The greatest error, the greatest delusion of unbelievers -- whether atheist or false religionist — is their belief that people can be good apart from the one and only true (Triune) God.
This erroneous and delusional opinion is commonly and widely held because statistically, in any given generation, the reprobate far out-number the elect. In other words, under the Sovereign God, in His unfathomable wisdom, those predestined for hell far outnumber those predestined for heaven.
The unbelieving person's delusion or error about his or her own goodness tends to be fatal to that person spiritually because it encourages self-satisfaction and a false sense of spiritual security. The truth, however, is that the soul of every unbeliever is in terrible danger or peril that increases with every second of earthly life and with every beat of his or her mortal heart.
Lost people, the benighted world, which is ever anxious to cover and to excuse and to rationalize sin, endlessly generates dangerous nonsensical notions about things spiritual and endlessly babbles self-justifying error. Through every media we hear that “People care about others and have high moral character outside of religion", and that "people can have goodness apart from God." But such claims, as well as their claimants, are dead wrong — quite literally.
The truth is that the unbeliever, as one spiritually dead and in need of rebirth, cannot be good because he (or she) sins continuously and without interruption in thought, word, and deed. Having inherited a fallen condition at conception, he is in a spiritual condition of non posse non peccare, which means he is NOT ABLE TO NOT SIN. This is so because fallen and unregenerate man's ruling faculty — the will — is misdirected toward self rather than properly directed toward God.
Salvation occurs, if and when it occurs in a person, when God implants the love of Truth (that is, of Himself) in the person being saved. This implantation of love involves a fundamental transformation and turning of the saved person's will. After this miraculous spiritual transformation, and until his last breath in this earthly life, he is able to sin or to not sin, rather than sinning continuously.
So again, a person who is unsaved or spiritually unregenerate is not able to not sin, and this means that an unregenerate person sins continuously and without interruption in thought, word and deed. Therefore, a truly good thought, good word, or good deed from that person is an impossibility. This is so because the motive behind every thought, word, and deed of such a person is always tainted by his sinful focus on -- and his willing in terms of — self.
But only the Lord knows our motives perfectly, and fallen humanity, both saved and unsaved, are often easily confused and unclear about motives in self and in others. This confusion is compounded by fallen man's oft-used strategy of trying to appear virtuous or good by furtively or unwittingly using a favored sin to subdue and mute other sins. For example, pagan Romans, concerned most of all to achieve national and personal glory (and not the glory of God), were able to mute or subdue other sinful tendencies, like greed, lust, and so on, to achieve the desired glory. So, at best, unbelievers can achieve a mere semblance of goodness and virtue by using one favored sin to beat down other sins to make them better serve the master sin's purposes. In this way, beat-down vices or sins mimic and resemble and therefore can be mistaken for genuinely virtuous self-control and moderation. And, as Augustine notes, when the favored sin of a lost person is hedonistic prioritization of mere physical pleasure, where other sins are both muted and enlisted to subserve the hedonistic life, man reaches his greatest depth of personal corruption and self-delusion.
Indeed, a person in the unregenerate state is often driven by sins like pride, vanity, and the like to appear good to others. But this supposed or apparent goodness is a mere farce or counterfeit, and the unbelieving and therefore unregenerate person who claims to be a good person is merely a hypocrite and impostor. Scripture describes such phony or vain "goodness" as filthy blood-soaked menstrual rags (Isaiah 64:6). Why? Because menstruation, involving the female body's expulsion of an unused, timed-out uterus lining, where no egg is fertilized, represents a failure to generate life. Analogously, pretended goodness cannot bring the dead soul of the unbeliever or false believer to life — only the wonderful and miracle-working salvific grace of Jesus, as God in the Person of the Son, can do that. So apart from God, "we are all like an unclean thing, And all our righteousnesses are like filthy rags; We all fade as a leaf, And our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away."
But of course, many unbelievers are desperate to appear good, and they spend a great deal of time and energy trying to convince or reassure both themselves and others that they are good, or altruistic, or what not. But true goodness can come to man only by faith through grace from the one true God, in the persons of the Father, His Son Jesus the Christ and the Holy Spirit.
It was the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) who put his finger on the crux of the matter about human motivation and true goodness. Kant, who was a Christian, taught that the only thing that is truly good — good without condition or qualification — among humans in this earthly life is a perfectly good will. Apart from a genuinely good will imparted from the Lord, all human thought and action and words, laid bare, are nothing but filthy, menstrual-fluid-soaked rags of ultimately sinful and selfish motive.
But good willing, Kant stressed, can come only from those who are true believers and followers of Christ, those in whom God has implanted the love of Himself as the Way, the Truth, the Life, and as Love. Good willing or true goodness flows from God into and through the believing human vessel. For an action to be truly moral, it must be done from a sense of duty, and not personal gain or desire. In the same spirit, the great Christian General Robert E. Lee called "duty" the "most sublime word in the English language."
Good willing is central to proper love of self, of others, and of God. Proper or salutary self-love and love of others is predicated on and can flow only from a love of God that is itself planted in the elect by God in the act of spiritual regeneration.
Delusions and error about goodness and who possesses it are perhaps most lethal when admixed in our mother's milk, or in our upbringing. Unbelieving parents are a great curse on their children, just as Christian parents are a great blessing. Devoid of a true love of God and of self and of others, unbelieving parents would, by unloving indifference to and by wicked unconcern for their children -- and by perpetuating the delusion that goodness is possible apart from God -- callously see their own children condemned to the same eternity of punishment in hell that likely awaits the parents themselves.
At the deepest metaphysical level, as the Platonists have taught, God IS the IS (Pure Being) and the OUGHT (Pure uncreated Goodness, and the source of all created goodness). In other words, God IS the capital "G" Good. Human goodness is possible only by means of God the Good implanting love of Himself in the elect when born again. Christians are good to the extent that they -- by His salvific and sanctifying grace, and not from any supposed merit of their own -- participate in God's Goodness. And unbelievers, being apart from God by lack of faith by His grace, cannot but lack all goodness.
So, dear Christian, when you hear self-righteous unbelievers crowing in self-flattery about their own alleged goodness, do not be deceived. Instead, keep your mind in the Word, your hand on your wallet, and your powder dry.
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Winston McCuen holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Emory University and is a John C. Calhoun scholar. A native of Greenville County, South Carolina, he is the son of Dr. William Garrison McCuen and Anne Ballenger King McCuen.
