Jordan Peterson In rule 8, “Tell the Truth—Or, at Least, Don’t Lie,” Peterson urges his readers to live in the truth rather than succumbing to the temptation to embrace “life-lies.”

Many of the patriarchs of social science, such as Viktor Frankl, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and Carl Jung, were “centrally concerned with pathology both individual and cultural, [and] came to the same conclusion: lies warp the structure of Being. Untruth corrupts the soul and the state alike, and one form of corruption feeds the other.

In Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s analysis of the Soviet Union, he perceived there was a direct connection between Soviet citizens’ proclivity to “falsify [their] own day-to-day experience [and] deny [their] own state-induced suffering” and the Soviet state’s ability to get away with tyranny and mass murder. The state could retain power and credibility because the people had learned to embrace small lies and eventually were willing to embrace big ones.

In resisting the various ideologies that seek to fill the increasing vacuum left by Christianity’s decentering, Peterson urges individuals to adopt as much responsibility as they are able.

“How do we get at our friends today who have relativized all evil? With the impact of postmodernism, how do you get at people who don’t really think that evil is anything more than a socially defined construct? Evil is evil for a particular group, but it’s not transcendently evil. Evil is relativized very broadly, not only in the intellectual circles of the arts divisions of our universities but in the mass media and beyond. If we can’t see what evil is, we can’t really see what the gospel is about.”

Just a few years ago, I suspect the best-known Bible verse in the country was John 3:16. Today, it is probably s Matthew 7:1. Nobody knows where it’s from, but it’s Matthew 7:1. “Judge not, that you be not judged.” As soon as you condemn anything or say anything is wrong or question the morality, people will say to you, “Judge not that you be not judged.”

What they are saying is, there is nothing wrong with what we are doing, it is not evil or sin.

Five verses farther on in chapter 7, verse 6, it says, “Don’t cast your pearls before swine,” which means somebody has to figure out who the pigs are

Evil entered history in the abuse of created freedom

Every language contains words for ‘evil’—that which ought not to be. A distinction is sometimes made between physical/metaphysical evil (misfortune, woe) and moral evil (offence, wrong), and the Bible includes terms for both kinds. The Hebrew ra‘ occurs about 640 times, and 40 per cent of these cases refer to some calamity. There

It is important to define evil. Two biblical insights are relevant here: 1. evil has no independent existence but is a perversion of what is good; 2. sin is the greatest of evils, the root of all evil.

Why the Cross? Because man is wicked and evil and God is Holy. In order for the two to be reconciled, something serious has to be done.

Romans 3:9 What then? are we better than they? No, in no wise: for we before laid to the charge both of Jews and Greeks, that they are all under sin; 10as it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one; 11There is none that understandeth, There is none that seeketh after God; 12They have all turned aside, they are together become
unprofitable; There is none that doeth good, no, not so much as one: 13Their throat is an open sepulchre; With their tongues they have used deceit: The poison of asps is under their lips: 14Whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness: 15Their feet are swift to shed blood; 16Destruction and misery are in their ways; 17And the way of peace have they not known: 18There is no fear of God before their eyes. 19Now we know that what things soever the law saith, it speaketh to them that are under the law; that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may be brought under the judgment of God: 20because by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified in his sight; for through the law cometh the knowledge of sin. 21But now apart from the law a righteousness of God hath been manifested, being witnessed by the law and the prophets; 22even the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ unto all them that believe; for there is no distinction; 23for all have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God; 24being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus: 25whom God set forth to be a propitiation, through faith, in his blood, to show his righteousness because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God; 26for the showing, I say, of his righteousness at this present season: that he might himself be just, and the justifier of him that hath faith in Jesus.
28We reckon therefore that a man is justified by faith apart from the works of the law.

The Truth is, All People Are Guilty of Sin

“All men, both Jews and Greeks, are under sin.” All men have sinned and are under the awful sway of sin, slaves to sin (Romans 6:16).

All people, regardless of race, are personally accountable to God No matter how virtuous we appear, we are accountable to God and there will be a reckoning for what we have done and said and thought and felt. The universal problem of guilt is not just a problem of how to feel better, but how to be right with God.

Guilt is a universal experience. Everybody at some time or other has had the bad feeling of not doing what he ought to have done. Even people who deny that there is any such thing as right and wrong are trapped by the law of God written on their hearts.

The people who deny man’s guilt and evilness, set out to prove there is no such thing as right and wrong and that all ethics are relative and arbitrary. They end up saying it is right for you to agree with them and wrong for you not to. No one has ever successfully erased the sense of ought which God writes in every human soul.

Our moral sensibilities may be perverted so that they are the very opposite of God’s, but everyone senses that he ought to do certain things and not others. And we all know we have not done all we ought to have done, or felt all we ought to have felt. And at some time or other this has made us feel bad. The failure to do what we ought to have done we call guilt. And the bad feelings that often accompany it we call guilt feelings or a bad conscience.

How the World Copes with Guilt

All secular efforts to deal with the human misery of guilt are impotent because they ignore the most important fact:

God’s holiness and righteous glory have been desecrated, defamed, and blasphemed by our sin. It is with a holy God that we have to do in our guilt!

