Jesus as the Moral Exemplar: Clarifying the Standard
Christians and atheists often talk past each other when arguing about whether God is good, whether divine judgment is just, or whether the problem of evil disproves God. Beneath the surface, they’re usually working with different standards of morality. This piece explores a distinctly Christian way of framing the discussion: Jesus Christ as the concrete, personal exemplar of goodness and justice, and God’s own character as the absolute moral standard.
The goal here is not to “win the internet” but to lay a clear baseline so disagreements become honest and focused. Once the standard is explicit, the real question becomes: Whose standard are we using, and why trust it?
From a Biblical Christian perspective, morality is not grounded in human opinion, majority vote, or cultural convention. It is grounded in who God is.
Classical Christian theism holds that God is perfectly good, just, wise, and loving in His very essence. He does not merely happen to act well. Goodness and justice are what God is, not just what God does. God is also unchanging, so His moral character cannot fluctuate or improve or deteriorate.
The New Testament presents Jesus as the exact representation and visible image of the invisible God. Passages like Hebrews 1:3, Colossians 1:15, Colossians 2:9, and John 14:9 ground the claim that when we see Jesus’ character (His compassion, justice, truthfulness, and holiness), we are seeing the character of God in human flesh. On this view, whatever is true of Jesus’ moral character is true of God’s moral character.
The New Testament also portrays Jesus as sinless, righteous, and perfectly obedient to the Father. He fulfills the law, loves His enemies, defends the oppressed, and willingly lays down His life. For the Christian, that makes Jesus the exemplar: the concrete, historical standard of goodness. To call something “good” is, ultimately, to say that it aligns with His character. To call something “evil” is to say that it departs from it.
With this baseline, the Christian can reason as follows: If Jesus fully reveals God’s character, and Jesus is just and good, then God is just and good. If God’s nature is unchangeably just and good, then God’s judgments about human beings are necessarily just and good. Therefore, even when we do not understand divine judgments, we have reason to trust them because of who God is and who Jesus shows Him to be.
This does not end disagreement, but it sets the stage. The Christian is not appealing to a vague “God is good somehow” but to a specific, revealed exemplar.
Once you claim that Jesus is the exemplar and God’s nature is the moral standard, a natural question for your atheist friend is: “Why should I accept that?” But an equally natural question for the Christian to ask is: By what standard are you judging any morality?
When someone says “God is immoral” or “Jesus is unjust,” they are not speaking from a vacuum. They are implicitly appealing to some standard of right and wrong. Broadly, their options fall into a few categories.
First, subjective preference: morality is “what I (or we) like or dislike.” In that case, “God is immoral” means “God does things I dislike.” That may express strong emotion, but it no longer carries the weight of a real accusation. It cannot bind anyone else, nor can it claim that God ought to act differently in any robust sense.
Second, social or evolutionary convention: morality is whatever promotes cooperation, survival, or flourishing in human communities. This view can explain why we have moral feelings, but it struggles to turn those feelings into truly binding obligations. If “moral norms” are just useful strategies for social animals, then to call God “wicked” for not conforming to them is like accusing an author of “breaking the rules” of a game He never agreed to play.
Third, abstract moral realism without God: some atheists appeal to objective moral facts that “just exist” in a Platonic or brute way. They may say “it is simply a fact that causing unnecessary suffering is wrong” and then measure God by that fact. The challenge here is to explain how these free-floating moral truths have authority over us (and over God) and how we, as small contingent creatures, reliably know them.
When you ask “by what standard?”, you are not dodging the issue. You are asking your interlocutor to make their own foundations explicit. You are saying, in effect: “I’m standing on Jesus as the concrete revelation of God’s unchanging moral character. I’m claiming an exemplar. Are you standing on anything more than opinion, custom, or unexplained abstractions?”
This does not automatically prove Christianity true, but it prevents an imbalanced situation where one side is forced to justify everything while the other borrows moral language without explaining its source.
The famous Euthyphro dilemma asks: “Is something good because God commands it, or does God command it because it is good?”
If you answer “because God commands it,” morality seems arbitrary: God could have decreed that cruelty is good. If you answer “because it is good,” goodness seems to exist independently of God, making God subject to a higher law.
On the Christian baseline described above, there is a third option. What is good is grounded in God’s own unchanging nature. God’s commands express that nature; He cannot command evil because that would mean contradicting Himself. Jesus, as the exact representation of God’s being, lets us see that nature in action.
So goodness is neither arbitrary (just “whatever God happens to command”) nor above God (a standard over Him), but identical with who God eternally is. Euthyphro’s forced choice is defused: God is not bowing to an external standard, and He is not inventing morality out of thin air. Instead, God’s nature is the standard, and Jesus is the visible, historical exemplar of that standard for us.
