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Situation Ethics

This is a time of moral confusion. There is a fog of uncertainty and doubt that clouds the minds of most people so that they have difficulty in making moral distinctions.

Some say there are no fixed moral principles for life’s moral questions. Each situation, they claim, must be judged on its own and they insist that there can be no rules applied apart from each particular case. And then the only guideline permitted is "love." One of the exponents of this idea has said, “Nothing can of itself be labeled as wrong. Sex relations before marriage or divorce may be wrong in 99 cases or even 100 cases out 100, but they are not intrinsically so, for the only intrinsic evil is lack of love.” Those who hold this view of morality make no rules in advance. They decide every case on its own.

Three things ought to be said about this new morality:

One, it is too egotistical. It assumes too much for humanity. Do we have the wisdom and insight to see every situation completely and make a correct judgment? Only God is able to see circumstances objectively and thus be able to define absolutes. It is the height of arrogance for us to claim this degree of wisdom. We have such limited vision and can so easily rationalize and make ourselves believe that what we want is right. We can even convince ourselves that we are in love to achieve our desires.

Second, it is unbalanced. Love and law are not in conflict. In fact, law is an expression of love for real love is strict and demanding. God’s love for us led him to set some laws of morality for our good.

Third, it is inconsistent. Those who hold to the new morality accept what Jesus said about love as absolute and reject all else he said as situational. We have no basis for doing this.

Morality is not relative. It is absolute. God has spoken on many issues and their controversy must end. Our problem is that we have left God out of our lives and have thus eliminated the only stable foundation of life. We are falling to pieces morally because we have gone to pieces religiously. 

Morality is grounded in the character of God. Right is right because of what God is, and wrong is wrong because of what God is. As someone once said, “God is a stake driven down in the field of morality.” Find him and anchor your life in him.

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Paul W. Powell - www.PaulPowellLibrary.com

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