7 May 2024 John 16:5-11
“And when [the Advocate] comes He will convict the world in regard to sin…because they do not believe in Me….” John 16:8-9
The first work of the Holy Spirit, Jesus says, is to convict the world of sin for not believing in Him.
In the end, not to believe in Jesus is a sin.
This is one of those claims that drives non-believers around the bend, because they believe that anyone who is a “basically good person” will certainly be admitted to heaven, regardless of what they may think about Jesus. “Basic goodness,” they think, is independent of Jesus. You can be good without God.
This is a claim as old as Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro. Plato described the famous “Euthyphro Dilemma,” wondering about where right and wrong come from. He reasoned that if the gods command something because it is right, then goodness is independent of the gods, indeed is superior to the gods. But where then does goodness come from? It is impossible to say. If, on the other hand something is good because the gods will it, that makes goodness rather arbitrary, a kind of “might makes right” goodness.
Modern philosophers, however, think the Euthyphro dilemma is a false dilemma because there is a third option: something is good because God isgoodness. It is like what Thomas Aquinas said about God’s existence, viz.,that God does not have being, but He is being (ipse Esse subsistens, “the act of ‘to be’ itself”). In the same way, God does not have goodness, but He isgoodness. Goodness is good because it is consistent with God’s nature. God, in other words, is the very definition of “good.”
Therefore, there cannot be any goodness, or good people, apart from God. This resolves all the problems raised by the Euthyphro dilemma – we know exactly what “good” is and where it comes from. It is Jesus. It comes fromJesus.
This is pretty abstract stuff, but Malcolm Muggeridge experienced it in a very concrete way.
He was filming Something Beautiful for God, a movie about St. Theresa of Calcutta in the 1970s at the Home for Dying Destitutes where Mother Theresa’s Missionaries of Charity did their work. Their home was a former Hindu temple and had very poor lighting. Muggeridge’s cameraman said it would be hopeless to film inside – the dim light would make the film of those days come out completely black. They decided to give it a try, however, and when the film was processed, everything was bathed in a soft, beautiful light that the cameraman could not explain. He knew cameras and he knew light – he knew black film was the only possibility filming in that place. And yet there was this soft, beautiful light illuminating the humble charity of those holy sisters.
Malcolm Muggeridge later explained that what they were capturing on film was holiness itself, and holiness, he found, doesn’t just have luminosity; it is luminosity. It reveals. It is like everything else about God. God does not have attributes – He is His attributes. It is what his name means. Not I Have, but I Am (cf. Exodus 3:14).
There is no such thing as a “basically good person” apart from God. To think of goodness as separate from God in any way is to diminish goodness to vanishing smallness. It is to make “I am a good person” about as significant as saying, “I am a Yankees fan.” It makes God no more significant than a hobby, or a personal taste.
Goodness means to be like Jesus. That is why the first work of the Holy Spirit is to convict the world of sin for not believing in Jesus. Not believing in Jesus is not believing in the Good.
It is why not believing in Jesus, when you have the choice, is a sin.
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