What Gives God the Right to Judge? The Answer to Every Objection Against God’s Morality

What gives God the right to judge people and take their lives? What gives Him the right to send people to Hell? Who died and made Him King? The answers to these questions are easier to provide than they are for people to accept.

We feel like our lives are ours. We feel like we are inherently good. We feel like we are the judges of right and wrong. But our feelings do not always reflect reality. And our lofty notions of the way things should be come from ideas that we would not even have without God.

I’ve heard many people claim that they will shake their fist at God on Judgment Day and declare themselves more righteous than He is. The arrogance of that statement boggles my mind. Who do they think they are? But that is the issue, isn’t it? They are not thinking. They are feeling.

And what they feel is pain in a fallen world.

So I am going to ask you to look past your feelings for a moment. I want you to understand the reality in which we all live.

Consider the truth I am about to share with you, because the truth will set you free even when your own feelings condemn you.

Many people believe that morality is relative. They think individuals can decide what is best for themselves, while groups determine what is best for society through majority rule. However, what is best for the group may not be best for the well-being of the individual, and individuals can have differing opinions on what is right and wrong.

The idea that we are the ones who decide good from evil is flawed. If there is any morality at all, it must be objective to us. It must apply to everyone, even if they don’t agree with it. Morality cannot be decided by us.

Yet this just brings us back to the original question: Who does have the ultimate authority to determine what is right and what is wrong?

God is the answer. God has the right to give life and take life, even though human beings do not have that right over one another. He has the right to execute eternal judgment. And His Son died on a cross to become King.

The Sovereign Ownership of God

When we look at the beginning, we see that God created the heavens, the earth, and everything in them. Even the very life that animates us came from Him. So is there any reason we should not be able to say that God owns everything and everyone?

God created everything and everyone in existence. Everything belongs to Him. That means anything anyone “owns” is actually just in their temporary possession by His permission. God still owns everything. He grants permission to use things, but it all belongs to Him.

How often do we pause to consider that everything we have, even our very lives, belongs to God? What would change if we truly lived with this awareness?

Suddenly, our lives do not belong to us. Our destiny is in His hands. And the One with all authority and power to judge anything and everything is God. Knowing this first puts us back in our proper place.

We are not the ultimate judges of right and wrong. We are not the ones who own the breath in our lungs. We are human beings living by the grace of God and sustained by Him alone. That also means we are not qualified to judge God.

How God’s Ownership Defines Good and Evil

God owns me, and God owns you. Every rule and every law ultimately boils down to one thing: ownership.

When we respect others’ property, we acknowledge their rights of ownership. This is the most basic form of every right.

As an example, if I want to use my car, that is my right. If I want to damage my car, I have that right. If you are upset about what I do with my car, it is because you are somehow attached to something that is not yours—something you do not own.

Ah, but I hear you say, “We have rules you have to follow on the road.” Some might argue that this means others have the right to control what you do with your car, implying that the majority is in charge of what you can and cannot do with what is yours.

The reality is that even these rules are based on ownership. The roads do not belong to you. The lives of others on the road do not belong to you. Therefore, you cannot use your car on the road in a way that endangers lives that do not belong to you. These rules exist to ensure that you do not violate others’ rights of ownership.

It is not the majority that arbitrarily decides what is and is not right for you to do with what you “own.” It is ownership and the fact that other people have ownership rights as well.

Think about it for a moment. Let’s look at the Ten Commandments.

1. Thou shalt have no other gods before me: God owns you; no other god owns you.
2. Thou shalt not make any graven image: God owns your worship; no other god owns your worship.
3. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain: God owns Himself and His own name. You do not own or control Him.
4. Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy: God owns each day you are given.
5. Honor thy father and thy mother: God owns you, and yet He has given your parents the authority to care for you. They are to be honored as servants of God in that respect, because He owns them as well.
6. Thou shalt not kill: God owns all life, and it is not yours to take unless He grants that authority.
7. Thou shalt not commit adultery: Your neighbor’s spouse belongs to God and has been placed under the care of their spouse by God. They are not yours.
8. Thou shalt not steal: If you take what belongs to someone else, you are a thief.
9. Thou shalt not bear false witness: Twisted truth affects the lives of others who belong to God. You are harming what is not yours.
10. Thou shalt not covet: Do not lust after what you do not own and have no right to possess.

