The Source of True Values
Their Application Will End the Moral Breakdown
MAN looks up into a night sky packed with stars, and he is filled with awe and wonder. As he gazes at this starry vault so far overhead, he feels small and insignificant. The words of the psalmist spoken long ago may even come back to him: “When I see your heavens, the works of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have prepared, what is mortal man that you keep him in mind, and the son of earthling man that you take care of him?” (Psalm 8:3, 4) The psalmist saw a few thousand stars and felt small; man now knows that there are billions of galaxies with billions of stars in each, and he feels much smaller. Questions may crowd into his mind: ‘How can I matter? Why am I here? Who am I anyway?’
But no animal has such thoughts.
Man looks at the variety of life around him and notes amazing design to accomplish practical purposes. He sees birds that migrate thousands of miles, mammals that hibernate through the cold of winter, and many other forms of life that used sonar, air-conditioning, jet propulsion, desalination, antifreeze, scubalike structures, incubators, thermometers, paper, glass, clocks, compasses, electricity, rotary motors, and many other marvels long before man ever dreamed of them. Thinking men wonder: ‘How did all these amazing, intricate, purposeful designs ever come about? What great intelligence is behind them?’
Again, no animal gives thought to any of this.
But man does. Why is man, of all the myriads of creatures on earth, the only one that marvels in awe and wonder at the heavens above and the mysteries of life here below? Why? Because man is different.
Why Is Man So Different?
Because he alone was created in the image and likeness of God: “And God went on to say: ‘Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness.’” (Genesis 1:26) This explains the unbridgeable gulf between man and beast. It explains why no other creature on earth is remotely close to man. It explains why man is a thinking creature, asks questions about the world around him, and concerns himself with moral values.
In what way is man in God’s image and likeness? It is by possessing some of the attributes and qualities of God, such as love, mercy, justice, wisdom, power, kindness, goodness, patience, honesty, truthfulness, loyalty, industriousness, and inventiveness. These were good qualities originally programmed into man, but with the first human pair’s misuse of freedom of choice, leading to their rebellion, these attributes became distorted and hence were not passed on in perfection to their descendants. They were thrown out of balance, and through disuse some faded from consciousness. Colossians 3:9, 10 shows, however, that by gaining an accurate knowledge of God and applying it, we can put on a new personality and again approach ‘the image and likeness of God.’
When Jehovah God gave the Israelites the Mosaic Law, it contained the true values, among them the Ten Commandments and the admonition to ‘love their neighbor as themselves.’ (Leviticus 19:18; Exodus 20:3-17) These values were to be passed on as a legacy to future generations. Moses told Israel to obey this Law, and he further said: “Command your sons to take care to do all the words of this law. For it is no valueless word for you, but it means your life.” (Deuteronomy 32:46, 47) Centuries later, Proverbs 8:18 referred to them as “hereditary values.”
Values to Reverse the Moral Breakdown
Many object, however, that society is now so diverse that no one set of values would cover the needs of everyone. The different backgrounds and cultures call for a wide variety of values, they contend. But what modern problem would not yield to the practice of Jesus’ command to love your neighbor as yourself? Or to do unto others as you would have them do unto you? Or to live the principles contained in the Ten Commandments? Or to aim toward producing the fruits of the spirit set forth at Galatians 5:22, 23: “The fruitage of the spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faith, mildness, self-control. Against such things there is no law.” Not one of these is asking anything impossible; any one of them would eliminate a large percentage of society’s present woes.
‘But people won’t live that way!’ you exclaim. However, if you think such solutions are too difficult, don’t expect the problems to be solved by easy substitutes. It is within society’s power to apply these remedies, though apparently it is not within its will to do so. This generation brooks no restraints on its freedoms, including its freedom to do wrong and suffer the consequences.
The paper Bottom Line/Personal asks: “What Ever Happened to Self-Restraint?” After commenting that “most people are horrified by the results of our sexually permissive era,” it continues: “Yet people continue to hold sacred the importance of indulging sexual appetites to the fullest. . . . People are expected to diet, to exercise, to stop smoking, to be self-disciplined about the way they live for the sake of their health. Only sexual gratification seems to have been granted a sacrosanct status for continued limitless indulgence.” It is not that they cannot apply the values; it is that they will not. So society sows and reaps.
