God will not quit. Hence, the Golden Rule (as well as all of the Sermon on the Mount) is as much a statement of where God is taking the Christian as it is a standard by which the goodness of the natural man is judged. What will it be? Will you flail away at that or some other standard, and be judged by it? Or will you surrender to Christ, letting God enter your life and remake you into His image?
Now at this point many very good studies would stop. For this is the Christian Gospel, and it lies at the heart of all Scripture. It is a good place to end. However, I believe that if I were to end here, I would be untrue to this text before me. For the Sermon on the Mount was given, as we saw in one of our earlier studies, not merely to drive a man to Christ (although that is the first thing necessary), but also to set forth that standard of morality to which God is constantly leading the Christian.
Yesterday, we concluded by saying that if we think of a ruler as a straightedge, as the British call it, we then have the idea that what we call the Golden Rule shows us how morally crooked we are, compared with the perfect straightness of God’s moral purity.
At this point, then, we have actually reached the first great statement of the solution to the problem of human morality. But before we pursue it, it is necessary to see that the major effect that the Golden Rule was intended to have on human goodness was to condemn it. It wipes it out. By this standard, all natural human goodness is condemned, and being weighed in the balances, is found wanting.
The Golden Rule, which is found in the seventh chapter of Matthew, verse 12, is probably the most universally praised statement that Jesus ever made. It has been called "the topmost peak of social ethics... the Everest of all ethical teaching."