As the saying goes, “Possession is nine-tenths of the law.” The other tenth applies only to things that no one possesses. But the reality is that God possesses all things. So, in truth, it is 100 percent of the law.

Since God created and owns everything, He has the ultimate authority to determine what can and cannot be done with what belongs to Him. There is no greater law or principle over Him because there is nothing that exists that is not His.

Only God Has True Ownership

If ownership is what gives us the ability to decide what is good or evil to do with what we own, does that mean we can do anything we want with something we own? What about people who used to own slaves? Were they justified in treating them however they wanted?

This might seem like a solid objection. If right and wrong are determined arbitrarily by ownership, then an owner would naturally be justified in whatever he chose to do.

The problem with this question is that it completely ignores the entire point of what I have been showing you: God owns everything and everyone. We do not.

That means slave “owners” did not actually own the slaves. You do not own your home or your car. You do not even own yourself. Even if you think you own something or someone, the reality is that you do not. Only God owns all things.

So whatever you do with what you think you own is actually being done to something that belongs to God. Slave “owners” beat, abused, and brought great suffering upon people who belonged to God. They were not justified. No one is justified in harming what belongs to God.

David himself had taken another man’s wife and had him killed. You would think this was surely a sin against them. But David understood that these people were not his own; they belonged to God. This did not lessen his responsibility or the grievousness of the sin. It enhanced it, because he knew that what he had done was ultimately done against God.

The point is this: good and evil are determined by the One who owns everything. That is God. And frankly, it does not matter whether we agree with Him or not, because we do not own anything that He has not temporarily allowed us to care for.

This gives Him the authority to give life and take life. He has the authority to judge His creation. He has the authority to guide, correct, and even discipline His children and all that He owns. And no one has the power to take that ownership away from Him.

Knowing that God owns everything and everyone is the first thing we need to realize if we are going to understand concepts such as eternal judgment. The difference between what God is justified in doing and what we are not justified in doing is based on ownership, not on some external, lofty notion of good to which even God is subject.

The question, “Is it good because God commanded it, or did God command it because it is good?” is resolved by this. If God commands it, then it is good because He has the right to decide. We do not. Period.

Knowing this one truth automatically refutes arguments against God’s moral judgments. He owns all life, so what if He chooses to take it in a worldwide flood? He owns the cities and resources of the earth, so what if He chooses to consume them with fire? He owns the life of the adult and the life of the child, so what if He takes what belongs to Him?

Just because we do not like what someone else does with something does not mean we are righteous and they are evil. It means we are claiming authority over something that belongs to another. Ultimately, that is what all arguments against God’s morality boil down to. We are simply trying to claim ownership of what is not ours.

The Perfect World

Many people think that God created a broken world, but they seem to have overlooked the first few chapters of Genesis. When God created everything, He made it perfect and good.

There were no illnesses, no thorns on roses, no famine, no greed, envy, or strife. All of the suffering we see today was not there in the beginning. If we look at the world God originally created, we catch our first glimpses of a good and loving God—something very different from what many people imagine today.

Today there are pandemics, poisonous plants, hunger, and people killing each other over the pettiest of things. Today we do not see the original world. We see it through the lens of destruction—a lens we placed over our own eyes, a lens that God never wanted us to put on.

That lens covers our eyes from the moment we are born, so that we cannot even imagine a different world. We grow up thinking that if there is a Creator, and if this is His creation, then He must be anything but loving.

Yet if we remove those blinders and look at the beginning, the entire picture changes. We see a God who provided everything we would ever need. We see a world full of goodness. That was the original creation, not what we see now.

The Bible says that man was created in the image of God. In other words, man was created to act, talk, walk, live, and breathe like God. He was perfect and sinless. So what happened?

How did a perfect world with perfect people become so broken? How is that even possible?

I will be explaining that in the next study.

Continue To Unit 2:1 – Why Did God Put the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in Eden? OR

Return To Christianity 101 Unit 2 – Sin and Eternal Judgment