To Hell with Standards!

by Desmond Ford

"To hell with standards!"

This has been the motto of millions in democracies in recent decades. During the 1930's, when most struggled for bread in the Great Depression, moral standards still prevailed to a considerable degree. But with post-war prosperity came moral decadence. When men and women no longer have to fight for food, when they are well clothed and warm, then their question is "What can I do to avoid boredom?" At this point we are likely to hear the cry "To hell with moral standards!"

Violence

Let's review quickly the twentieth century. It has witnessed the violent deaths of more people than in all preceding centuries combined. Hitler's murder of six million Jews, Stalin's execution of ten million Russian land owners -- these iniquitous crimes were repeated by multiple dictators of the Third World, such as the cannibal Idi Amin, who cut up his own wife and stored the parts in his refrigerator to consume at leisure.

Consider that bastion of Christianity and democracy, the United States. Post-war prosperity led millions in this land of the free to act as though anarchy were king and chaos the objective. In the sixties racial riots and student upheavals ignited innumerable city fires and prompted looting, the dynamiting of university buildings, and death. Simultaneously, family morality faltered and fell.

Fires and bullets

In his review of over 40 years of American history (The Glory and the Dream -- 1932-1972) William Manchester features a section entitled "Reaping the Whirlwind," covering 1961-68 and climaxing with the chapter entitled "The Year Everything Went Wrong." He tells of rioters running amuck in 114 cities in 32 states, involving scores of deaths and thousands of casualties. In Detroit alone there were 1,600 fire alarms in eleven days.

This was the decade of the assassinations of President Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy; the decade of the Ku Klux Klan acting with senseless violence; the decade when sexual morality was rejected by most teenagers and many of their seniors; the decade of the hippie, the drug culture, the My Lai massacre. Thousands upon thousands belonging to the most prosperous country on earth acted like animals.

Land of gods

There were gods aplenty on the American scene. Take commercialized sport, for example. "It turned millions of men who ought to have been active outdoors -- for their own benefit, if nothing else -- into beer-drinking, flatulent spectators, watching young athletes romp joyously in guilded playpens." [1] No wonder Vance Packard referred to this generation as Waste Makers. Everything was "throw away" -- not just diapers, kitchen implements, and containers, but morality, marriage, human life, and all the principles of the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount. The very best things had become trash.

The badge of the new morality was reflected in the attitude toward sex. "The sexual balance between the sexes had been altered, probably forever." [2] With reference to women, Manchester states, "More of them were sharing men's vices, . . . public drunkenness, juvenile delinquency, and assault and battery. Women's Liberation leader, Ti-Grace Atkinson called marriage 'slavery,' 'legalized rape' and 'unpaid labor'." [3]

Each season's X-rated movies went farther than the last. Soon they flaunted bestiality, cunnilingus, and fellatio. If a little old lady wished to buy a magazine at a stand, she had to reach over three rows of smut magazines to get it.

Anything goes

Between 1940 and 1960 illegitimate births doubled, and 40 percent of the mothers were in their teens. Venereal diseases vanished (with new miracle drugs) only to reappear as a national epidemic yielding, in our decade, millions of cases of genital herpes and the new scourge, AIDS. This "anything goes" generation endorsed wife-swapping and wife-testing. During the sixties the New York Hilton, Manhattan's largest hotel, rented rooms by the hour.

Sex unlimited became the leading sport, and tripping on drugs ran a close second. The music matched the mood of these youngsters "blowing their minds" on driving, drowning, acid rock. In 1967, 10,000 boys and girls gathered in Central Park's Sheep Meadow to honor love. A physician who opened a free clinic was immediately overwhelmed by pregnancies, venereal disease, and hepatitis caused by filthy syringes.

Those who talk against upholding moral standards are sowing to the wind. They will reap the whirlwind. The most meager knowledge of history makes it plain that human nature is so depraved that without continuing and constant education in morality, it sinks to the level of the brute.

Extreme theological views

What is surprising is not that men and women who are ignorant of God should ditch standards, but that many professing Christ have done the same -- at least in their theology. Standards have been equated with legalism, and ridiculed. The tragic record of history is that with every revival of the gospel has come a revival of antinomianism -- opposition to law. Literally millions of professed Christians will go to hell with puny standards. The fact that those claiming to believe in the infinite righteousness of Christ have simultaneously cherished a shocking low-level of practical righteousness in their own lives, proves the deceitfulness of sin. Jesus warned of all this in the ordination sermon we call the Sermon on the Mount (see Matthew 7:21-27).

