Pursue peace with all people, and holiness, without which no one will see the Lord: looking carefully lest anyone fall short of the grace of God; lest any root of bitterness springing up cause trouble, and by this many become defiled; lest there be any fornicator or profane person like Esau, who for one morsel of food sold his birthright. For you know that afterward, when he wanted to inherit the blessing, he was rejected, for he found no place for repentance, though he sought it diligently with tears. (Hebrews 12:14-17, NKJV).
In a mere 50 years we have come so far and fallen so low in regard to Western sexual mores that what was once considered shameful is now the accepted norm. This is precisely what has happened throughout human history when human authority and judgment supplants the divine.
Take God out of the picture and all you have left is man. Nothing could be more dismal and hopeless. Nothing could be more antithetical to all that is good, except perhaps Hell itself.
This is the issue of sovereignty; the question of who has authority and who can rightly demand or enforce submission. If it is the eternal transcendent God - omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent - then the absolute standards He establishes are reflections of His character. Since He is good and just and merciful, so too are His laws.
But what of the ruthlessness recounted in the Old Testament? What about an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth?
The answer is simple. Divine judgment based on an all-knowing God can determine rightly what constitutes fitting punishment. Human judgment, steeped in sin, self-will, woefully limited knowledge, and cultivated in the hotbed of intense emotion, can not.
When God commanded that whole city-states be exterminated by the Children of Israel, men, women and children, it was not only fitting retribution but a necessary lesson for His Chosen People.
Left to flourish, those ancient people groups would have further contaminated the culture and era in which God had ordained that Abraham and his descendants would live, making them unfit to receive His revelation, and thus depriving the world of its most important asset: knowledge of God.
Using Israel as His instrument of judgment was a graphic and dramatic illustration for them of what it meant to fall under God's righteous wrath.
These horrendous events are often used as an argument against the goodness and love of God, but this is a specious argument for two very good reasons.
The first is founded on the assumption of human innocence, and prefaced by the arrogant, whining, and self-serving question of "How could a God of love do X or Y or Z?"
To exterminate evil is not only good and loving, but a moral necessity. To promulgate an environment for good to flourish is also loving. Both those things were accomplished by the Old Testament judgments. Had these been initiated by man, that would not have been the case, but commanded by God it would have to be the case, since God is just.
Unless of course, and this leads to the second specious argument, mankind is, and knows "better" than God.
The assumed innocence and goodness of mankind is belied by history. Godless human authority, from Nimrod to Ghengis Khan to Hitler to Pol Pot to Kim Jung Ill, has not only resulted in miscarriages of justice, but in genocide. In reality, the limiting principle of "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" is a soothing lullaby in comparison.
The idea that humans know better and would rule better if only we put aside all those things that make us quintessentially human in our fallenness is simply delusional. We are incapable of justice or mercy or love for more than a moment in and of ourselves. Without God, we are minions of the devil by default.
Every single instance of a society ruled by men without God has quickly devolved into an unmitigated disaster. Just look at the atrocities of the French and Communist Revolutions, both founded on rabid atheism. Look at the slow death and decay of whole cultures that sought only human rule.
Logically, if those nations founded ostensibly in faith toward God, like the United States, are rampantly imperfect and fall far short of expectations, how could any that emphatically rejects Him hope to be any better?
The answer is that it can't.
When man is the sole source of authority, moral values become relative. What is "good" and "proper" for some are profoundly evil for others. This is where we find ourselves today.
Vile evil is propagandized as tolerance and choice. Insistence on absolutes is deemed the only true evil, unless of course the "absolutes" originate from those paternalistically deemed as "backward" or "primitive", then these are viewed as quaint sensibilities that must be respected by the more enlightened.
The equation is damningly inevitable. When man rules chaos results.
Only when those in authority acknowledge and rely upon a Supreme Being, can there be any hope of justice or mercy in human society. To believe otherwise is sheer fantasy and a denial of the raw facts of history.
Aside from the devil himself, a human being without God is profoundly evil, and that evil manifests itself primarily in the buying and selling of justice or benefit or privilege or position or power.
When the pricelessness of righteousness is assigned a crass material value, every other virtue is rendered worthless.
Look at Esau, who for one morsel of food, sold his God-given birthright. In effect, he cast aside divine goodness and authority for a meal; to satisfy the momentary lusts of his belly. When he realized the self-defeating stupidity of his transaction, he repented, not of his motives or heart, but of the deal he had struck - momentary gratification at the expense of lasting blessing.
And that is the deal we all face in this life.
When we discard God from our thoughts, words and actions, man takes His place. We exchange delusional momentary benefit, "the passing pleasures of sin", for eternal blessing. Eventually, every evil becomes justifiable under the auspices of tolerance and enlightenment, or business, or survival of the fittest. Fairly soon, even the attempt at justification falls by the wayside.
The end is suffering, injustice, exploitation, chaos and death.
Look around.
