Compass that we all have.

Let's look at a Bible verse. And there's a number of Bible verses I think that we can look at. But one of them that I think about is in Titus chapter two.

Oh, I got that written down here, doing title two. 11.

You had a long spiel there, so.

I need to hide.

That was long.

You gotta hide that.

Thank you for letting me open my heart to you about my paper.

No, that was beautiful.

We loved it.

Titus 2, verse 11. And this is one of a number of Bible verses. We've looked at a couple. But I think it would be really good for us to just note a few more that talk about the big picture as we talked about earlier, the macro picture, how God pervades all humanity, all society, all culture, how God is working through His Holy Spirit. You know, Romans Paul says, those who do not have the spirit of Christ are none of his. And you were talking about how your grandpa has the spirit of Christ. Okay, he doesn't know Christ, but he has the spirit. And Daniel, again, we're going back to the Old Testament. Daniel had the spirit of the living God, and heathen people knew that. Darius knew it. The mother of Belshazzar knew it. You know, there's this man in whom.

There'S a spirit of the living God. The spirit of the living God. That's right. He's a different kind of guy.

Yes. And so in Titus 2:11, it says, for the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men. And now notice what it goes on to say.

Teaching us.

Teaching us that denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously and godly in this present world. Okay, so that's what happened to you, Grandpa. That's what's happening in this world today. In spite of now we say, without Christians, without evangelists, without. Sometimes we have to say, in spite of. In spite of Christians, in spite of the way we come across and the way we represent God. In spite of us saying, if you haven't confessed Jesus Christ, you can't be saved. In spite of us saying, there's a.

Verse, and I don't know where it is, that says, the Lord knows those who are His.

That's in Timothy.

Okay, so the Lord is looking down from his vantage point where he sees what's going on in people's hearts and he knows those that are his. Whereas from our limited perspective, our judgment is skewed. And we might look and we might think that we've picked out who belong to the Lord and who don't belong to the Lord. We say, those are the wheat, those are the tares. We think we know, but our judgment is skewed. So I look at what you've just described about your grandfather, and my heart was just moved, David, and I'll tell you why. Not just because you're my friend and I love you, and I think that it's a beautiful thing that brings my heart joy that you had that person in your life. That moves me on one level, but on another level, when you're describing that, it comes to my mind, well, wait a minute. The Lord is looking down on the situation. And let's just say if I were to go to your grandfather and anybody else, all kinds of different people in the world, and take religious language out of the equation, so to speak, and have imagine this conversation with Oak. Oak, what are your opinions about justice, treating people fairly? Yep. I agree. That's why I say to the. What do you think about people who are down and out and they're marginalized and they just don't have enough, but you have a little more and you have an opportunity to help them? What would your response to that be?

He lived that way.

Yeah, he lived that way. Hey, what's your opinion about humility versus arrogance? I like the humility thing. I don't like the arrogance thing. Do you see where I'm going with this? Absolutely. You're describing the character of Jesus.

Without using the name. And Oak is aligned with Jesus.

He recognizes that. That's the very thing.

Yeah. He's aligned with Jesus.

He's intuitive to. Yeah.

Do you see how that works, though, or am I stretching this?

I don't think you're stretching it.

Yeah.

I've met unbelievers, call them atheists, agnostic, whatever. They don't believe in God or the Bible. Who are atheists on just grounds?

Absolutely. People rejecting God for the right reasons.

Yeah. Rejecting God for the right reasons because of misrepresentations of God. So when I say to you or you say to me or anybody in our world, in our culture says, I believe in God, we can't assume that what they mean when they say I believe in God is precisely what you mean when you say you believe in God. We could be holding in our minds two entirely different pictures of what is meant what is contained in the word God and in the word believe. And there are some people who say, I don't believe in God. And if you said to them, describe that what you don't believe in, you might turn around, Jeffrey, and say, well, actually I don't believe in that either. So I share your atheism in the sense that I reject that picture of God that I find as repulsive and untenable as you do. Then they might turn around and say, well, that's a new thought. Could you describe for me the God you do believe in? And when you begin to describe things like compassion and mercy and justice, they might say, well, I believe in all that.

So basically you're saying we have to define our terms to have any intelligence conversation.

We shouldn't assume and we need to recognize. I think what we're trying to say is that all of this moral activity that goes outside of the borders of religion and is pervasive throughout the world and trying to creep into every human heart, all of that moral sense is in fact from God. As the author of from God by.

His spirit, not by his spirit. Can we come back into this? We have to talk about evolution.

And it's not just spirit. It's not the product of evolutionary advancement.

No, right. That's big evolution.

I don't even understand. I've heard the arguments. I don't see how the evolutionary process, Darwinian process, can even begin to account for what we view as morality.