The urgency of our problem with guilt is not that we feel miserable, but that God’s name has been blasphemed. We live in a day with such a inflated view of human potential and such a tiny view of God’s holiness that we can scarcely understand what the real problem of guilt is.,

“How can God be loving and yet condemn people with such little sins?”

The problem is, “How can God be righteous if he acquits such miserable sinners as we?”

There can be no lasting remedy for guilt which does not deal with God’s righteous indignation against sin.

That’s why there had to be a sacrifice, and not just any sacrifice, but the sacrifice of the Son of God! No one else, and no other act, could repair the defamation done to the glory of God by our sins. But when Jesus died for the glory of the Father, satisfaction was made. No other gospel can take away our guilt because no other gospel corresponds to the cosmic proportions of our sin in relation to God.

There are three main ways people try to solve the problem of guilt: intellectual ways, physical ways, and religious ways.

Among the intellectual ways there is the teaching that guilt is owing to unrealistic expectations we put on ourselves.

Another approach is to say that our moral principles are dated and restrictive.

The old-fashioned physical ways are still predominate. There is always alcohol to fall back on and, more recently, other drugs.

The oldest and most revered tactic for avoiding the misery of guilt is religion. In religion people know the ultimate cause of guilt is that there is a righteous God whose will for his creatures is ignored or defied.

Religion has developed a way to deal with this guilt is to try to placate or appease God with good works or religious ritual.

God Has A Way To Deal with Our Guilt

It appears that the justification of the ungodly caused a problem for Paul. For him, God’s righteousness is called into question by his passing over of sins. God is now passing over the sins of those who trust Jesus and that he has been doing the same thing for generations to those who trust him.

Romans 3:25 whom God set forth to be a propitiation, through faith, in his blood, to show his righteousness because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God;

Why is God’s righteousness called into question when he passes over sins and justifies the ungodly?

The justification of the ungodly does not call God’s righteousness into question because it might perpetuate sinning. The real sin is always a depreciation of God’s glory, and therefore God’s passing over it looks as if he is agreeing that his glory is of no value. It makes God look as if he is not being true to himself

The essence of sin appears to be a refusal to glorify or honor God. Verse 23 says, “All have sinned and fall short of (or lack) the glory of God, “Although men knew God, they did not glorify him as God or thank him Natural man always delights more in the glory of created things than he does in God’s glory. And in that, he exchanges God’s glory and therefore lacks, or falls short of it.

When God passes over sin that so belittles his glory, it looks as if he regards his glory as worthless. It would be wrong for God not to preserve his honor and not to display his glory. That is the heart of Paul’s problem
with the justification of the ungodly. It makes God look as if he no longer values his glory, by acquitting people who have trampled it in the dirt.

God’s Righteousness is Vindicated

Paul sees God’s solution to the problem, in the death of Christ.

Everything Jesus did in life and death he did for the glory of his Father. Just a few examples, Jesus approaches the hour of his death, he says, For this purpose I have come to this hour: Father glorify thy name” John 12:27, 28. “Now is the Son of Man glorified and in him God is glorified” John 13:31. in Jesus’ great prayer in John 17, “I have glorified you (Father) upon the earth having accomplished the work you gave me to do” 17:4.

Everything Jesus suffered, he suffered for the sake of God’s glory. All of Jesus pain, shame, humiliation and dishonor served to magnify the Father’s glory, because it shows how infinitely worthy God’s glory is that such a loss should be suffered for his sake.

Why the Cross?

The awful death of the Son is how God can be both righteous himself and the one who justifies the ungodly who have faith in Jesus.

No Person is Justified by Works of the Law

Romans 3:19: “For no human being will be justified in God’s sight by works of the law, since through the law comes the knowledge of sin.” To be justified means to be acquitted by God, to be declared free and innocent, to be made right in relation to God

When people do not trust the mercy of God but try to use the law to get right with him, the law brings to light their sin and condemns them for their unbelief. This is true of all humans (“all flesh”), Jew and Gentile

Only God can Acquit Sinners

God, on his own initiative, has taken the step to acquit us. When God decided to show his righteousness for our justification, he did it “apart from the law.” That is, he did not direct our attention back to the law with its animal sacrifices, but he directed our attention to his Son whom he sent to die for our sin. Romans 8:3 puts it like this: “God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do: sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, he condemned sin in the flesh.”

God has not left us to deal with our guilt alone, but he has taken the initiative, while we were yet sinners Romans 5:8, to seek our acquittal and to offer it to us freely.

God Justifies us Through Christ Death

The free gift of justification purchased by Jesus on the cross only comes to those who trust in him. Paul defines that righteousness in verse 22 as “the righteousness through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe”

Philippians 3:9, then in verse 25 he says that Christ is an expiation (or propitiation) “through faith,” or “to be received by faith.” verse 26 says that God “justifies him who has faith in Jesus.” Anyone who trusts in Jesus for justification will have it freely.

The human-potential movement has a heyday and the real problem of guilt remains unresolved for most people. Saving faith in Jesus Christ is hard because it is born in desperation, and apart from God’s grace, humans hate to admit that they are desperate.

This gift of justification, the removal of our guilt and God’s wrath, comes only to those who trust in Jesus. It is only for those who place their faith in what Christ did on the Cross.