If God Is "I AM", then Who Am I? - Day 17

Day 17 – moral

 

These students, like increasing numbers of people in the modern world, sensed—however vague, that there was something fundamentally inadequate about moral relativism… [T]hey realized that some things—torturing children, for example—were “just plain wrong” no matter where you were coming from.  –HARVEY COX

 

Let me give you a snapshot of some of the patients I treated in the emergency department today:

1

a sixty-year-old male with chest pain and arrhythmia, stabilized and transferred to a cardiologist

2
a forty-year-old female with atypical chest pain, scheduled for outpatient testing

3
a female in her sixties, assaulted by her intoxicated husband, discharged home after five staples to a scalp laceration

4
a 22-year-old bee-stung female with a life-threatening allergic reaction, admitted to the hospital after treatment

5
a 54-year-old motorcyclist who luckily walked out of the ER with only a fractured finger and a few abrasions after colliding at fifty miles per hour with a dog

 

6

a 3-year-old boy sent home after having a plastic bead removed from his right nasal passage

 

7

a 91-year-old female in severe pain from a massive myocardial infarction (heart attack), admitted to the ICU

 

8

a fourteen-year-old Hispanic girl with pelvic pain, diagnosed with a complex left ovarian cyst

9
a nineteen-year-old male with seizures caused by amphetamine use, discharged to a rehabilitation and detoxification facility

10
a thirty-eight-year-old male with multiple trauma from a head-on motor vehicle collision, med-flighted to a trauma center after life support measures.

 

Now let's pretend that you are a reporter assigned to follow me today as part of a newspaper series on life in the local ER. Instead of the treatment described above, imagine that I refused to give the man with chest pain the medicine needed to correct his rhythm problem; that I gave that medicine instead to the lady with atypical chest pain who did not need it; that I called the intoxicated husband and told him his wife's whereabouts so he could assault her again; that I watched TV for one hour before seeing the lady with the life-threatening bee sting allergy; that I left the motorcycle rider's fractured finger unsplinted and his wounds uncleaned and undressed; that I pushed the plastic bead further up the nose to punish the child; that I injected into my own veins the pain medicine intended for the lady with the heart attack; that I ejected from the ER the teenage girl with pelvic pain because of the color of her skin; that I offered some amphetamine stashed in my locker to the drug-crazed teen (if he could come up with $100); and that I took a 30-minute joyride on the helicopter before transferring the MVC patient to the trauma center. Then, at the end of the shift, suppose I placed fifty dollars in your hand and, with a sly wink, told you to write something favorable about me.

If all this happened before your eyes in the ER, what would your reaction be? What opinion of me would you have at day's end? If you reported the truth in your newspaper article, can you predict the public's response? If you took my bribe money and ignored my actions, how would you feel deep down about yourself? What sort of reputation in the community would you have if your involvement in the cover-up were exposed? You know full well the answers. You would be appalled at my behavior, as would the general public. If you took my bribe, they would consider you equally the villain. Even you and I would know that our actions were out-of-line.

Now suppose that this story made the national news and a panel of experts gave commentary. I predict every one of them would condemn my actions. Granted, those on the political left and right would disagree on a few peripheral issues, such as the extent of my punishment, but they would be unified in outrage against the acts themselves. They would know, like everyone else in the world, that what you and I did was wrong.

This is not an isolated phenomenon. All cultures, continents, civilizations, and classes have an innate sense that some actions are right and some are wrong.¹ We humans, it appears, have a moral dimension to our nature. An infinitely holy and righteous God has planted a divine Moral Law within us.

 

SELF-REFLECT

1

Think of three criminal acts on the local or national level that you consider absolutely wrong.

2
What activities in your life would a holy God consider absolutely wrong?

3
What should your response be when these wrongs are exposed?


¹In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis argues convincingly that all civilizations throughout history have adhered to a universal code of morality. He called this the tao (the way).

Daily Quotation

Harvey Cox, When God Came to Harvard (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 7-8.