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Does Being Good Do
Any Good?
by Dan Schaeffer
Jesus
said, “Let your light shine before men, that they may see your good
deeds and praise your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:16).
Allen Dershowitz
begs to differ. He believes that most Christians’ good works have
no real value whatsoever. It is the atheists and agnostics who are the
truly moral people in our universe.
In his book, Letters to a Young Lawyer, the super lawyer argues that when
Christians and other believers do good things, they are being given far
more credit than they deserve.
In a chapter titled “Why Be a Good Person,” Dershowitz writes:
“For most people, the question why be good--as distinguished from
merely law abiding--is a simple one. Because God commands it, because
the Bible requires it, because good people go to heaven and bad people
go to hell.”
For the moment let’s ignore the fact that Allen Dershowitz is like
millions of others who fail to understand the gospel, thinking that good
works result in salvation.
He makes a valid point about the motivation for many Christians doing
good works. If you asked a number of Christians why they do good works,
or act morally, their response would be almost precisely what Dershowitz
shares. We desire to be obedient to God, to obey his moral commands.
But Dershowitz hasn’t finished. He goes on to say “any God
worth believing in would prefer an honest agnostic to a calculating hypocrite….
I have never quite understood why people who firmly believe they are doing
God’s will are regarded as ‘good,’ even ‘heroic.’
For them the choice is a tactical one that serves their own best interests,
a simple consequence of a cost-benefit analysis.”
Dershowitz makes the amazing claim that the only truly moral person is
an atheist. His reasoning is quite simple. “The truly moral person
is the one who does the right thing without any promise of reward or threat
of punishment--without engaging in a cost-benefit analysis.”
Allen Dershowitz is wrong, and I’ll show several reasons why, but
his insights are nevertheless valuable. He raises an important question:
Why do we do our good works anyway? What are our true motivations?
I have pondered that very thing on several occasions, and it wasn’t
a terribly comfortable exercise. It can be a frightening operation to
begin to dissect your own motivations and lay bare your deepest ambitions.
It is common knowledge that many people do good things for less than sterling
motivations. Some people give to their church or favorite charity for
the tax write off. Some do charitable work to polish their public image,
or involve themselves in civic projects for the public accolades and good
will it will garner them. While part of a person’s desire to give
may be out of a genuine desire to help, or worship, in many instances
there is also some financial, emotional or social benefit that also motivates
them.
Helping Others…or
Helping Yourself?
A good example of this is my daughters’ involvement in their 4H-pig
project. My two girls both raised pigs
that were later sold at auction at the county fair. A local car dealer
and a businessman in a nearby town bid on my daughters’
pigs and bought them at way above market rate. I couldn’t help asking
myself why they would do this. Furthermore, these businessmen bought pigs
all day long. There was no way anyone could eat that much ham and bacon,
and they certainly weren’t buying them for pets. Curious, I began
to ask questions. I discovered that the pigs were often resold to food
chains at half the price they were bought for and the purchase was a write-off.
But that didn’t explain the whole picture. After thinking more about
it, I began to see the brilliance in this. We live in a small town, and
there are several car dealerships. Would a parent forget the car dealer
who bought his child’s pig? When it came time to buy a new $30,000
truck, where would they go? It may not “pay off” every time,
but all it would take would be a few cars being sold to make the philanthropy
cost effective.
In other words, their “good works” could not be seen as entirely
unselfish. They would get something in return for their “goodness,”
such as goodwill and more business. Of course it’s easy to see that
kind of diluted goodness in others, but sometimes it’s harder to
see it in my own life.
Serving Others…or
Serving Myself?
When I was a young man, I had a desire to become a pastor. Why? In retrospect,
I believe it was for several reasons. First, I had recently given my life
to Christ and was excited about my faith, but also because my own pastor
was very impressive and was the recipient of a lot of attention and respect.
I admired him a great deal. These were things that were in short supply
in my own broken-home existence. I wanted to have that kind of attention
and admiration.
Don’t misunderstand me. I loved God and also felt a genuine calling
to serve him full-time. It’s just
that I would be lying if I told you that I responded purely from an unselfish
desire to serve. I couldn’t see it at the time, but I see it now.
Frequently even good motivations are not entirely pure; they are sometimes
diluted with selfish ambition. The mixture might have been 70 percent
good motivation and 30 percent bad, but any bad dilutes the good.
A desire to serve oneself is a constant temptation in any kind of ministry.
It is so easy to serve when there will be a pay-off of some
kind. When I would preach a particularly inspiring message on Sunday morning
I would get a lot of “attaboys!” So I worked hard to make
every message inspiring. And, while I wasn’t consciously trying
to garner attention to myself, I’m sure that to some extent, I was.
