Matthew 5:48
You Must Be Perfect Like God is Perfect
48 You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
Mark 10:17-18
Only God is Good
17 As Jesus started on his way, a man ran up to him and fell on his knees before him. “Good teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
18 “Why do you call me good?” Jesus answered. “No one is good—except God alone.
There have been many people who have given us moral arguments that God exists...Morality is based on a common human experience...Most people have a sense of right and wrong, and this sense of right and wrong seems to be universal in all cultures...Being moral is supported by the fact that all cultures have some concept of right and wrong...This suggests that our sense of right and wrong is not just a product of our culture or our upbringing, but is something that is innate to all humans...Morality is further supported by the fact that even young children seem to have a natural sense of what is right and wrong...This suggests that our sense of right and wrong is not just something that we learn, but is something that we are born with...
One who was Perfectly Moral was Jesus...As we read about Him and His teachings we see this...Jesus said that Only God is good, and that God is Perfect...So God is Perfectly Good...He is Perfect Goodness...There is Glory in Perfect Goodness and man falls short of being perfectly good all the time...So we fall short of God's Glory and His vision for us of being perfectly moral...
As we read the Bible we see and can believe that God provides the Basis, the Source, and the Foundation for man's morality...This fact might seem to favor God arguments for God's morality rather than moral arguments for believing in God and there being a God...But they exist together, in my opinion...And after studying the Bible, if someone believes that morality is in some way “objective” or “real,” and that this moral reality requires explanation, moral arguments for God’s reality naturally can be read...As one reads the Bible, it has this Great Connection between morality and religion...And does support the claim that one's moral ways and one's more views and the moral truths require a religious foundation, and can best be explained by God’s existence...And this is seen in the beginning when Moses gives God's people the Ten Commandments...We see this Moral God...
So the moral arguments for God are very strong, because (for example in the second chapter of the Bible) God gives us the Moral Ten Commandments...By giving Moses the tablet of Ten Commandments, we learn about God and what morality means to Him, so early in the Bible...One might believe that morality and treating people kind is at the very top of God's list of what His followers are to do...Because He could have given the Ten Commandments at various time and at a later time...The Ten Commandments are to be followed in living our lives...And as the New Testament unfolds, we see the Grace and Truth unfold as Jesus becomes a much needed Savior for mankind, which we all need...
Many different people regard religion as in some way what provides us a basis for being good and trying to be as good as we can....And this morality comes from the events that happen and we can read about early in God's Book, the Bible...And we see the moral challenges even of our first created ancestors, Adam and Eve, as well as the challenges of our three Patriarchs...We can look at Jacob, Joseph's brothers, King David, and others who struggled from the earliest of times with being good all the time...They wanted to be good and they were firm believers in God, but they are very much challenged in this moral world that God has created...We can believe this because not only the earliest of readers can believe in the nature of sin, even today's reader can see our struggles with sin and how we try to be good, but have trouble in doing good all the time (thousands of years later)...So the problems of sin and our moral difficulties have an importance that resonates with both its earliest of readers and even today's readers...
Different people believe in this Moral Argument for God...
Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher...He did comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics...This made him one of the most influential figures in modern Western philosophy and especially of his time...He gave a moral argument for the existence of God...Kant's moral argument for God can be summarized like this: We have a moral duty to act in certain ways, even if it is not in our own self-interest to do so...This moral duty cannot be explained by any natural or physical causes...Therefore, this moral duty must be explained by a supernatural cause, such as God...
Author and Professor Peter Kreeft writes: And that leaves us with God...Not just some sort of God, but the moral God of the Bible, the God at least of Judaism...Among all the ancient peoples, the Jews were the only ones who identified their God with the source of moral obligation...The gods of the pagans demanded ritual worship, inspired fear, designed the universe, or ruled over the events in human life, but none of them ever gave a Ten Commandments or said, "Be ye holy for I the LORD your God am holy."...The Jews saw the origin of nature and the origin of conscience as one, and Christians (and Muslims) have inherited this insight...The Jews' claim to be God's chosen people interprets the insight in the humblest possible way: as divine revelation, not human cleverness...But once revealed, the claim can be seen to be utterly logical...To sum up the argument most simply and essentially, conscience has absolute, exceptionless, binding moral authority over us, demanding unqualified obedience...But Only A Perfectly Good, Righteous Divine Will has this authority and a right to absolute, exceptionless obedience...Therefore conscience is the voice of the Will of God...
