What is right?  

Here is the way that one dictionary defines “right”:  

morally good, justified, or acceptable.  

synonyms:  

just, fair, equitable, good, upright, righteous, virtuous, proper, moral, morally justified, ethical, honorable, honest, principled; lawful, legal   

But, from a Biblical perspective, what is right? I.e., what is the right way to treat my neighbors, should I not regard those around me who deviate from traditional moral norms? Are some people superior to others? Are some sins justifiable in favor of a greater good? Who is really in ownership of one’s body? The merchant undercharged me — I get to keep the difference, right? It is okay for immoral and dishonest individuals to represent me before others and before God, right? I am a good person — I help the needy and contribute to the poor — I will go to heaven if there is one, right?  

I once heard a man say, “you don’t know what you know”. Sounds silly, right? Well, it is not so silly. You have heard me speak about the inner man, you know, our spirit man or human spirit.  

One of the three primary attributes of our inner man is conscience. The other two are communion and intuition. These on-board attributes of the spirit man all have additional attributes within themselves that represent things that we know but do not know that we know. For example, if we go into a country and kill off 43 million of the inhabitants and destroy their food source, we may not know that it is wrong, but we know that it is wrong because our conscience tells us that it is wrong.  

The same above reference but unnamed dictionary defines conscience as:  

an inner feeling or voice viewed as acting as a guide to the rightness or wrongness of one’s behavior.  

Watchman Nee says this about the conscience in his book The Spiritual Man:   

“The conscience is the discerning organ which distinguishes right and wrong; not, however, through the influence of knowledge stored in the mind but rather by a spontaneous direct judgment. Often reasoning will justify things which our conscience judges. The work of the conscience is independent and direct; it does not bend to outside opinions.”  

This scriptural passage makes my point:  

Whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin; for His (God’s) seed remains in him: and he cannot sin, because he is born of God.  

In this the children of God are manifest, and the children of the devil: whosoever doeth not righteousness is not of God, neither he that loveth not his brother.  

For this is the message that ye heard from the beginning, that we should love one another. (1 John 3:9-11 King James Version)  

 The Book of proverbs cites the word right or righteous ninety-one times in the KJV. Check them out here.