Today these values have fallen into disrepute. Many call bad good and good bad, as it was foretold they would do: “Woe to those who are saying that good is bad and bad is good, those who are putting darkness for light and light for darkness, those who are putting bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!” (Isaiah 5:20) Others, however, have growing concerns. They see the rotten harvest that comes from the do-your-own-thing philosophy and want to see a reversal of the current moral breakdown.
Can Religion and Family Help?
Many programs are offered for the restoration of values. One is religion. It will supposedly offer spiritual strength. But that strength is not to be found in the orthodox religions of Christendom. Some have backslid into paganism to resurrect such blasphemies as the Trinity, eternal torment, and immortal soul. Others have discarded the ransom and creation to bow down to the scientific religion of evolution. They embrace the higher criticism that discredits the integrity of God’s Word, the Bible. They offer a “Christianity” so watered down and polluted that nothing of value remains, and the younger generation sees only hypocrisy and hollow mockery. No, it is not to such sickly religions that we should look for spiritual strength but only to the one true Bible-based worship that announces Jehovah’s Kingdom as the only hope of the world.
There remains, however, another source of help for concerned people, and that is the family, the setting in which parents can instill values in their children. The attachment that began at birth must continue. Children who love and trust their parents want to be like them, to imitate the way they talk and act, to mimic their behavior, and to absorb their morals, and in time the parental values become incorporated in the value system of the children. Simple explanations, not windy lectures; two-way communication, not dogmatic statements, are the effective approaches.
Parents who not only preach but also practice true values will have children who have incorporated those values within themselves. Such children will not be endangered by the negative role models of peers at school or elsewhere. As Proverbs 22:6 says: “Train up a boy according to the way for him; even when he grows old he will not turn aside from it.” Train by valuable counsel. More important, train by valuable example.
Potential for Values Encoded in Our Genes
Jesus said: “Happy are those conscious of their spiritual need.” (Matthew 5:3) It is an instinctive need programmed into us, as some psychiatrists have said. It is also true that only out of spiritual strength will we be able to resist the false values championed today.
In keeping with the fact that we were created in the image and likeness of God, with a potential for values innate in us, Thomas Lickona, a professor of education, says: “I think the capacity for goodness is there from the start.” But he adds that “parents must nurture those instincts just as they help their children become good readers or athletes or musicians.”
TV producer Norman Lear was a guest speaker to the national convention of the National Education Association. After recognizing “the problem of those more sophisticated, better-educated people among us—those who have dismissed the search for transcendent purpose as flaky or irrelevant,” he said: “I have no trouble drawing the conclusion, from human history, that the response to life, to Being, the impulse to believe in something larger than oneself, is so strong and irresistible as to be part and parcel of the way we are genetically coded.”
Lear indicts big business and four decades of television with transmitting a “new value system” so influential on public morality and personal values that many social ills have resulted: schools and colleges that graduate people unable to read and write; increasing use of drugs; unmarried teenage girls having babies; and families with no savings sinking deeper into debt. Lear then adds: “When we speak of a hundred social ills—I think we may be talking about a trickle-down value system that, with the help of television, has come to subvert the entire culture.” And again he said that he “believes that, embedded in our genes is the belief that there is a greater force and mystery framing our lives, to which attention must be paid.”
The prominent psychiatrist C. G. Jung said that religion “is an instinctive attitude peculiar to man, and its manifestations can be followed all through human history.” Innate also is a conscience that senses right and wrong: “For whenever people of the nations that do not have law do by nature the things of the law, these people, although not having law, are a law to themselves. They are the very ones who demonstrate the matter of the law to be written in their hearts, while their conscience is bearing witness with them and, between their own thoughts, they are being accused or even excused.” (Romans 2:14, 15) “Conscience” is “a knowing within oneself” like an internal court of justice convened within us to render decisions on our conduct, accusing or excusing us. If, however, we show “contempt of court” for our conscience, its sensitivity will become calloused and nonfunctional.
Scientists See Mysteries Only God Can Explain
Very interesting is the fact that as science learns more of the earth and the universe, some scientists gravitate toward a belief that a supreme intelligence must be behind it all. They balk, however, at accepting the God of the Bible.
