The Gospel Foundations of Ethics

What Is “Good?”

All day, every day, you are making distinctions between good and bad. You are making determinations about what would be good or bad in a given circumstance, and then acting accordingly. How do you know the difference between good and bad, and how did you learn that? By what standard are you able to call something bad or good?

These are some of the foundational questions in the disciple called ethics. Likely, you have taken some sort of ethics class at some point in your life—either in high school or college. Often, ethics is viewed and discussed primarily in the world of theory or philosophy. It can often feel as though it is nothing more than thought experiments—like a complicated version of the game “Would You Rather.” But however you answer those theoretical questions, you are using some standard of right and wrong. And we assume (rightly) that good and evil are objective, existing outside of us, and apply to all of us equally. And as Christians, we believe that the source of this standard is God and his revelation to us in Christ and in Scripture.

The study of ethics is not supposed to stay in the realm of theory. One of the foundational questions of ethics is, “how shall we live?” This is not supposed to stay in our minds, but will necessarily come out of our fingertips. Therefore, we must take care about what the Bible says about how we are to live. So what does the Bible say about our actions?

Gospel Foundations

If you found yourself talking to an unbeliever about the Bible, you would likely hear some complaint about all the rules and laws contained within. You will likely hear about all the “Thou Shalts” and Thou Shalt Nots” that they likely find backwards, outdated, and oppressive. Although it is true that the Bible does contain many imperatives and commands, it also contains many more indicatives—statements of reality.

Doug Wilson helpfully defines it this way:

There is a basic difference between the indicative and the imperative. The indicative is simply a statement of fact. The imperative is a command. The indicative states, “The book is on the table.” The imperative commands, “Put the book on the table.” The former states what is; the latter attempts to control what will be.

—Doug Wilson

We must understand how those two work in the gospel logic. All of the imperatives in the Bible flow out of the indicatives. We can and must act because certain realities are true first. And this order is vital—indicative then imperative. If we reverse this order—imperative then indicative—we twist Scripture into some sort of earned salvation. Instead of 1 John 4:19 reading “We love because he first loved us”, it would read “We love so that he will then love us.” This is not the gospel.

Doug Wilson again is helpful:

The imperatives of the Bible tell me what I must do. The indicatives of the Bible tell me what has been done. When I take the message of what has been done and turn it into something that I must do, I am twisting Scripture.

—Doug Wilson

We do not “do” the right things (ethics) in order to secure our status—our status is secured in Christ first. Thus we are empowered and enabled and commanded to “do” the right things (ethics). If our obedience to the commands of God are done in an attempt to earn or secure our status before God, it will fail. We will be frustrated. We will never experience any assurance, because our assurance is based on our performance, which is inconsistent at best.

Praise God that this is not the case! Our status before our God is not on the basis of our obedience, but on the basis of Christ’s. But as we have been learning in James, that is not to say that we need not obey. Far from it! Because of what Christ has done, we not only can obey, but we must.

And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.

—Ezekiel 36:26–27

What was commanded in the Old Covenant is now the promised reality of the New Covenant. Obedience is a supernatural work of the Holy Spirit.

Fight to Obey

Recently I was taking my son to school. He was extremely reluctant to go, wishing to just stay home and keep playing. As we walked to my car to leave the house he said to me, “But Dad, I can’t go to school. I’m just a little kid.” As adorable and sweet as that was—and as tempted as I was to just acquiesce and let him go back inside and keep playing dinosaurs—I knelt down and reminded him of who he was and how God made him.

He was built not to stay in the home, sheltered from the world and from growing responsibilities. He was made and built by God to grow, develop, learn, and be sent out into the world to build nations and fight dragons, all to the glory of the God who alone makes it possible.

We are just like that. Our temptation is to declare that we can’t do it or we don’t want to do it, but by God’s grace secured in Christ and applied to us through the Holy Spirit, we can do what God has called us to do.

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.

—Ephesians 2:8–10

Because of the gospel, we have victory over our sin. Let us fight to obey and walk in the good works God has prepared for us in Christ Jesus.