I have a story on that. I want to show selfishness first.

I tell that story right after the break.

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So so far we've talked about the reality that outside of religion, there's people that properly represent religion or God's character. And yet inside religion, there's people, people that totally get it all wrong. And just before we took the last break, somebody mentioned, kind of reaffirmed the fact that how do we get morality? And somebody said that it can't come from evolution, can it? And that statement reminded me of an experience I had on the plane. I was flying from Europe back to the States and I was sitting next to this guy and we started small talk and he asked me, hey, what are you doing? Where are you going? And I mentioned that I just came from a conference. And he said, what's the conference about? And every time somebody asks me that question on the plane, I'm always, oh, man, because I'm going to say I came from a Bible conference where I was teaching the Bible. And, you know, then you get into religion. And when I said that, the guy was like, oh, I'm an atheist. And so we got into this conversation.

That's how he said it.

He said that through the course of the conversation. Literally, that's how he responded. Through the course of the conversation, we got into some deep philosophical stuff. And this issue of morality, this very question we're talking about now came up, do we need God to be moral? And I was basically sharing, and I want to know if you guys resonate with this, if this is even a good idea. And I was sharing with him the impossibility of us even believing in morality if God is out of the picture. Right? I was arguing that we need God for morality. And the basic premise of his rebuttal to me was that morality doesn't come from God. Morality develops through the evolutionary process. And the way that that's manifested is this thing called the herd instinct. You guys have heard a lot, of course, the herd instinct.

We've heard of the herd instinct.

Yeah, you've heard of the herd Instinct. Right. So basically, at some point in history, we were all cavemen, cave women. And we figured out that there are certain behavioral patterns that are beneficial for the herd. For the herd. Right. For society. And that's how we basically evolved. So we figured out that it's not good to steal because if I steal from Ty, then Ty is going to steal from me. And then we're going to kill each other. So we figured out maybe we should not steal. And that's how morality, with time. Anyway. So in that course of that conversation, he basically said that society determines morality. We don't need God, society tells us. And then I posed the question. I said, have there been societies where people believed certain things were okay, but that were totally corrupt? And I mentioned the classic example, Nazi Germany. I said, you know, 1940s Nazi Germany. It was believed and accepted. Society dictated and taught and said that it was acceptable to kill individuals because of their ethnic background and so forth and so forth. I believe that that's wrong. Are you saying that because their society told them that, that that's right? Or would you say it was wrong, the Holocaust was wrong? And the point there is just that. It just revealed a huge contradiction. He basically thought about it for a second. I can see his thought process. And he realized that there was a contradiction there because he believed intuitively that the Holocaust was wrong. Desperately wicked. But this is what he said. He basically said.

In their time and in their society. I don't have the right to say that that was wrong.

Because he's struggling to be consistent with his logic.

Exactly.

He feels like he's blocked in.

Yeah. And to me, that just was so telling, that there is. It's very difficult to arrive at even a foundation for morality without God in the picture. And every other conceivable replacement, alternative explanation is totally bankrupt. Because if we're counting on society. There was a time in the United States of America not too long ago where because of the color of your.

Skin, such and such society was.

Or women were not allowed to society. Society. So to me, that was just one example that came to my mind where.

To remove God out of the equation. And if we're left with evolutionary processes and the development of society, where we're in trouble now. Because now we can't even determine what's right or wrong. Because that's up to any individual society, which is totally not true. Because everybody knows, everybody watches the news and here's what happens in different parts of the world. And we all react to it as if there was something wrong. With the morality of that society, which in essence we're revealing, we can cast judgments on another society when we feel they're immoral. So it's not true that morality comes from society.

We could take it another step and point out that evolutionary morality is fundamentally.

One step short of what we're calling morality. Because even in the usage of the term moral, the evolutionary developed morality, all that's being defined there is a different, more sophisticated level of self preservation or selfishness. So when we use the word morality, we're talking about an altruism that is actually putting the other first for the sake of the other. Do you hear that? Versus in the evolutionary morality, I'm putting you first to my advantage.

I'm not stealing from you to my benefit. I'm not stealing from you for my own benefit so that you don't steal from me. As opposed to it's wrong to do that.

So it's a morality that is still self centered. It's a morality that is void of what we call what the Bible calls love. It's a morality that is basically just another manifestation of the survival of the fittest. You know, scratching and clawing for the top spot. But we're scratching and clawing at a more sophisticated level now. We're wearing suits and ties now. We're scratching and clawing through conversation and negotiation. But it's not morality. When the Bible talks about this standard of morality, it's describing something that transcends human culture. And human cultures are tapping into it and experiencing it because of the way God made us in his image. And to some degree we've lost it. To a major degree we've lost it, but we're approaching it. There's a gravitational pull upon the human heart and the human conscience toward a level of morality that is altruistic, that is goodness for the sake of goodness.

