It was Sunday afternoon in my junior year in college. I was returning from my church service and entered my dormitory room to see my roommate lying on his bed. He looked up from the newspaper he was reading.
“Back from church?” He flashed a sly smile that telegraphed to me that he was about to poke my faith.
“Yup!”
“Did you confess your sins? You got a lot of them!”
“I know!” I laughed. “I did confess my sins…” I wanted to seize the teachable moment, “…but I don’t have to go to church to do that.”
“What do you mean?”
“I confess my sins directly to my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. I don’t have to go to a building or a person. This is why Jesus Christ died for my sins and was resurrected. He showed that He has the power to conquer death and forgive our sins.”
My roommate shook his head. “No that’s wrong! You confess to your priest, that’s why you go to church.”
My roommate’s background was in the Greek Orthodox church and I wanted to be sensitive to his upbringing and beliefs. “Priests are also there to listen and give counsel…but only God can forgive sins.”
“So there is no accountability?”
“If we sin against another person, we are accountable to that person and we must make things right with that person, but whenever we sin, whether it involves another person or just myself, it is always a sin against God. He always holds me accountable for all of my sins, whether I am aware of them or not.”
“Well…” he slowly began, “I think we are only accountable to ourselves and each other.”
“Yes, we are. But if everyone has a different standard of morality, how can we know who is correct? If we disagree how can we be accountable to each other? What makes your standards better than another?”
Miffed, my roommate mumbled, “We just know. Natural selection. Millions of years of evolution have taught us that in order to survive, we must get along.”
He was changing the narrative but my roommate did make a good point. If there is no God, my roommate would be correct. The only accountability we would have is to ourselves and each other, but is this the Truth?
For the wicked one boasts about his own cravings; the one who is greedy curses and despises the LORD. In all his scheming, the wicked person arrogantly thinks, “There’s no accountability, since there’s no God.”
Psalms 10:3-4 (CSB)
If there is no God, there is no absolute standard of morality. The laws of our societies are a reflection of this. What was a felony a few years ago, is now embraced as part of the culture. Abortion on demand, legalized marijuana-these are just a small sample of our changing morality. Like my roommate averred, moral standards change because it is the result of natural selection and the evolution of human morality. There is no absolute standard, just a dynamic evolution, further distancing us from God’s Word.
There is accountability because there is a God who created us and this universe. We may laud ourselves for our evolving morality, substituting accountability to each other and ourselves, for accountability to God. Has this made us better individuals leading to a better society?
We must all realize that we need to be accountable to God alone for our sins and confess and repent of our sins and accept Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior. We desperately need God’s absolute standard of morality to heal this broken world.
Love and trust the Lord; seek His will in your life.
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