This framing also explains why Christians can meaningfully say “God is good” without judging Him by a standard outside Himself. They are not measuring God from above. They are confessing that goodness as such is revealed in God’s own character, made visible in Christ.
The logical problem of evil claims: “If a perfectly good and all-powerful God exists, there should be no evil. But there is evil. Therefore, such a God does not exist.”
On the Christian baseline, two key points answer this charge.
First, God’s goodness is not up for renegotiation. If God’s nature is necessarily just and good, and Jesus is the concrete demonstration of that, then the existence of evil cannot be used as a straightforward disproof of His goodness. Rather, evil becomes something we must understand in light of His known character, not against a neutral background. If Jesus is who Scripture says He is, then whatever reasons God has for permitting or ordaining suffering are consistent with perfect justice and love. Our inability to see those reasons is a limitation of our perspective, not evidence of divine injustice. That does not answer every emotional question, but it blocks the alleged logical contradiction between “God is wholly good” and “evil exists.”
Second, the atheist’s use of “evil” carries hidden commitments. If an atheist uses the existence of evil as evidence against God, they must treat “evil” as something more than “what I dislike.” They must mean that some events or states of affairs are truly wrong, unjust, or intolerable.
At this point, the “by what standard?” question returns. If morality is merely subjective, then the problem of evil collapses into “I don’t like the world,” which is not a contradiction for theism. If morality is objective but not grounded in God, then they must explain how these moral truths arise, why they apply to God, and how we reliably know them.
The Christian, by contrast, says: “The very moral outrage you feel at suffering and injustice is best explained by the fact that you live in a world created and ordered by a just and good God, whose image you bear, even if you currently reject Him.”
That does not force belief, but it shows that the problem of evil cuts both ways. It is not only a challenge to theism; it is also a challenge for any worldview that must make sense of deep, apparently objective moral intuitions.
Once you make your baseline clear, you can insist that criticisms of Christianity aim at the right targets. On this framework, your critic must do at least one of the following.
They could attack the metaphysical premise: deny that any such God exists, or deny that God is immutable and perfectly good. Here the discussion moves to arguments for God’s existence and the coherence of the Christian concept of God.
They could attack the Christological premise: deny that Jesus is God, or deny that He fully reveals God’s character. This shifts the debate to historical questions about Jesus, the reliability of the New Testament, and the internal claims of Christian doctrine.
They could attack the moral portrait of Jesus: grant the textual portrayal but argue that Jesus’ words and actions are not actually just and good when fairly evaluated. In that case, the critic must spell out a standard by which they judge Jesus and justify why that standard should be preferred.
Or they could concede that their own standard is non-absolute: admit that their moral judgments are ultimately based on preference, culture, or unexplained abstractions, and therefore lack the authority to condemn God (or anyone else) in the way their rhetoric suggests.
What they cannot do, if the conversation is to remain honest and focused, is assume a vague, unargued moral high ground; condemn God or Jesus using moral categories their own worldview cannot sustain; or shift definitions of “good,” “just,” and “evil” mid-argument.
By tightening the argument and making Jesus the explicit exemplar, you help keep the discussion anchored. You are saying, in effect: “I’ll gladly defend my premises as a Biblical Christian, but I won’t allow critiques that quietly borrow the very moral capital my worldview explains.”
For use in conversation, the argument condenses to this:
God’s unchanging nature is the absolute standard of goodness and justice. Jesus Christ, being God and the exact representation of His nature, fully reveals that standard in human form.
Jesus is sinless, righteous, and perfectly loving. He is not only a teacher of morality but the personal exemplar of goodness itself.
Because Jesus fully reveals God’s character, and because His moral character is perfectly just and good, God is necessarily just and good, and His judgments concerning humanity are necessarily just and good.
Anyone who calls God or Jesus “immoral” must impugn Jesus’ character, deny His identity and role, or provide an objective moral standard more reliable than Jesus and justify why anyone should trust it.
The debate is no longer a vague complaint against “a cruel God” but a focused question: Whose moral standard is ultimate, and why should we trust it?
From a Christian perspective, the answer is clear: I will stand on Jesus over the changing opinions of man.
Phenomenal breakdown of the divine command theory versus moral realism debate. The insight about how critics borrow moral capital from the very worldview they're attacking really cuts to the core of the issue. I've been wrestling with this exact thing in conversations with my philosophy prof who keeps saying divine judgement is arbit rary, but when I asked him what standard he's using instead he just sorta went in circles. It's wild how the Euthyphro dilema gets dissolved once goodness is treated as inherent to Gods nature rather than external.