What a Life! for February 28-March 4, 2007

Years ago The Wall Street Journal ran a front page story about a young man who stole some $20 million by a phone-slamming scheme and then disappeared. Daniel Fletcher is the son of the Rev. John Fletcher, the pastor of Faith Bible Church in Sterling, Virginia. According to his parents, he was “a good kid.” In fact, he originally planned to follow his father into the ministry. At age sixteen, while recuperating from the flu, Daniel memorized the entire book of James from the New Testament. Later, he attended two Bible colleges.

Somewhere along the way, he decided not to follow the path that his parents had led him. He invented some phony long-distance phone service companies, and by various forms of trickery, he got thousands of people to switch to his accounts n a practice called “slamming.” He collected millions of dollars from his unsuspecting victims, as well as from Sprint and AT&T.

Before the law could catch up with him, he had dropped out of sight, taking his millions with him. He is probably living a plush life in some country that has no extradition agreement with the United States.

This young man grew up knowing right from wrong; he knew about God’s intentions about how we should live. Then, at some point, he chose the other way. From the point of view of the Bible, we have only two ways to live n God’s way and the other way.

When we were children, most of us had very clear-cut ideas of what was right and wrong. When our parents said to us “Be a good boy” or “Be a good girl”, we had a good idea what that meant. When we got into trouble, we generally knew that we were doing wrong.

As adults, however, we may have experienced that right and wrong are not as clear-cut as we had thought. We have encountered complex situations where the line between right and wrong sometimes seemed blurred. Sometimes we have been forced to make choices, not between good and bad, but between two lousy solutions, neither one of them good. We have come to understand such terms as “the lesser of two evils,” “ambiguities,” “gray areas,” and “moral dilemmas.”

Psalm 1 presents life in black-and-white terms. It suggests that a person is either good and righteous or bad and wicked, with no category in between. That perspective seems foreign to us today. We are more apt to think that we are all a mixture of good and bad. The psalm is saying that some moral absolutes exist in life, that certain things are always right and other things are always wrong.

Some things about God’s ways may be unclear to us, but most of the ways God has laid out before us are perfectly clear. Does anybody really suppose that Daniel Fletcher had any question about whether his phone-slamming schemes were wrong? So, while we occasionally recognize some moral dilemmas in life, more often we can stand firm on what is right and what is wrong.

Some people today have redefined right and wrong. We can find people who would argue that greed is okay, that unfaithfulness is okay, that betrayal is okay, that torture of the enemy is okay, that all sorts of private behavior once thought sinful are okay.

When it comes right down to it, our choice is between God’s way and another way that is not his. This means that when we make moral choices, we are determining something about the direction of our lives. Jesus told us, “Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and many take it.” (Matt. 7:13) Let us choose God’s way!