Yeah. There's even a more fundamental question that evolution would not answer because science tells us what is, but it doesn't tell us what ought to be. Right. So a more fundamental question would be why should we care about the other individual? So from an evolutionary perspective, somebody might say, well, we are moral. We behave in moral ways because it makes society better. But a fundamental question would be, why should I care about making society better on the basis of what should I be interested? So you just keep going in circles. Whereas in the biblical worldview we have a foundation for why individuals are valuable, why they should be treated such and such. They were created in the image of God, but you don't get that from.

The whole, I actually find that. I find the argument, and I've read a couple papers, actually several papers from atheists on the evolutionary argument for the development of morality, and I actually find it fairly persuasive.

In other words.

Well, just the idea that if it were true, that cumulatively over time, people had a dawning awareness that to do a negative act could reverberate negatively back on me, that that would then begin to create a sense in which a modicum, or at least a veneer of morality would spread through a given population. I find that reasonably persuasive. In other words, that seems plausible to me. What I find to be the touchstone, though, the point is Ty's point, and that is that even if that's true, even if we give that, if we grant that, that that's at least a possibility, right, that that could happen, that's conceivable. It's still a morality that is rooted to some degree in what benefits me ultimately or my progeny or my neighbor or it's. It's me. But in the biblical portrait, love does good to another for the benefit of the other and even at the expense of oneself.

Sacrifice.

Yeah, that's the whole idea of sacrifice. I actually do a series, a lecture on this very thing that contrasts at the most fundamental level. If Darwinism is true, if evolutionary.

If that picture of the world is true, versus if the picture that Jesus painted is true, what does reality end up looking like? In other words, let's just take this to its logical conclusion. Let's take this to its logical conclusion. And I find it to be a fairly persuasive argument. But at the end of that presentation that I make, I tell the story of a plane that a number of years ago, like about a decade ago, crashed, went just off the end of the Runway in Toronto and in the airport there. The airport is close to or reasonably adjacent to the freeway that runs by. And here comes this Air France flight, goes off the end of the Runway and just immediately is in flames. And here are people driving down the road, and they see this plane that's in flames. They spontaneously pull their cars over, get out of their cars and race, climbing over fences, race across the field several hundred yards to this plane, because people saw this. Dozens of cars saw this. They run over there, and I mean, this is a burning airplane. The doors had been opened. Two of the four evacuation doors were operational. They began to help people get off. People are dragging people. People are being burned. And the Canadian Department of Transportation, the Minister of Transportation actually came on within five or 10 minutes of the flight crashing and made an announcement. Hey, there's been a terrible crash. There's been loss of life. We don't know how much. Right. She's making this. She's gotten. Word has come back to her. This announcement's made. What unbeknownst to her is that there are motorists, just citizens, that are racing into peril, racing into death, potentially helping people. They don't know these people. They're not family members, they're not friends. They don't know who these people are. They're just humans pulling them off. And as the story goes, not one person perished. Really, it's an. Absolutely. And I close the story and I give. In the presentation that I give, there's this journalist who's writing the next day, and I don't know if it's the Toronto Star or the Toronto sun or something.

He's telling the story and he says, here's the bottom line. Strangers got out of their cars, the comfort and safety and security of their cars, raced toward a burning aircraft to help people that they do not know may never meet again, put their own lives at peril, and in a matter of two minutes, organized an effective evacuation procedure to get every single person off of that airplane before moments later, it was engulfed in flames. Okay, now that. That is very difficult. That kind of magnanimous, absolutely selfless behaviorist, altruistic behavior. I don't see how the herd thing can explain.

It's no evolutionary sense.

To me, it's a shock because there's no survivability there.

I got to read this statement. I got to read this statement in the context of that.

Yeah, please.

It's in a book called the Desire of Ages. It's on page 638, and this is what it says. Those whom Christ commends in the judgment may have known little of theology, but they have cherished his principles through the influence of the Divine Spirit. They have been a blessing to those about them. Even among the heathen are those who have cherished the spirit of kindness before the words of life had fallen upon their ears. They have befriended the missionaries, even ministering to them at the peril of their own lives. Among the heathen are those who worship God ignorantly, those to whom the light is never brought by human instrumentality, yet they will not perish. I think that's our question here, our issue here. Though ignorant of the written law of God, they have heard his voice speaking to them in nature, and they have done the Things that the law required. Their works are evidence that the Holy Spirit has touched their hearts.

Yes.

