What you think and feel cannot be the standard for what is right and wrong.
Judges 21:25: “In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.”
Some years from now, I can see people then writing about us now saying “in those days everyone did what was right in their own eyes.” Why is that? Because today most of us believe we have the inherent ability to know right from wrong. That is true. But unfortunately, that inherent ability to know right and wrong doesn’t mean we can typically choose right from wrong.
When Adam and Eve ate from the forbidden tree their eyes were opened. They came to know good and evil or right and wrong. Why wouldn’t God want them to know this? God even says that the two of them had become like Us – knowing good and evil. Well, we may know there is good and evil, but that doesn’t mean we know how to judge or choose good over evil.
With the knowledge of knowing right and wrong comes the responsibility and accountability to judge and to live righteously. And to judge rightly we must have a righteous standard against which our thoughts and ideas are weighed. A standard of right cannot be what we think and feel. What we think and feel must be judged against the unchanging standard.
God knew that man would not be able to judge righteously once he became aware of good and evil or right and wrong. He also knew that we would eventually create our own standard for what is right. He knew we would naturally be drawn to do what is right in our own eyes.
So, the question I have for us is this. What is in your eyes? Right and wrong are fundamental truths that existed before we existed. We do not determine what is right; we can only choose to do what is right against what is right. So, we should be mindful of what is in our eyes.
God’s standard for right should be the thing we see in our eyes. It should be the thing that gives us all our feelings of right and wrong. It should be the thing against which we judge how we feel, not the things before us that we see each day.
When we choose to do what is right in our own eyes, we sin by deciding for ourselves what is a fundamental right. We define our actions as right and we want to use them as the standard of right for everyone else. When we do this, we go beyond being like God to wanting to be our own god.
Knowing what is right is one thing. Knowing that you are right is a different thing. Our sin today is to believe that we are right because what we see in our eyes is the right thing. The Israelites made themselves right back in their times, and we do it today. But it is wrong.
In Exodus 20 we have what we commonly refer to as the Ten Commandments. One of the commandments listed is this. “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.” The Israelites struggled with this simple but profound commandment back then and we struggle with it today.
We can know and understand and agree that God is saying we should not use His name in a worthless, degrading or in a way that does not exalt Him. This is knowing the right thing. But knowing that you are right in how you use the name of God is different.
You may believe it is ok to use His name to express your frustration towards something since you do not intend to degrade Him but just to express yourself. By doing this, you effectively change the standard for vain to suit what is in your eyes. You don’t change your behavior; you establish your behavior as the standard for what is right behavior.
Right is good for everyone. Wrong is wrong for everyone. Our behaviors can never be the standard for what is fundamentally right or wrong because we cannot be what is right or wrong for all people. The best we can do is to have our behaviors judged against a fundamental right or wrong created by our creator. When everyone does what is right in themselves, we are at that moment less like God then at almost any other time.
So ask yourself if what is in your eyes is accurately compared to what is the standard that God has set for us? If everyone does this and behaves this way, God would once again become the King we need to guide us in the days we live today.
So, what’s in your eyes?
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