How grateful I am for the grace of God who allows leaky vessels to serve
him.
But over the years I have experienced a kind of transformation. When I
was younger, I desperately wanted attention and accolades.
I would never admit it, but they were terribly important to me. When I
sang “If you want to be great in God’s kingdom, learn to be
the servant of all,” I was focusing on the first phrase, not the
second.
But the more I saw that even after years of walking with God
I was still a wretched sinner
(although polished on the outside), I became overwhelmed with God’s
grace. An honest look at my own sinful motivations was one of the things
that made me love God far deeper than I ever had. I could not deny his
perfect righteousness, nor my utter sinfulness, and when I surveyed the
work of Christ on the cross for me, I shook my head in disbelief. That’s
when I began to change.
Nowadays, I don’t care if I am the gatekeeper or the street sweeper
in heaven. I am just ecstatic that I’ve been granted entrance into
his eternal kingdom. Understanding the depth of his love for me on the
cross has changed my primary motivation for doing good deeds. Dershowitz
was right about me for many years, but not anymore. I’ve already
received citizenship in God’s kingdom. I don’t have to work
to attain it, and I never ever deserved it. Not when I was first born
again, and not now.
Where Dershowitz Is Wrong
Dershowitz, however, is wrong on several accounts. First he makes the
false assumption that man can be “good” or “moral”
on his own apart from God. Romans 3:10-12 reminds us that “there
is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands.”
Paul makes it clear that there is “no one who does good.”
If there is no
absolute good revealed from above, then good is in the eyes of the
beholder.
To do good you would have to know what good really was. Since definitions
change from person to person, it would be impossible for anyone to know
for sure that they were doing anything truly good. If good becomes indefinable,
how can you pretend you are a person of good character?
Dershowitz defines good character as something someone does “simply
because it was deemed by the actor to be good.” He admits it would
be necessary to strike an appropriate balance among often competing interests,
such as the interests of oneself and of others, (such as your tribe, race,
gender, religion, nation and so forth). Yet how could Dershowitz ever
condemn as evil those who felt that for the greater good in the eyes of
the Third Reich, it was necessary to eliminate Jews from the face of the
earth?
Sincerity, or the actor’s own feelings, are not reliable. Many Confederate
troops did not even own slaves, and yet gave their life sacrificially
in the Civil War for a principal and standard of life they sincerely thought
was eminently true and right. Were they good or bad? It is quite possible
to be
sincere, and yet sincerely wrong.
Dershowitz is also wrong because he is assuming that a person’s
good works are his “ticket” into heaven. Buying into works
salvation, he sets up a straw man and then proceeds to tear it down. The
Bible does not tell us that if we are good we will get to heaven. What
Dershowitz does not apparently understand is that Christians do their
good deeds out of love--love for God and for those around us. Were we
still counting on our good works to get us to heaven, Dershowitz would
have a point. But we’re not. We
already have salvation granted to us by grace through faith. Now if the
only reason we do our good works is to get greater standing in God’s
kingdom, or to impress those around us with our piety, I think Dershowitz
would still have a point.
But, maybe the heresy Dershowitz writes about has some value to us Christians.
Maybe we need to think more deeply about why we do the good things we
do. The primary motivation for
a believer doing good works is gratitude and love for what has been done
for us by our God through Christ. The target audience for our good works
should not be those watching us from here below, but the One who watches
from above. Doing good works is more a form of worship than anything else.
In our feeble attempts to do good, we agree with God that he alone is
good, and we want to try to be more like him.
When our children were very young, we wanted to teach them how to clean
up after themselves. After they played with their playdough, for example,
we would
require them to put it all back in the can. They were very young and though
they tried as hard as they could, there were always playdough “crumbs”
left on the table and their attempts to put the dough back into the can
and put the lids back on were hilarious at best. In short, there was still
a mess that needed to be cleaned up.
But after their immature
attempt, they would proudly show me how they had done what I asked. Instead
of pointing out their failure, I praised their hard work and good effort.
Though their execution was lacking, their desire to please me was not.
I made allowances for their age. Our heavenly Father knows we aren’t
perfect, but he still loves our well-meaning, although less than perfect,
good works. Will we ever be able to do good deeds with a completely pure
heart? Probably not, but don’t be discouraged.
We need to examine our motivations for the good things we do under a spiritual
microscope. This does not mean we stop doing
good things. On the contrary, we need to do more--but for the right reason.
Is it still good to be good? Yes, Allen Dershowitz is wrong, and Jesus
of Nazareth is right. But let’s not be afraid to take a much closer
look at our own motivations for the good that we do.
Dan Schaeffer lives
in Solvang, California. |