And they are recognized as the children of God. How surprised and gladdened will be the lowly among the nations and among the heathen to hear from the lips of the Savior. Inasmuch as you have done it under the least of these, my brethren, you have done it unto me.

Hallelujah.

How glad will be the heart of infinite love as his followers look up with surprise and joy at his words of approval.

Hallelujah.

Sweetness.

Isn't that a powerful statement?

Beautiful.

So check this out. On the break, when we were trying to, you know, we had some technical things to take care of on this last break, Ty just spontaneously said, coming out of that first presentation, the first section of this talk, he said spontaneously. Do you remember what you said?

Nope.

You said, this truth about God is so liberating.

Liberating?

Yeah, it's so liberating because it frees you to believe the best about people. We know that humanity has fallen. We know that there's selfishness. We know that the heart is deceitful above all things. We know that. But we also know that the spirit of God, in his pervasive, wonderful, wooing way. You know, what I said to Ty is this overwhelms me the most in airports. I don't know what it is about airports, but all of us here, a.

Lot of people there, for one thing.

There's a lot of people.

It's just overwhelming.

And every time I'm in an airport, I see all these people waiting to go to Des Moines. I see these people waiting to go to Birmingham. I see these people waiting to go to Cancun. And I'm thinking, every one of those people's life is just as real and important to them as my life is real and important to me.

I don't know them.

I don't know where they're going. I don't know the names of their children. And you can become overwhelmed and think, how is the gospel going to get to every one of these people? And as a minister, as somebody who's dedicated his life, as a ministry that's dedicated our life, we're doing what we can. And praise God. There are other ministries that are doing what they can, but there is still an ocean beyond people that are untapped. But I just become so thrilled with the fact that God, while using us, while asking us to participate in his work, is not outright, absolutely dependent on David Asherich he's speaking to that he's wooing he's inviting. And in that quotation you just read there, she says that these people who have done right, they hear his voice, the word, the wisdom, the light that lights every man.

And out of this fold.

They'Re literally, in the language of this quotation, they're literally heathen who hear the well done from God. It's amazing. There's an example of this that is explicit in the ministry of Jesus in Matthew, chapter eight. If you guys want to take a look at this, I think that you will find this to be very beautiful and satisfying. Not only, as David said, because it liberates us to.

Believe the best about.

People and to hope the best for them.

Yeah. And to hope the best for them. It also. It liberates us to believe the best about God in the way God is intersecting with people. But look at this here. Jesus. I love this story, by the way. Yeah. Jesus is ministering within the nation of Israel. And then it says here that when Jesus entered Capernaum, a centurion came to him, pleading with him, saying, lord, my servant lies home sick of the palsy. He's paralyzed. He's dreadfully tormented. So here's the story. You got a centurion. This is a Roman, so a Gentile, a Roman soldier. That Roman soldier comes to Jesus. There's some kind of attraction.

Yes.

Okay. He sees, just pray. Something.

In Jesus that draws him to Jesus, which is a point we've made earlier, that people are attracted to the character of Jesus. They see goodness in him that is like a gravitational pull upon their hearts. So he comes to Jesus expecting goodness from Jesus. Jesus, my servant is sick. Would you heal him? Jesus then affirms, we know the story, and says, yes, I'll come tell it anyway.

Just tell it.

I'll come and heal him. And the centurion responds and says, I'm not even worthy for you to come under my roof, to come into my house. But speak the Word only and my servant will be healed. All you have to do is just speak the word and I know that what you say will take place. The centurion then explains his understanding of this based on his own relation to those who are under him. He says, I'm a man who. I have a little bit of authority myself, and I'm under authority. I know how authority works, and I see authority in you over my problem, and would you please use it? So here's the part that is just amazing.

Come on.

Jesus goes through this entire interaction. The servant gets healed, and then Jesus turns to the religious folks around him, he turns to the Pharisees, the scribes, to the Jewish believers around him, and Jesus says something that in this context can only be regarded as scandalous.

Scandalous.

That's the right word. Jesus says in verse 10 of Matthew 8, assuredly I say to you, to you religious people, I have not found such great faith, not even in Israel. Okay? That's the foundation. So then, if that's not scandalous enough, Jesus then blows the lid off this thing and says, who believe that salvation is exclusively for them. Jesus says to them, and. And I say to you that many, not a few, but many will come from the east and the west and sit down with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven. Isn't that amazing? So with this, Jesus has basically said, when we get to the other side of this great controversy between good and evil, surely these people believe. Yep, Abraham will be there. Yep, yep, Abraham will be there. Isaac, he'll be there.

Of course he will.

