In recent weeks, I have meditated and continue to meditate upon the moral nature of God.  As a reader, especially some of you, you might say, “You, the moral nature of God?!?!  You’re not moral!”  I agree.  When you meditate on the moral nature of God, it doesn’t result in thinking you’re moral.  Just the opposite.  I fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23).

When I think of God’s moral nature, it goes further than seeing how abominable I am compared to Him.  I also think of His grace and love, which are moral attributes of God.  I fall short of His grace and love, but because of His grace and love, as a fallen human I rejoice.

Cause for Meditation on the Moral Nature of God

What caused me to increase my amount of thinking about God’s moral nature?  Agnostics and atheists use moral arguments against the likelihood of the existence of God.  It relates to two challenges to the existence of God.  First, an all-powerful and all-good God would not allow for the suffering of men and animals and especially the latter.  Second, the God of the Bible called for the genocide of the Amalekite children,  as well as those of Jericho and the city of Ai.  They have other arguments, but the main ones center on the morality of God.

In our discipleship of the lost, we spend several weeks studying God from the Bible.  In that study, we consider the moral attributes of God.  The term “moral” is not in the Bible.

Moral in the English Language

English is a new language compared to ancient languages, but the earliest usage of “moral” occurs in the writings of Geoffrey Chaucer in the fourteenth century.  It comes from the Latin, moralis, first used by Cicero to translate the ancient Greek, ethicos.  The first two definitions are these:

1.  Of or relating to principles of right and wrong in behaviour, especially for teaching right behaviour.
2.  Conforming to a standard of right behaviour; sanctioned by or operative on one’s conscience or ethical judgment.

English men began using the phrase, “moral attributes,” of God first in the 17th century.  In his huge work in 1682, The Existence and Attributes of God, Stephen Charnock does not use “moral attributes” to speak of God, although a few times he uses the word “moral.”  John Locke uses the exact words, “moral attributes of God,” once in 1697 in his book, Remarks upon an Essay concerning Humane Understanding.

Thomas Stackhouse

Thomas Stackhouse in 1729 wrote the book, A Complete Body of Divinity, and in his Section XI, he titled it, “Of the Moral Attributes of God:  And First, Of His Holiness.”  On the first page of that section, he wrote something that I have thought about for several days before reading it.  I had never thought about his moral nature like I began thinking, but what he wrote summarized especially one aspect on my mind:

But how transcendent forever the moral Perfection of the Divine Nature (his capitalization) may be, compared with those of Men, or any other intelligent Being; yet if the Reasons of Right, Good, and Fit, have the same Foundation in the Divine, that they have the human mind; the moral Attributes of God must be of the same Nature with what we perceive in Men, how much soever they may differ in the Degrees of Perfection:  Otherwise we cou’d form no distinct Notions of them, nor cou’d they be proposed as fit Objects of our imitation.

Richard Fiddes

Stackhouse was saying that without God having moral attributes, we could form no distinct notions of them.  We also would not propose them as fit objects of our imitation.  I could add to that, no one could make a moral judgment on God without an ability of moral judgment that comes from God.  Maybe Stackhouse thought of some of what he wrote, when he read an earlier work by Richard Fiddes in 1718, Theologia Speculativa: Or, the First Part of a Body of Divinity.  In that book, he wrote:

Again, if the moral attributes of God be not founded in the same general reasons with those of men (and if they be so founded, the nature of them is still the same) then it would be impossible for us to form any distinct notions of the divine attributes, or rather any notions at all, but what would be very irregular and confus’d.  For they being so farther of a moral consideration, that as we apprehend them as reasonable in themselves, if we do not know what common reasons to resolve them into, we at once destroy the morality of them, and all possible methods of reasoning upon them.  What grounds, I say, can we have upon any principles of natural religion to attribute certain perfections to God, whereof we are not able to discover any natural reason; which yet is impossible for us to do, without knowing what they are, in some imperfect manner at least, in their own nature.

I shall only add, since I am arguing on occasion of what has been advanc’d by a learned person in one of the first stations of the church, that when God refers it, our selves being judges, whether his ways are not equal:  if we are not to judge concerning the equality of them, according to our common notions what is just and right, the design of such an appeal be altogether impracticable.  Neither could we be capable, as both reason and his positive commands requires we should, of imitating his perfections, did we not know, wherein his perfections consist; an unknown object of imitation evidently implying as great an inconsistency, as an unknown object of desire.

God Is Moral

I’ve been thinking, God is moral: that is why morality exists.  This is in the writing of these above men too.  God, the only God, created men with morality.  They are moral creatures, since they are made in His image.  They must think and behave morally.

God is moral.  He did not begin morality.  It didn’t start with Him.  He is moral.  God always is and with His moral nature, morality is too.  Men got their morality from Him.  At best they can reflect His nature, not judge His nature and whatever proceeds from it, like His actions.  God acts in accordance with His nature always, so every act proceeds from His nature.

The Glory of God

No way can a man judge God or justify himself before God, like Bildad said in Job (Job 25:1-6).  Just because a man cannot please God with his morality is not a pass for his immorality.  God created him as a moral creature and God desires morality.  God is the standard, which is why Paul wrote that all fall short of the glory of God.  It is not that all fall short of a prescribed standard.  No, they fall short of the glory of God, which is the perfections of God’s moral attributes.  Like Paul says in Romans 5:6, they are ungodly.  They violate His nature.

God comes first, then man’s perception of morality.  Like Stackhouse and Fiddes say above, man doesn’t even have a notion of morality without God.  He only reasons from morality, because God created him a moral creature.  Even if he gets it wrong, he knows something is right or wrong.  Man doesn’t know without God.  Then he doesn’t know right or wrong without God.  If not from God, then from what ether did this judgment come?

God is not wrong.  He is always right, because He defines right.  Whoever judges God as wrong did wrong in judging God.

God can’t be wrong.  He just can’t.  Wrong would mean something was wrong based upon something.  God is the basis for all right.  He is never wrong.  If a man thinks He’s wrong, that man is wrong, not God.

The Problem of Animal and Child Suffering

A deer is caught under a fallen tree and starves to death confused and alone.  The deer doesn’t understand a fall or a sin-cursed world.

God allowed a child to die.  So why shouldn’t I allow a child to die?  God did.

The point of the agnostic or atheist is that he’s justified in a rejection of God.  He can’t accept the reality of God under these above and other circumstances.  The skeptic rejects God on a moral argument.

More to Come