The world is buzzing with news about President Donald Trump’s meeting with North Korea Kim Jong Un. There is much talk about denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and talk of the U.S. and the rest of the world helping North Korea more humanely look after their people.
Trump is the first U.S. president to meet with a North Korean leader, and body language experts were observing how Trump spoke cordially with the North Korean leader yet definitely maintained a physical posture of control. Besides establishing healthy diplomatic relations with North Korea, it is fervently hoped that the meeting will result in better living conditions for the North Koreans and ultimately make this world a safer place.
Now, at a time when so much of the Western world has moved toward secularism—and in this era that has seen the rise of “nones,” with worldwide rejection of belief in God now at around 13 percent—how can it be that so many people are talking about the moral good that can come out of North Korea joining friendly relationships with the rest of the world? And especially in a world without God, and at a time when so many now spurn the idea of religion? How is it that we can say one state of affairs is objectively—or absolutely—better than another state of affairs?
The answer is this: We can know these things because they are his moral truth ingrained in every thinking person’s soul. The Bible says that moral knowledge is “written on our hearts.” Consider this:
- The Bible teaches that humans really do know God’s moral truth.
- Human history bears out the fact that we are aware of objective morality.
- Humans intuitively desire—and work for—conditions that are more closely aligned with God’s moral order. We lament disorder, we condemn injustice, we reward the good, we punish evildoers and we seek the betterment of the human condition. This shows that we do know natural law, even though we don’t always practice more goodness, and we frequently fail to achieve it. But all sane humans know of it.
- Our ubiquitous, undeniable knowledge of moral truth makes legitimate value judgments possible. Parents judge right and wrong; municipalities and governments judge based on an assumed moral reality; world courts, such as the U.N. and Nuremberg, judge with moral law as their starting point; and God will judge the world based on people’s response to moral truth that they really did know.
- The only hope for this world—and for you and me personally—is to order our lives and our soul in conformity with Christ, the universal standard of moral truth and righteousness.
Dr. Alex McFarland is a religion and culture expert, director of Christian Worldview and Apologetics at North Greenville University, a national talk-show host, speaker and author of 18 books, and the host of the Truth for a New Generation conference. For more information, visit alexmcfarland.com.
