No, we don’t do good because we’re afraid God will punish us
We’ve all experienced it as children: We find ourselves in a situation where we’re tempted to do something we know we shouldn’t do, but we really want to do it. We justified and reasoned and convinced ourselves that it was okay to do it anyway, but we stopped short for one reason: We knew that if we got caught, we’d get in trouble. We didn’t always like the rules, and we didn’t always understand them, but we knew we had to obey them because if we didn’t, there were negative consequences.
Although when we get older we start to understand why those rules were in place, and why authority figures punished us for breaking them, but our tendency to see rules as a burden doesn’t seem to go away. Because the one authority figure we have throughout our life is God, we often have a hard time growing out of that stage where we do good because we fear getting in trouble. We retain the same view of God as the immature view we sometimes had of authority figures when we were five years old: that they are watching us and waiting to punish us if we screw up. It’s as if God is a volcano about to erupt at the slightest provocation.
Nonbelievers pick up on this. The American Atheists like to circulate a billboard during the holiday season that says, “Go ahead and skip church. Just be good for goodness’ sake!” Usually the message is accompanied by a Santa with a sly-looking smile. It expresses an accusation I’ve heard leveled at Christians over and over, sometimes expressed with an air of moral superiority: “I do good just because it’s good, but you need your God and the threat of hellfire to motivate you to do good.”
This is an objection that’s sometimes problematic to address, because we all know that we shouldn’t think that way, but in reality a lot of us do. I have heard this idea — that we do good because if we don’t God will punish us — expressed more than once by the teenagers I work with. And it’s very telling that this is the impression one of the most prominent atheist groups in America has of Christians. Clearly enough Christians think that way that the American Atheists feel the need to express that message, or at least, Christians give that impression.
Now, of course the Bible talks about hell and the wrath of God. It warns that those who do evil and don’t repent will suffer hell. But to say that this should be the primary motivation for us doing good is to completely misunderstand the character of God and why he told us about these things in the first place. It indicates a pattern of spiritually immature thinking, much like the child who does good only because he’ll get in trouble otherwise. While it’s understandable that those who don’t know God might misunderstand him that way, we should know better. We should be able to take it upon ourselves to dispel the notion that God is like a volcano on the verge of eruption, not contribute to it.
The fact is that we usually do good things for the same reasons that nonbelievers do good things. This isn’t a bad thing. We might think that, as believers in Christ, we should have different reasons for doing good than nonbelievers, but on the outside they really aren’t that different. As such, we shouldn’t think that we have different reasons for doing good than nonbelievers. Rather, we have additional reasons for doing good that nonbelievers don’t have. And the difference in the reasons we have in common is the way we think of them. What’s different is the way we think of them. This goes back to the concept I’ve written about before of repentance as changing the way we think.
Romans 2:15 speaks of the conscience God has given all people, to help us tell the difference between right and wrong, even those who haven’t read a word of the Bible. But while some might be inclined to see it as just a feeling, to us it’s sort of spiritual sense that helps us see spiritual reality for what it is — not unlike our sense of sight helps us see physical reality for what it is. Our conscience directs us to what is truly good, and we would be wise to obey it.
We all derive joy from doing good. It’s not selfish or wrong to do good for this reason. Eminent pastor John Piper, who calls his philosophy Christian Hedonism, goes so far as to say that “the desire to be happy is a proper motive for every good deed.” God intended for us to find happiness in doing what makes him happy. We have joy in doing good because we know that’s the way it’s supposed to be.
We all have compassion for others. As God has compassion for us, we are able to have compassion for one another. And to us, it’s not just a strong feeling, but a reflection of God’s character. We can know that when we do good out of compassion, we’re acting like our Father.
All of these reasons — conscience, joy, compassion — we share in common with nonbelievers, at least at the basic level.But we also have additional motivators.
If none of those three motivates us to do good, we also have love for God. Even if we don’t want to listen to our conscience, it doesn’t make us happy, and we can’t bring ourselves to feel compassion or sympathy for someone, particularly someone who’s wronged us, we can at least bring ourselves to do right because we love God and don’t want to abuse his gifts to us or forsake the mercy he’s shown us. That’s not to say that love for God shouldn’t always be a motivator in everything we do, but our love for God expresses itself in many different ways, including compassion for his creations and adherence to the conscience he’s given us.
And if none of those are enough to persuade us to choose the good over the evil, if somehow even those things cannot convince us, then we may take into account the fear of God. It’s a last resort. If we do wrong, God may discipline us for it. He might allow us to experience negative consequences, or even cause them. He does this to bring us back to him, not because he’s vindictive or can’t control his temper. Just like when we were children and we needed the threat of negative consequences to deter us from doing wrong, sometimes we do need the threat of negative consequences to spur us toward the good, because it’s slightly better to do good under compulsion than to do evil. The possibility of negative consequences may be a factor in our decisions to do good, but only when it has to be.
God intended for doing good to be a joy, not a burden, and not something done out of fear. And he has put several means in place to gently lead us to do good. But ultimately, we don’t do good just for goodness’ sake, because human good is not the highest good there is. It’s merely an inferior imitation of the ultimate good, the best thing in existence, and that is God himself.