Human nature is proverbially one-eyed. Some people can read the first half of every letter Paul wrote about salvation by grace alone, yet ignore or misunderstand the second half of those same letters that call for the dedication of body, soul, and mind to the Redeemer.

Cheap grace

Often confused behavior is rooted in confused thinking. This is true of professed Christians who live with low moral standards. Their grace is a cheap grace, not true grace. They may mouth New Testament texts against the law, but reveal a colossal ignorance of what the texts are really affirming. Comparatively few who read the New Testament in the popular churches are aware that word law has a wide variety of meanings and that the Ten Commandments do not constitute one of them.

The Hebrew and Greek words translated "law" imply a standard of truth and behavior, but they are usually applied in a much broader sense than modern Christians apply the term. Precise study of law passages in both testaments show that the word is often a synonym for the Jewish religion or the Scriptures of that religion. Only one text in the whole Bible, beyond possibility of controversy, uses the word law as a synonym for the Ten Commandments (see Exodus 24:12).

That the commandments themselves remain as a skeletal, moral summary for Christians is made clear by Jesus' endorsement of them a few days before His crucifixion (Matthew 19:18, 19); Paul's continual reference to them as a standard for Christians (see Ephesians 6:1-3, which recognizes the commandments as a unit well known to those to whom he wrote); and the reference to the ark of the testimony in the Bible's last book (see Revelation 15:5 -- the word testimony, when coupled with the ark, always means the Ten Commandments and nothing else in both testaments).

Because the majority of people in our churches are spiritually immature, without some thumbnail sketch of prescriptive Christian behavior, masses of professed Christians unable to wrestle with Paul's paradoxical thoughts will inevitably go the way of the flesh.

Holiness

Another reason for the decay in moral standards in professed Christians today is ignorance concerning sanctification, or holiness. Too few have contemplated the meaning of such New Testament expressions as "grow in grace," "rich in good works," "created unto good works," "cleanse yourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and of the spirit," "render your members as instruments of righteousness," "present your bodies as a living sacrifice," "I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection: lest . . . I myself should be a castaway," etc.

The New Testament is not opposed to obedience to the commands of God. It does protest against such concepts as 1) a person must become a Jew before becoming a Christian; 2) a person should behave as though the age of shadows, types, and ceremonies has not come to an end; 3) a person should imagine that duty's primary motivation springs from tables of stone rather than the Cross; 4) the depth of God's will is in the Old Testament rather than the new; 5) obedience is self-initiated rather than the fruit of the indwelling spirit.

Salvation

A third misunderstanding concerns the significance of the term salvation. The first reference to this term in the New Testament is in Matthew 1:31, where we read that Jesus would save His people from their sins. Salvation, then, is not just a fire escape. It is not just deliverance from guilt and death. Salvation is more, not less. Can it then be thought for a moment that the Christian is less concerned with obedience to God than the Jew at the foot of Mount Sinai?

The greatest failure

Apart from death, the main thing wrong with this world's behavior is the lack of right standards. The multitudes think murder -- even mass murder, which we call war -- is okay; rape is okay, including rape of the mind and soul by propaganda and pornography and twisted media; theft is okay -- from family, employers, neighboring territories or people. This lack of standards springs out of the failure to worship God, the failure to see the priorities of reverence, adoration, holiness, and abhorrence of all idolatry. These failures are a result of the greatest failure of all: to mediate on Jesus' crucifixion and the reasons for that most terrible of all tragedies, yet most glorious of all triumphs. The words of Griffith Thomas are appropriate:

Conduct as Matthew Arnold says, may be "'three-fourths of life," but the other fourth is the motive power of the three. A train is much longer than the locomotive, but the locomotive provides the motive power. A building is much higher than the foundation, but the foundation is very necessary. A tree is much larger than the root, but it is the root which gives life to the tree. [4]

The cross of Christ is the "locomotive" that provides the power, the "foundation" that secures the building, and the "root" that gives life. All Christian behavior springs from a heart that is daily transformed by the vision of the cross.

Notes

1. W. Manchester, The Glory and the Dream, p. 1089.
2. Ibid., p. 1105.
3. Ibid., p. 1106.
4. W. H. Griffith Thomas, Grace and Power, p. 120.

Taken from the January 1986 issue of Good News Unlimited. Used with permission. A version of this article appeared in a past issue of the Bible Advocate magazine. For a free subscription by regular mail, contact us at bibleadvocate@cog7.org.

Desmond Ford is president of Good News Unlimited in Auburn, CA. You may e-mail him or GNU at gnu@aub.com.

© 1998 General Conference of the Church of God (Seventh Day)