“These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up (Deuteronomy 6:6-7).
Two slightly overweight men board a bus and head for the one empty seat. Both, approaching the seat from different directions, arrive at about the same time and attempt to claim the seat.
One says, “That’s my seat.” “No, it isn’t. It’s my seat.” “I got here first,” says the other. “No, you didn’t, you’re wrong!” “No, you are wrong.”
In writing about the incident, C. S. Lewis raised the question, “Where did the idea of right and wrong come from?” Who says something is right and something is wrong? Lewis pointed out the fact that you’ve got to know what a straight line is before you know what a crooked one is.
Today the issue is fuzzy in the minds of a lot of people. Our basic understanding of right and wrong is the result of our Christian roots. These have been the foundation of society. In simple terms, the Bible has provided an understanding of what is right and what is wrong. This book provides answers to the issues as the fact that it is right for me to love my wife, wrong for me to love another man’s wife. It is right for me to take the grain that is grown in my field; but wrong to take what is grown in my neighbor’s field. It’s right for me to discipline and train my children; wrong for me to discipline your children.
Some of these issues were defined in a set of moral guidelines known as the Ten Commandments. These have been the backbone of society for 3,000 years. Other guidelines for living came with the teaching of the prophets, then in Jesus’ teaching. He said things such as, “Do unto others as you would have them do to you,” instead of the rule of the street, which is: “Do it to the other guy before he does the same thing to you!”
Today, however, we’ve obscured the line between right and wrong. Making the issue of moral right and wrong a subjective thing, nothing is really right or wrong in itself. And when you abandon fundamental issues of what’s right or wrong, chaos and anarchy result.
Whenever a mob is inflamed to violence, people justify that violence—the theft and the looting—based on the fact that, “Well, everybody is out there doing it, so I might as well.” Typical, was a young man, then 17 years of age, who explained why he helped loot a furniture store. He said, “I saw everybody getting things, so I said, ‘Well, it seemed like fun,’ so I started doing it too.”
Question. Was C. S. Lewis right in saying you’ve got to know what a straight line is before you recognize what a crooked one is? If he was on target (and history well demonstrates that he was), then our failure to know the difference today results in the chaos that touches us at every level of life: government, education, in the schools, and most important of all, in our homes and our families.
We can blame others—we can blame the educational system for its failure. We can castigate leadership today for failing to exemplify the qualities in their lives that we think are important, but the fundamental failure is that of the home, where parents bear the great responsibility of teaching right and wrong. Who says so? God does, and He did it very clearly. Make a note of Deuteronomy chapter 6 in the Old Testament. Here God instructed, “These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up (Deuteronomy 6:6-7). When we begin to do that again, our children will know clearly what a straight line is and what a crooked one is too.
Resource reading: Deuteronomy 6:1-12.
