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Well, people are basically good.”
Ever hear (or say) that? Wonder what response comes back when that’s said to a cop/detective? a bank employee? a corporate whistleblower? Children’s Protective Services? a marriage counselor? a store manager?… or to someone just trying to maintain his place in line to board a plane or roller coaster! When I consider the responses those folks might have… well, a scene from an old Seinfeld episode comes to mind:
Elaine: I will never understand people.
Jerry: They’re the worst!
Ha! Maybe that laugh line comes closer to reality? And yet we often hear that “people are basically good.”
Josh McDowell wrote, “Orthodox Marxism… presupposes that man is basically good. Marxism sees evil as a product of a sick society. Cure the society (or shoot it and replace it with a new one) and evil disappears.” As I understand it, the secular humanists thought that when WWI was in the rearview mirror, the stage was set to move on toward perfection. Then WWII with its especially horrific atrocities happened (Understanding Secular Religions, 1982, pgs. 70, 79).
The Foundation for a Better Life says, “We believe that people are intrinsically good.” (That is, our basic nature defaults to good.) The group claims no religious or political attachment; they try to focus on “commonalities.”
Cult leader Elizabeth Prophet said, “Contrary to the lie that man is a sinner and gravitates to the baser elements of his nature, man is inherently Good; he polarizes to Good and to the highest representatives of God-Good” (Climb the Highest Mountain, p 59; quoted in Walter Martin’s The New Cults).
When we say “people are basically good,” we likely mean “most people walking the streets aren’t serial killers.” We’re picturing a sort of scale: really horrible on one end; then moving up to kinda bad, not too bad, kinda good, real good…. A similar scale is how one former agnostic had measured himself: “I’m not sure what I believed about the spiritual world. I thought there was something out there, but didn’t believe I was in any danger, as opposed to the blatant bad characters in history such as Hitler. I figured he deserved hell, but the rest of us normal people, you know…” (quoted in “An Interview with Three Occultists” by Lena Wood).
But Scripture shows (as do other history books and our own life experience) how easily we can deteriorate. In the very first scenes of the human drama, Adam and Eve had only one rule—and wouldn’t keep it! (Of course, some believe that ancient humans were baboons but we’re getting smarter all the time.)
Chuck Colson, who became a Christian after the 1972 Watergate scandal, wrote this after the later Whitewater scandal: “The most astonishing thing about Whitewater is that we are astonished by it. Our reaction… reveals how deluded we are about the most pernicious myth of this century: that man is good, and that with technology and education we can achieve utopian societies. Our founders were not so naïve. They understood the Judeo-Christian truth that man is a sinner” (Wall Street Journal, 3/11/94).
Through the Lord’s lens, there are really only two categories: perfect and sinner.
- “No one is good—except God alone” (Luke 18:19).
- “All have sinned” (Romans 3:23; also see v. 10).
- “I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature…. The evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing” (Romans 7:18, 19).
- “Above all else, guard your heart (Proverbs 4:23-27). “The heart is deceitful above all things” (Jeremiah 17:9).
- “If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves (1 John 1:8).
We don’t like to call ourselves sinners since it conjures an image of being scum at the bottom of the scale mentioned above. But that’s not the whole story. - “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us” (1 John 1:9).
- There is “no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1; read the entire section, verses 1-17!).
- “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight” (Proverbs 3:5, 6).
Even longtime Christians can forget those truths and mistakenly drift into trying to chalk up merit points (like saying, “I try to be good. I hope it’s enough”). No! We’re just to realize that our perfect Creator knows what he’s doing. Think of athletes with a great coach—it’s an honor to be on his team. Yes, we’ll stumble. But wouldn’t the cops (and others mentioned in the first paragraph) have less to deal with if more of us sinners weighed our decisions/actions against the Lord’s standard?
