What planet is this? Not that long ago, Christian morals were seen as good and enshrined in law. Today we are increasingly being told that our morals are the problem, that what we believe is not just misguided but backward and harmful. We’re beginning to find ourselves pressed to behave in ways that we see as not only wrong but bizarre and illogical. As Stephen McAlpine put it in Being the Bad Guys, “The cultural, political and legal guns that Christianity once held are now trained on us—and it’s happened quickly.”
We woke up one day and found ourselves in a foreign culture that was pressing us to conform, so it’s worth looking at Biblical characters who experienced a similar problem. For our next Lesson from Babylon, let’s look at when and how our heroes said “no.”
When everything’s going well, we don’t ask too many questions. Why rock the boat? When things aren’t going our way, we ask lots of questions. Why me? How long will this last? Is anybody running this thing? The book of Daniel addresses this last one thoroughly.
As we continue our Lessons from Babylon, recurring themes from the book of Daniel, let’s look at what seems to be the overarching theme of the entire book. Every chapter of Daniel is written to convey one message over all others:
Everything old is new again. Fashion is cyclical, that's why men never throw anything out — they fully expect that leisure suit to come back into style again.
Ideas do the same thing. Especially errors. And so we find ourselves in a place that seems kind of familiar. Many people look at the world today and see parallels to the situation of the faithful Hebrews in Babylon. I think that’s fair, so I intend to mine the book of Daniel for insight into our situation.
This is the beginning of a series of Lessons from Babylon. Rather than digging into an expository study of the book, I intend to highlight some repeated themes or messages we see.
If we normally think of life as a marathon, today’s world makes it feel like a Tough Mudder course — harder, slower, and way dirtier. We’re going to start a series soon on some biblical guidance for navigating this obstacle course, but this week I thought it’d be useful to offer you some other people’s thoughts on the matter.
Is it time to stop talking about objective morality?
I believe objective morality exists. I believe God is the only explanation for objective morality. But skeptics will run you in circles trying to prove that objective morality can exist apart from God or by bringing up the Euthyphro dilemma. Perhaps it’s time we take a page from their playbook and adjust our approach to the issue to disarm or even preempt some of their objections. We can do that by shifting our focus from objective to external morality.