Philosopher William Lane Craig writes “"If there is no God, then man and the universe are doomed...Like prisoners condemned to death, we await our unavoidable execution...There is no God, and there is no immortality...And what is the consequence of this?...It means that life itself is absurd...It means that the life we have is without ultimate significance, value, or purpose.”...“In a world without God, who’s to say whose values are right and whose are wrong?...There can be no objective right and wrong, only our culturally and personally relative, subjective judgments...Think of what that means!...It means it’s impossible to condemn war, oppression, or crime as evil...Nor can you praise generosity, self-sacrifice, and love as good...To kill someone or to love someone is morally equivalent...For in a universe without God, good and evil do not exist—there is only the bare, valueless fact of existence, and there is no one to say you are right and I am wrong.”...“The point is that if there is no God, then objective right and wrong do not exist...As Dostoyevsky said, “All things are permitted.”...“But the problem becomes even worse...For, regardless of immortality, if there is no God, then there is no objective standard of right and wrong...All we’re confronted with is, in Sartre’s words, “the bare, valueless fact of existence.”...Moral values are either just expressions of personal taste or the by-products of biological evolution and social conditioning...“...if God does not exist and there is no immortality, then all the evil acts of men go unpunished and all the sacrifices of good men go unrewarded...But who can live with such a view?...Richard Wurmbrand, who has been tortured for his faith in communist prisons, says, The cruelty of atheism is hard to believe when man has no faith in the reward of good or the punishment of evil...There is no reason to be human...There is no restraint from the depths of evil which is in man...The communist torturers often said, 'There is no God, no Hereafter, no punishment for evil...We can do what we wish.'...I have heard one torturer even say, 'I thank God, in whom I don't believe, that I have lived to this hour when I can express all the evil in my heart.'...He expressed it in unbelievable brutality and torture inflicted on prisoners.”...“God exists necessarily and is the explanation why anything else exists.”...“If God is dead, then man is dead too.”...
C. S. Lewis wrote a book called Mere Christianity...It is one of the best selling books on Christian apologetics...He began his book telling us that moral arguments for God are strong ones for believing in God...According to Lewis, there is validity to a Moral God because people do want to do what is right...And this is all people around the world...His view was that morality that can exist is an objective one — all subjective conceptions of morality lead to destruction and without morality, then we have evil...An authentic objective morality must be grounded in a Supernatural Reality beyond our world....Morality is Divine...Lewis rejects the naturalistic conceptions of an objective morality as well...Lewis in Mere Christianity wrote that there is this innate Natural Law of God...Humans naturally have this sense of right and wrong...This sense of right and wrong is not based on our own desires or preferences, but on something that is objective and universal...The only explanation for this objective moral standard is that it is grounded in a God who is the source of all goodness and morality...Lewis believed that the entire universe and the different cultures of the world are intensely interested in fair play, unselfishness, courage, good faith, honesty and truthfulness...Lewis gives us the ideas that we learn more about God from Natural Law than from the universe in general, just as we discover more about people by listening to their conversations than by looking at the houses they build...Natural Law shows that the Being behind the universe is intensely interested in fair play, unselfishness, courage, good faith, honesty and truthfulness...However, Natural Law gives no grounds for assuming that God is soft or indulgent...Natural law obliges us to do the straight thing regardless of the pain, danger or difficulty involved...Natural Law is hard -- “as hard as nails.”...
Lewis continues about how the universe is ruled by a Perfect Goodness...Man falls short of this type of goodness all the time; we are not good enough to consider ourselves allies of Perfect Goodness...In Lewis' books about Narnia, a character falls so far short of this goodness that he finally realizes, with a shock of despair, there is this need for forgiveness...So Lewis believed that until people see that they need forgiveness, man needs to see he is a sinner and actually want forgiveness, otherwise Christianity will not make sense...Christianity explains how God can be the Impersonal Mind behind the Natural Law and also be a Person...He declares that, since we cannot meet the demands of this Natural Law of God, He actually became a human being to save us from our failure...He became this forgiving Savior, this Christ, this Messiah that we actually do need in our lives, if we believe in the Sacred and Holy and want to be like the Son, who is also Perfectly Good...