Commandment 9: Remember That People Are Not Good, but Can Change
or, more precisely, they can be changed.
While this commandment is hard to swallow, it is basic to understanding the good news of Christianity. And it is undeniable in terms of biblical teaching; particularly, Romans 3:10ff.
An essential element of a functional society is optimism or hope. There must be a belief that things can be maintained, succeed, or even that they can progress. In a secular culture that optimism is in human nature. “People are basically good.” “We all have goodness in us.”
But a Christian worldview is incompatible with that optimism, finding hope instead in the intervention of God to transform people from what they were to what He intends for them to be.
Optimism in human nature promotes foolhardy confidence in appeasement, in value-neutral education, and in government. Realism toward human nature promotes prudence (being wise as serpents) in dealing with those who would harm us, awareness that education is only as valuable as the subject being taught, and a healthy regard for the edict: “that government is best which governs least.”
It is untrue that there are no evil people. Quite the opposite. However, much contemporary cultural analysis is based on the view that every culture’s morality is right for them, and only wrong from the perspective of a different, myopic culture. So, they suggest, if some radical Muslims believe it is right to die as suicide bombers killing innocent people in order to prevent the stabilization of a free economy or the introduction of real democracy, who are we to question their ethics? But the reality is that while some evil is motivated by confusion with good, some is motivated simply by evil. And neither motivation justifies it.
But as grave as our original condition, so great is the desire and provision of God to change it. It is from that desire that both the revelation of our need and the provision of our rescue comes.
The long and short of it is that people are not good to begin with, do not seek God until He moves them to do it (which He does), and cannot get to Him even if they did want to. But God loves us while we are bad, seeks us when we ignore Him, and brings us together Him when we could not do so ourselves.
This commandment does not promote pessimism regarding people. On the contrary, it allows no observer to discount the hope that any person, no matter how bad for the moment, can be changed.
