Can people be good without God? In the midst of all the moral confusion and wrong of our world, the Bible points clearly to how human beings can live genuinely good lives. Key Biblical points are:

God gives to all human beings a basic awareness of right and wrong. We are created, according to Genesis, “in the image of God” – a God who is good – and this means that God implants within everyone a fundamental sense of what is good. When human beings do good things, they are acting on this basic moral awareness. In this sense, people are not “good without God,” because whenever they do good, they are using the moral capacity that was given to them by God, even if they do not acknowledge God in the process.
Although people are created by God with a knowledge of the good, they fall away from God into sin. Sin is the attempt to “be like God” (Genesis 3:5) in the sense that we decide what is right and wrong, and go our own way, contrary to God. The result is that the moral vision given by God to human beings becomes distorted, and people fashion their own very imperfect moral rules. They convince themselves that they are morally O.K., even as they are engaging in great wrong. Some of the most glaring modern examples of this can be seen in recent scandals in the business world, or, to an extreme extent, in the behavior of Islamic State terrorists.
In order for human beings to be authentically good, they need first of all to catch God’s vision of goodness. We need to clearly see what is good. So the Psalmist says, “Show me, O Lord, your ways.” (Psalm 25:4) This what God does throughout the Biblical story; and God’s picture of what is good comes to ultimate clarity in Jesus Christ. In Jesus, God shows us perfectly what a genuinely good life is.
But we not only need an understanding of the good; we need a spiritual transformation – so that we are inspired and enabled to live an authentically good life. Such a transformation becomes possible through Jesus Christ, who restores us out of sin into a relationship with God, and then fills us with the Holy Spirit – to guide and empower us to live in God’s ways.

Without God, human beings perpetually fall well short of what we were created to be. But by the grace and empowerment of God, we can experience God’s goodness, and truly become instruments of God’s goodness in the world.

Through Jesus, we can be enabled finally not only to see the good, but to do the good. Share on X

Sunday’s Scripture Readings:
Psalm 25:4, 8-10
Jeremiah 31:31–34
John 16:8, 13
II Peter 1:3-4

A photo posted by UMC of Kent, Ohio (@kentmethodist) on Jan 28, 2016 at 10:10am PST

About the Author

Dr. David A. Palmer has been the senior pastor at the United Methodist Church of Kent since 1995. He has a B.A. from Wittenberg University, a Master of Divinity from Duke University, and a Doctor of Ministry from Princeton Theological Seminary. A native of Wooster, Ohio, he has served three other churches in east Ohio before coming to Kent. He and his wife, Mavis, have three children.