What is the truth about ethics?

“Chapter 5 of my English textbook is all about ethics,” my English teacher tells the class for the fifth time, somehow expecting that because the textbook says something is bad that the class will act accordingly.  I know without looking around the class that there were scattered sneers as they where given away by obvious snickers of contempt.  The teacher was telling us not to lie about the mark we received.  I ask myself, “Why should they believe this one chapter of this one English textbook when all throughout all other education they have been told that ethics are subjective?"  After all, what is right for you may or may not be right for me and vice versa.

What’s different now?  Is someone’s money on the line?  What changed ethics from subjective to objective?  Or perhaps the fact that ethics where subjective was the lie?  A lie?  Isn’t that only subjective?  Lets educate away right and wrong, good and evil.  There are no consequences until someone gets hurt, right?  But getting hurt is subjective so there will never be consequences.  Maybe this one chapter, chapter five out of this once English textbook, actually has it right.  A tiny bit of truth in a whole world of lies.  A tiny bit of truth people sneer at but know inside is true.    Maybe truth and ethics are not so different.

A liar is bound by the lies he makes for himself, trapped by the lies he tells others and even himself.  He tells himself that he will have good friends if he goes out and parties with the guys a bit more ignoring the fact that if anything of real value was said or done they were so plastered they won’t ever remember a single thing.  He tells himself that if he gets that next promotion he would be happy, but there is always another promotion.  He tells himself that after he gets divorced everything will be better, but his kids experience the truth day after day after day.  He tells himself that everything is ok as long as its fun, but as time ticks on he pays the consequences of the things he shouldn’t have done.

Before truth people stand condemned. Before truth there darkest secrets come to light. Truth huts, but it sets us free.  A man of truth knows that real friends experience real life together, good and bad, and remember.  He knows that the next promotion is just more time spent working for a little more money when he could be spending it with his wife and kids who love him and miss him.  He knows that life isn’t always easy but divorce is running away from your problems and in the end is going to hurt more people more than it hurts him now.  He knows there is so much more to life than momentary entertainment, that truth is hard in the moment but is better in the end.  Search out the truth.  Momentary pain, eternal gain.

He knows that truth is a person.

“I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me," John 14:6