Jacob will be there. And they're kicking back under the tree of life. That's the picture we have here, basically. And they're fellowshipping. And Jesus says, wait a minute, there are going to be many from the east and the West. So geographically, he's saying, we're here in Israel, but if you go to the east, we're dealing with Persians. The Persians had Persia. Yeah. Asia. You go to the west, we're dealing with Western Europe and British island, all of that. Okay. And he says there are going to be many people from all these different cultures and nations, and they will come and sit down with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom. This scripture is Jesus explicitly saying that people from all different cultures that have never had access to the special revelatory knowledge of Israel in scripture. Yeah, these people will be in the kingdom.

Yes.

That would have sounded crazy to the original audience here.

Absolutely. But if you fast forward to the book of Revelation, in chapter seven, John sees what he calls a great multitude which no man could number. And do you know, do you remember the rest? Of course I do. Out of every nation, kindred tongue or language group, and people in the kingdom, a great multitude.

And let me tell you, to me, the story talking about liberation, the story of Jesus and the way that he affirms the faith of the Roman centurion. I want to say something about this Jesus endorsement of the centurion's faith and his healing of the centurion's servant was not a wholesale endorsement of all of the things about this man. It wasn't an endorsement of the fact that he's a soldier and that he would have been. In other words, what he's saying is, hey, here's a person who's on a journey. Here's somebody who has at least the glimmerings, the dawning of recognition of who I am. And I'm walking around my own people. Because the next part that he says is the kind of stuff that got him killed.

Verse 12. But the sons of the kingdom, the.

Sons of the kingdom, they will be cast into outer darkness and there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. In the first segment, Jeffrey basically said there are religious people who have a mischaracterization of who God is. There are non religious people, we would say non Israelites, moral, who have a correct concept. And that's what Jesus is doing here. And there is, by the way, and I don't have time to develop it here, but there is a very intentional positioning of Matthew's telling of this story with Jesus coming down off of the mountain. It's the first major miracle other than the healing of the leper, which happens just before this. Matthew has positioned this story and I believe Jesus positioned this experience. He saw this guy, he said, man, because this was the very thing that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were called to do, to take the gospel, not just given to, but through. And here this isolationist, elitist, patriotic, nationalistic, insular mentality had overtaken Israel. And Jesus starts dropping these little seeds to the Syrophoenician woman, to the woman at the well, who was just.

There's this term that he uses, huh? Even Paul, the true Israelite, a spiritual Israelite. So this guy's a centurion.

Paul doesn't use the term spiritual Israelite.

No, no, no. But this whole concept, the Israel of God. Israel of God and an Israelite, indeed. But here in Matthew 8. So this guy's a centurion, but he's really at heart, to the core. He's a spiritual Israelite, basically, in character and in spirit.

Jesus is describing, I guess, what might be called a great exchange picture, two circles overlapping. And over here, in this circle is the wide, unbelieving world that doesn't directly associate itself with Christianity or with Israel at this time and its teachings. And this circle, overlapping, represents the church or Israel back at this time. They're overlapping.

Those are the church books.

Yeah. Here's the thing right there at the overlap point, that's where the Lord knows those who are his. But this is amazing. What Jesus is describing here is that many, the sons of light, those who have had great privilege and knowledge. Many of those. What are they going to do? Outer darkness. And at the same time, simultaneously. What's going to happen with those who haven't had all the privilege in light?

Shoo.

It's just going to a great exchange. Tribe after tribe, company after company from the unbelieving world are going to come into the fold and they're going to be shaken out. Group after group are going to be shaken out. Isn't that amazing?

I'm on fire.

Now, there's a few more verses here that I wanted to look at, but Ty was also taking us through a step of scandals. You say now it gets more scandalous to this. You've got this next step. And I think the syrophoenician woman is another one. That's a scandal because the question I would ask is, can dogs be saved? In the mind of the Jews, these people outside of their borders were like dogs. And Jesus picks up subhuman. Yeah, and Jesus picks that up because when the syrophoenician woman comes to him asking his favor, and she's the only other person in the life of Christ, the ministry of Christ, she's the only other person where Jesus says, great is.

Your faith, great is your faith. There are other people.

Your faith has made you whole.

Your faith.

But great is your faith to the centurion. Great is your faith to the syrophoenician woman. But before he does that, she's asking for a favor. And he says, it's not meat to take the children's food and give it to the dogs.

He's voicing their own prejudices.

And what he's saying there is when he commends your faith, he's saying to his disciples in the Jewish nation. This is what I came. These are the people I came to say.

Do you see this?

Yeah. The ones you call dogs, I don't regard that way at all.

He's going all the way. In other words, he's answering our question. He's telling us that there are people out there that we consider dogs. There are people out there in this military unit. There are people out there, women that have been married two times, three times, four times, five times. There are people out there that are more moral and more appreciative and more accepting of me as the Messiah and ready for salvation than you guys are in all your religiosity.

