The other day a colleague shared a experience he had recently endured that exposed him to as he called it, “a moral dilemma.”His solution for solving it was, let’s just say, creative, but it did get me to thinking– it always does. I wonder if all the “dilemmas” we endure, are really that, dilemmas, you know, moments to “phone a friend named Solomon…. or are they just difficult because we lack the mechanism and practice for solving them biblically. Hmm, now there’s a novel idea, biblically generated principles leading to practical applications. Someone should write this down…
As difficult as our current culture is to navigate, I would be hard pressed to find a more challenging environment than the situations presented to the Apostle Paul from the church in Corinth. Their many battles with life in the fast lane of Divorce, remarriage, litigation, incest and the like made them a real challenge for the Apostle to sort it all out and provide them with a way off the horns of their dilemmas. But difficult or not, he did it and so can we. It’s wisdom, after all, that we lack, and courage to apply its principles, we so easily forfeit. So, let’s set aside the the moral dilemmas often presented to our school kids; namely the five people stuck in the life-raft with provisions for only four, and discuss several very real scenarios.
A student in a Christian school is found to be having sex with another student resulting in a pregnancy and bringing to bear the couple’s expulsion from the school. There is no dilemma here; the school acted correctly, within its policies and guidelines, offered the two an opportunity to repent and re-apply to school the following year. Oh, the outrage, the lack of grace, and the absence of love demonstrated to the students by the governing board. Really? Yep, I was there.
And then, there’s the church who seeks to enlist, engage, and encourage its membership to attend, participate, and serve but inevitably many choose absence, isolation, and no service to the very assembly they claim to love. Should they still be retained as members? There is no dilemma here either. God has called us to engage his church, be accountable to it, participate and serve it, and when we do not, we bring into question the nature of our commitment to our Lord and his church; and we compel those in leadership to remove those not involved so that the body can remain efficient and effective in its work.
And finally, there’s the pastor who has agreed to perform a wedding for two people in the church whom he discovers during routine pre-marital assessments, have been sleeping together, see nothing wrong with it, have no interest in repenting of it, and see no reason why it might pose a problem for their future life together. What do do? Well, no real dilemma here either. In one instance, the pastor chooses to continue the process, pursuing a commitment from the couple to abstain from sex until they are biblically and officially married; and in the other, the pastor declines the opportunity to perform the ceremony and merely completes the counseling process, choosing not to align himself with those who would so carelessly and casually disregard the clear teachings of Scripture. And all of that, recognizing that this pastor knows the parents well, and cannot fully disclose to them the nature of his decisions. As I said, no real dilemma here either.
In most cases, the line we see as blurry only appears that way to us because our glasses are dirty. We either have surrendered a desire to know the truth and therefore lack the information necessary to come to a decision or we do know the Scriptural truth but lack the wisdom to unite biblical truths with the timeless principles that supernaturally flow out of a study of God’s word, and willfully choose to ignore the right answer in favor of the easy way out, which is usually, to do nothing.
We like to say that our faith is both confessional and propositional, which means that we define our faith by those truths we have come to believe about God, His Son and his church, just to name a few; that matter enough for us to adhere to and confess to others, the Deity of Jesus, the wickedness of man, etc. They are likewise propositional because they can be stated as foundational truth and firm resolutions resulting from our faith in Jesus Christ and the consistency of the Scriptures to speak the truth.
” I believe that God created the heavens and the earth, that Jesus Christ is both God and man and diminished in neither capacity, would be an example.
So why not pull ourselves off the horns of our dilemmas and fill our minds and hearts with the principles of God’s word, where finally then, we shall be able to see the world more clearly and defend our “FAITH” more boldly.
MJC
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