Astrophysicist George Greenstein, in his book The Symbiotic Universe, set out “to detail what can only seem to be an astonishing sequence of stupendous and unlikely accidents that paved the way for life’s emergence. There is a list of coincidences, all of them essential to our existence.” Greenstein said the list got longer, the coincidences could not be by chance, and the thought grew that some supernatural agency was at work. “Is it possible,” he thought, “that suddenly, without intending to, we have stumbled upon scientific proof of the existence of a Supreme Being? Was it God who stepped in and so providentially crafted the cosmos for our benefit?” He felt “an intense revulsion” at such a thought and arbitrarily said: “God is not an explanation.” Yet the growing list of “coincidences” had forced the questions from him.
Another astrophysicist, Nobel prize winner Fred Hoyle, in his book The Intelligent Universe, discussed those same mysterious coincidences that troubled Greenstein: “Such properties seem to run through the fabric of the natural world like a thread of happy accidents. But there are so many of these odd coincidences essential to life that some explanation seems required to account for them.” Hoyle also agrees with Greenstein that they could not have happened by chance. Consequently, Hoyle says, ‘the origin of the universe requires an intelligence,’ ‘an intelligence on a higher plane,’ ‘an intelligence that preceded us and that was led to a deliberate act of creation of structures suitable for life.’
Einstein spoke of God but not in the sense of orthodox religion. His concept of God related to “the infinitely superior spirit” he saw revealed in nature. Timothy Ferris, in his article “The Other Einstein,” quoted Einstein as follows: “What I see in nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of ‘humility.’ This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism. . . . My religiosity consists in a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we, with our weak and transitory understanding, can comprehend of reality. . . . I want to know how God created this world. I want to know his thoughts, the rest are details.”
Guy Murchie, after discussing some of the incomprehensible mysteries of the universe, comments in his book The Seven Mysteries of Life: “It is easy to see why modern physicists, who have been pushing the frontier of knowledge into the unknown probably more profoundly than any other scientists in recent centuries, are ahead of most of their fellows in accepting that all-encompassing mystery of the universe commonly referred to as God.”
Seek God, Benefit Yourself, Live Forever
Man is groping. What he is groping for is God. Some were doing this in Paul’s day. He said: “For them to seek God, if they might grope for him and really find him, although, in fact, he is not far off from each one of us.” (Acts 17:27) No animal gropes for God. Not even one has any concept of God. Man does, is made in God’s likeness, with an unbridgeable gulf separating him from even the most advanced animal. And as the text tells us, God “is not far off from each one of us.”
We see evidence of him everywhere around us reflected in his creations, as Romans 1:20 says: “His invisible qualities are clearly seen from the world’s creation onward, because they are perceived by the things made, even his eternal power and Godship, so that they are inexcusable.” As scientists see more and more of the unexplainable coincidences and complexities and ponder the awesome marvels in the universe, perhaps more and more of them will perceive the Supreme Intelligence at work behind those features and recognize their Creator, Jehovah God.
The earth and its fullness belong to Jehovah. He sets the standards for those who will live on it. He has given the true values as guidelines to happiness and life. He has also given people freedom of choice. They do not have to obey him. They may sow what they wish, but sooner or later they will also reap what they sow. God is not to be mocked. He has given the true values, not for his own sake, but for the benefit of his subjects on earth. So says Isaiah 48:17, 18: “I, Jehovah, am your God, the One teaching you to benefit yourself, the One causing you to tread in the way in which you should walk. O if only you would actually pay attention to my commandments! Then your peace would become just like a river, and your righteousness like the waves of the sea.”
Heeding Jehovah’s earnest plea, all peoples will then tread in the way they should and will pay attention to their Creator’s commandments. All will benefit themselves with peace like a river and righteousness like the waves of the sea. All will apply the hereditary values and will never again suffer a moral breakdown. And when will all of this be? When the prayer is answered, soon: “Let your kingdom come. Let your will take place, as in heaven, also upon earth.”—Matthew 6:10.
[Pictures on page 7]
Jet propulsion
Desalination
Papermaking
Sonar