Amazing. We have to take a break.

When we come back, we have to go to Romans 9.

We'll do it because that's Romans 9. Yeah. Let's pause.

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All right, you guys here on the break. I'm just vibrating.

You're going Pentecostal on us. You're going Pentecostal.

I am a Pentecostal. Right now. I believe in the Pentecostal power of the Spirit. Okay, check this out. I'm just going to. Based on the conversation where we ended, I'm just going to read Romans, chapter 9.

Here we go.

Verse 30. What shall we say then? That the Gentiles, who did not pursue righteousness, have attained to righteousness, even the righteousness of faith. But Israel, pursuing the law of righteousness, has not attained to the law of righteousness. Why? Because they did not seek it by faith, but as it were, by the works of the law. For they stumbled at that stumbling stone.

Yeah, love that scripture.

That's the theology behind Matthew 8.

Yeah. The Centurion's experience is here described in theological terms.

That's right. That is the very point that he's making. And I tell you, they basically lost the plot.

Basically, they lost, but somebody else was getting the plot.

And it was the outsider that got exchanged.

James ended with the Syrophoenician woman. And I love that. And I love the woman at the well, the Samaritan woman. The disciples are like, you know, they come back, what are you doing? Even the woman was confused. Hey, can I have a drink? And what I love about that is he doesn't say, can I get you a drink? Because she would have said, of course. No, no, thank you.

I'm good. She wouldn't have served him. He's a man, she's a woman. I have to. Sure, I will.

I don't know.

I think he asked a favor. I think he wanted a favor from her in order to make.

If he would have said. Well, if he would have said, can I get you a drink? That conversation would have been over in five seconds. Because she would have said, no, thank you.

You're a dragon. He drew her in.

Yeah. He gives her the opportunity to rep. He trusts her. He reposes. Trust gives her the opportunity to serve. She's taken aback.

Why would you want something from my hand? Why are you asking me?

I'm a Samaritan You're a Jew. But here's my point. When the story unfolds, Jesus gives to this woman, as you mentioned, James, not only a Samaritan. You know, a Samaritan spit when you say it. A woman who had been married repeatedly. And Jesus was like a woman, the one you're with now, not even your husband. He gives the fullest disclosure and revelation of who he is. She says, we know that when Messiah comes, he'll sort all this. He said, oh, man. Can you see this?

Oh, yeah, it's beautiful, sister.

That's me.

The pot is like. You know, I love this story. Jesus is planting, and all the while, the disciples. And I feel like I'm this way, just befuddled and just.

What?

Huh?

What's going on?

You know, just not getting it. Even on the day of Pentecost coming down, Peter's going to get this vision. You know, it's just like these guys were slow to. They were so parochial, they couldn't see the bigger.

Are we that way, David? I know the point we're making here. Why did Jesus tell her and no one else that he was the Messiah? Because she was willing.

She could hear it. She could hear it, she could receive it. He couldn't tell the truth.

Not that he'd watch it.

They even ask him sometimes. They would say, you tell us if you're the Messiah. Let me ask you a question. That baptism of John.

But with her, he seems to have freedom to just dispute.

Even though she's a sinner, he senses something in her.

She's a sinner and she's a woman, and she's a Samaritan. And yet there's this.

She's open.

Somebody's got to break out. Romans 2. We got to go in this connection. Romans 10. Romans 2 is a scripture that we all have on the table. Bring it all together.

Bring it all together.

Who's going to do it?

You? Me?

Oh. Romans, chapter two. This is fascinating. The Apostle Paul is here explaining something that in a very nice way summarizes what we're talking about.

I hope the people that are listening into this conversation will get their Bibles out and open up. Romans, chapter 2.

Romans, chapter 2, verse 6.

This verse liberated me. This verse created a context in which I could become a Christian. Christian.

This passage, really, for me, you break it down.

No, no, no, no.

I want to read it. And you tell me what this says.

I'll worship you.

Preach. Okay, for verse 14. For when Gentiles who do not have the law by nature do the things in the law, these, although not having the law, are a law to themselves. Verse 15. Who show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and between themselves their thoughts accusing or else excusing them. This is astounding.

And it's a passage regarding morality, in a sense.

And it's a passage regarding the judgment, verse 16, in the day when God will judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ, according to my gospel.

Yeah, but I like the fact that the word nature is in verse 14.

By nature. Yeah, that's right. So in other words, this is referring back, by the way, to chapter one, verse 19, where Paul had earlier said that what may be known of God is manifest in them. Well, here when we come to chapter two, the in them part is by nature. Yeah, that's right, it's by nature. In other words, what we've said previously in a conversation, there's moral activity inside of them. But this moral activity is a transcendent morality that first exists in God. He then makes human beings in his image. That image is lost, but remnants.

