In Whose Eyes?
You make moral decisions all day long, and most of them come without a verse attached. What do you say to your boss when the report is not quite true? How do you answer a friend whose choice you cannot bless? Should you take the job? Everyone around you has an answer ready: follow your heart, live your truth, do whatever feels loving. This study asks a plainer question. How does a Christian decide?
Scripture shows us where the other road ends. The book of Judges closes with one sentence.
“In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes.”JUDGES 21:25 · KJV
Every age has its own version of that sentence. Paul gives the Christian a different way to live.
“And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.”ROMANS 12:2 · KJV
A renewed mind can prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God. To prove is to test and to approve. God does not leave His children guessing, and He does not treat them as machines. He gives them His Word, His Spirit, and His people, and He teaches them to think.
The study and practice of what God calls right and wrong, learned from His Word and lived by faith in Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit.
Three Questions Keep It Clear
Theologica asks three questions of any teaching, and they serve any decision as well. They ask how God tells us to respond (see The Gospel, the Whole Counsel, and Liberty).
- What must someone believe to be saved? The Gospel: Christ died for our sins, was buried, and rose again the third day (1 Corinthians 15:1–4). No right decision earns salvation, for it is not of works, lest any man should boast (Ephesians 2:9).
- What must a Christian believe and obey? The whole counsel of God: all things whatsoever I have commanded you (Matthew 28:20). Telling the truth, keeping sexual purity, forgiving, and gathering with God's people are not open questions for a believer.
- Where has God granted liberty? Particular matters He has neither commanded nor forbidden, where each believer is to be fully persuaded in his own mind (Romans 14:5).
Much confusion comes from mixing these up. Legalism takes a matter of liberty and treats it like a command, or even like a condition of salvation. License takes a command and treats it like a matter of liberty.
When you say something is right, what makes it right? Your feelings, your friends, your culture, or the God who made you?
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For Deeper Study
- Decision Making and the Will of GodAmazon Garry Friesen with J. Robin MaxsonA careful case that God guides His people through His revealed moral will and through wisdom, not by a hidden plan that must be decoded. Friesen taught at Multnomah in a dispensational setting. He presses the argument further than some will, so read it with discernment.
- Ethics for a Brave New WorldAmazon John S. Feinberg and Paul D. FeinbergA thorough evangelical treatment of method and of hard questions such as abortion and capital punishment, from teachers at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School who write from a dispensational, broadly Reformed position.
- Conscience: What It Is, How to Train It, and Loving Those Who DifferAmazon Andrew David Naselli and J. D. CrowleyA clear study of conscience in the New Testament, with practical help on calibrating it. Naselli writes from a Reformed Baptist setting.
- Situation Ethics: The New MoralityAmazon Joseph FletcherThe primary source for the view answered here. It is not a Christian guide. Read it only to understand the argument. Fletcher later abandoned belief in God.
- Foxe's Book of MartyrsAmazon John FoxeThe classic Protestant record of those who died for the faith, from the early church to the English Reformation.
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Liberty, Convictions, and the World
Christ has set believers free from sin's mastery and from rules God never gave, so in matters Scripture leaves to conscience each believer holds his convictions before the Lord, refuses to judge his brother, and asks, “Will this help my brother?”
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