Do we need God to know right from wrong? Why can't people just decide morality for themselves?
God's commandments are based on self-evident truths. Self-evident means that something needs no external proof. It is an absolute truth, understood and believed by everyone, intrinsically right and good, beyond debate or controversy.
Murder is one such absolute truth. Virtually no rational human being on earth would argue that murder is a good thing.
Stealing and lying are other absolute truths. No society that encourages murder, stealing, and lying would survive very long.
Now, I'm aware that post-modern philosophers have conjured up hypothetical scenarios where students are asked to decide if stealing medicine from a drug store to save a person's life is moral. Is it morally wrong for a husband to lie when his wife asks him if her jeans make her look fat? Such questions are clever and even entertaining, but on a serious level, they pose a dilemma for many people. Since Friedrich Nietzsche first proposed to dispense with the notion of absolute truth and raised relativism in its place, Western society, in particular, has struggled with an understanding of morality. When the measure of what is moral depends on how I feel or what is to my greatest advantage, the world devolves into chaos. Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, and every other notable monster in modern history all thought they were right. I believe that they knew right from wrong, but chose wrong because they thought they could get away with it.
Moses's stone tablets dismiss modern relativism. Self-evident truths exist in the universe. And I believe God is God, in part, because He knows these truths and lives by them. These truths are eternal, as God is eternal. They are not arbitrary rules God dreamed up to limit our freedom. God gave commandments as a guideline for a happy, successful life from the very beginning. He restored them and codified them for Moses to be able to lead a people who had escaped from a centuries-long culture of slavery, where the only truth the Israelites knew was what their masters told them. God needed to establish a moral certainty in a people who would soon have to learn to govern themselves.
The Apostle Paul wrote that God wrote His law on human hearts (see Romans 2:15). In other words, God built morality into us. Guilt is the natural, normal response to doing wrong, provided our inborn sense of right and wrong has not been tampered with.
A universal sense of right and wrong, pervasive in virtually every society and culture, points to a Moral Lawgiver, someone who understands absolute truth and the consequences of violating that truth and can tell us about it. That would be God.
I believe in God because I believe in absolute truth. I'm accountable to God for how well I align myself with the universal truths He has revealed. His goal and my goal are for me to become more like Him. My obeying absolute truth is essential to achieving that goal.
And because I fail from time to time in achieving perfect obedience, I need a Redeemer to rescue me from my mistakes. And so, I believe in Jesus.
I choose to believe in God and Jesus because to live in a world of total relativism, with no moral guidance beyond my own selfish advantage, is a recipe for disaster and sorrow.
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