It's compromised.

Yeah, it's compromised. And remnants of that moral image still reside in the human heart in a compromised form. So we're not moral by evolutionary process. We're moral by design, but yet this is. We're moral by design.

I love how this acknowledges, though, that the Bible itself acknowledges that there is an intuitive, innate morality, which is where the evolution. Evolutionists would take off from.

And this scripture says that when you violate it, when you violate your nature.

Your conscience accuses you.

Your conscience accuses you. Your own conscience accuses you. You shouldn't have done that. You lay on your bed at night. You haven't necessarily. These people haven't read the Bible. They don't have the Ten Commandments. They lay on their bed at night and they think, why did I do that? Today? Their conscience is. But also, he says simultaneously, when you do what's right, your conscience. Affirmative.

Have you heard of the Baby Lab?

I think it's just called the Baby Lab. I think it's located at Yale University. I just read a synopsis of a paper. They're constantly studying the development of human behavior there. And I just read a paper recently that was sent by a friend of mine, Dr. Sean Pittman, in which they showed that this idea that children are blank moral slates, and you can just implant any old idea like they're a blank car drive, and you just put.

In any software that was. Can't happen.

Can't happen.

Can't happen.

They show that children from the age of as young as two already have an innate inborn sense of right and wrong, of morality.

That's right.

Now you can squelch that. You can become a person over years of silencing that voice and abusing your own conscience. And you can create a situation where you are devoid of a conscience.

But that's the point. You would have to initiate that you wouldn't naturally.

And you'd have to persist in it.

Right. That's hard work.

It's hard work to suppress your moral compass.

And the converse is also true as you become a sensitive person and you respond to people with empathy and kindness and compassion. And you know, whatever you've done under one of the least of these, you clothed me, you visited me, you fed me. Then we become increasingly in tune to moral situations around us. That's one of the things. I'll just be straight up, Ty. I love about you, I love all the guys here, but I've heard you in repeated situations, tyranny, difficult situations, in meetings and board meetings or whatever you say. Hey, but wait a minute. How does this situation look from their perspective? There's this like. There's this justice element and I love that there have been times in meetings where you have brought things that even me as a gospel preacher, I miss that. I miss there's a moral sensitivity that God has given you. And I love that. I pray that God will give me a similarly acute. And not that all of us don't have it, but I've just noticed it in you a number of times. But in the same way that that's the case. Well, the opposite could be. You can get to the place where you just pull out a gun and just.

It's called psychopathy.

Let me share this statement real quick just to firm up what we're talking about. Education, page 29. Christ is the light which lighteneth every man that comes into the world. That's a verse that we've been looking at quite a bit in John 1:9. John 1:9.

John 1-9.

John 1:9. Thank you. As through Christ every human being has life, so also through him every soul receives some ray of divine light. Not only intellectual. I've been putting it off for a long time. I waited till my wife got him and then I said, okay. Not only intellectual, but spiritual power, a perception of right. A desire for goodness exists in every heart.

Why?

Because Christ is the light that lightens every man that comes into the world. But against these principles, there is struggling and There is.

An antagonistic power. Yes, the result of the eating of the tree, of the knowledge of good and evil is manifest in every man's experience. There is in his nature a bent to evil, a force which unaided he.

Cannot resist, which unaided he can't resist.

To withstand this force, to attain that ideal which in his inmost soul he accepts as a loan worthy, he can find help in but one power, and that power is Christ.

Just one quick bit of advice and secret you don't know about. Parenthetical statement. On the iPad, you can make the type bigger so you don't have to wear the glasses.

I know, I just don't know how to do that. I'm not able to do that right this second.

Some of my quotes are big and some of them are small.

It looks to me like you're going to flip out of Romans, but I'm just going to quickly read because you started in verse 14. I'm just going to quickly read verses 11, 12 and 13 because they really say, okay, verse 11. There is no partiality with God.

Praise God.

Verse 12. For as many as have sinned without the law, without the written code that God gave to the Jews through Moses, they will perish without the law. And as many as have sinned in the law, they will be judged by the law, for not the hearers of the law. The writings of Moses in the Old Testament are just in the sight of God, but the doers of the law will be just. And then he begins his argument with the Gentiles.

Quick question, Ty. How do I make the type in my Bible bigger so I don't need my glasses?

Doesn't work that way. You gotta buy a large printmap.

It looks like you're going somewhere.

Well, this is connected, but it's a little bit of a different way to go. And I think it's really a helpful thing to go back to the Old Testament to a prophecy in Isaiah 49 that is about the coming Messiah, the one that we have in this conversation and the previous conversation spoken of as the word, the voice, the light. This Jesus is foretold in Isaiah 49. And as the prophecy is given in verse one, it says, Listen O coastlands to me, me Jesus, the Messiah keep coming. Listen O coastland to me and take heed, you peoples from afar long way. In other words, outside of the perimeters of Israel, outside. Okay, the gentile world is being addressed here. Okay, listen. And then it goes on to basically say the Messiah that's coming, the Savior that's coming. He is not just for the Jews, he's not just for Israelites. He's for. And there's all these different groups of people, people who inhabit islands and coastlands that are described. And then interestingly enough, when you come all the way down to verse 12, yes, surely these shall come from afar. Remember Jesus said they shall come from the east and the west. Okay. Surely these shall come from afar. Look, those from the north and the west and these from the land of Sinim. The land of Sinim. Now that's a very strange word that most people aren't familiar with. But Sinim is the ancient word for China or basically Asia. The word Sinim refers to China.

So.

So today in our modern language, you may hear in the news about American. Sino talks. S I N o Sino talks. Well, Sino refers to China. Or you look up in the dictionary. Sinology, S I n ology. Sinology. It is the study of things. Chinese. Sin nim refers directly to the people of China. And what this scripture is basically saying, you guys. Well, two things here. Number one, don't you find it fascinating that China is referenced in scripture as a people group, as a nation that the Messiah has particular interest in?

Absolutely.

Jesus loves the people of these far off lands outside of Israel.

Of course.

And don't you find it interesting, secondly, that the prophecy is basically saying that when this Messiah comes, when this Savior comes, he's not just for one people group, he's for everybody. Jesus is the one who is the Savior of all mankind.

That's right.

And he's coming for everybody.

The New Testament calls him that. The Savior of the world.

That's right. Powerful. Love that prophecy.

Okay, Psalm 87. This is one that I think is powerful too. And it just says the same thing.

You can the camera, James, please.

Psalm 87. You want to see my glasses?

Don't you want to see the glasses?

His foundation is in the holy mountains. The Lord loves the gates of Zion more than all the dwellings of Jacob. Glorious things are spoken of thee, O city of God. Selah, verse 4. I will make mention Rahab and Babylon to them that know me. Behold Philistia and Tyre with Ethiopia. This man was born there. And of Zion it shall be said, this man was born in her, and the highest himself shall establish her.

The Lord.

Verse 6 shall count when he writes up the people that this man was born there. Selah, think about this. And here's the point I get out of this, because when Titus was reading those verses, I was thinking that is really incredible. Verse 6 said I'll be a light to the Gentiles. And what God does in the context of this is he takes into consideration where we were born. Rahab, where she was born, the Babylonian, where he was born, the Ethiopian, where he was born. You were born in Zion. Jesus comes and he looks at the Samaritan woman, and he looks at the Theophanician woman. He says, wow, this is these people from the east to the West.

They're going to come.

God takes. So we say, well, they didn't know the law. They didn't know the name of Jesus. This is what we've been talking about. They didn't know the X, Y's and the Z's of theology. But God doesn't look at it that way. He considers where they're born. He considers lightning circumstances and whether their conscience is bearing witness and they are becoming a law unto themselves. And in that context, they are judged saveable.

So do we need God to be moral?

James, you have to read James 1:17.

That was my setup for.

I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

I'm sorry. I cut you off.

I cut you off.

That was the setup. I cut you off.

Well, you only have a minute and 30 seconds, so you better set it up.

He's like, doing this, like, Latin slow thing.

Every.

Get it done.

Every good gift. James 1:17. And every perfect gift is from above and comes down from the Father of Lights, with whom there's no variation or shadow of turning. Every good gift comes from above. If morality is good, every good thing that anybody does, whether they are a believer or a non believer, whether they profess the name of Jesus, whether they don't, whether they're in church, whether they're out, whether they love religion, whether they hate religion. Every good thing that we do is a gift that's extended from the Father, and we're just a conduit through which it is expressed in this world. Right? So I think the answer to the question is yes. We need God in order to be moral in the sense that morality is grounded. It's not something God speaks and invents. It's grounded in his very character.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Steps to Christ, page 26. Christ is the source of every right impulse.

Isn't that something.

He's the one. Every good gift. I love the way you did that. If morality is good, it comes from God. Comes from God.

And that's what it means when he says that I'm the way, the truth and the life.

Amen.

Which is a funny way to spin that text.

Around.

The way around.

Yeah. He's the way, the truth and the life in the larger sense that he is always the way, the truth and the life. To anybody who encounters the way, the truth and the life in any way, they encounter the way, the truth and the life.

That's good.

Sa.