“God is indeed good
to Israel, to the pure in heart. but as for me, my feet almost slipped; my
steps nearly went astray. For I envied the arrogant; I saw the prosperity of the
wicked” (Psalm 73:1-4).
“Did I purify my
heart and wash my hands in innocence for nothing? For I am afflicted all day
long and punished every morning. If I had decided to say these things aloud, I
would have betrayed Your people. When I tried to understand all this, it seemed
hopeless until I entered God’s sanctuary” (Psalm 73:13-17).
“When I became embittered
and my innermost being was wounded, I was stupid and didn’t understand; I was an
unthinking animal toward You. Yet I am always with You; You hold my right hand.
You guide me with Your counsel, and afterward You will take me up in glory. Who
do I have in heaven but You? And I desire nothing on earth but You” (Psalm
73:21-25).
“My flesh and my
heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart, my portion forever. Those far
from You will certainly perish; You destroy all who are unfaithful to You. But
as for me, God’s presence is my good. I have made the Lord God my refuge, so I
can tell about all You do” (Psalm 73:26-28).
The
longer I walk with Jesus, the weaker I become in myself. The longer I walk with
Him, the more glorious and strong He becomes to me. I have said many times that
the Bible is the most honest document I have ever read. I believe it to be the
inspired Word of God and I believe it is infallible because it is inspired by
and it revolves around an infallible Person. The Bible shows us the truth about
God and ourselves and those who wrote the Bible did so through the illumination
of the Holy Spirit. He is God and He reveals God to our spirit and, in doing
so, also shows what the absence of God looks like in the human condition. Sin
isn’t just poor morality it is the utterly depraved absence of God in humans.
Apart from Christ we are fallen, this
implies that we were made with a specific design that we, the entire human race,
have fallen from. Ecclesiastes 7:29 says this: “I have discovered that God made
people upright, but they pursued many schemes.”
When man
fell in disobedience to God, he aligned himself with the enemy of God and so
took on an image that at its core is self-glorifying and anti-God. Envy,
jealousy, murder, lust are all the product of idolatry and Jesus said all of
these proceed from the human heart. He sees sin in us even before it is
conceived in our actions. All of these sinful tendencies are against God and
His purposes. People speak of evil in “the world” or in “society” when we want
to speak of it as a principal with which we are not associated. I do believe
evil has a source and it entered the human heart by agreement with a lie. I can
understand someone not believing in the devil if that person doesn’t buy into
the Bible. We live in a humanistic society that believes largely in the theory
of people being inherently good and that we just need better ideas to reach our
potential and reform the bad parts of society. But there is no sound
explanation for why people do and think evil things in humanism. There are answers
to these dilemmas that I have heard and they have some plausibility: mental
health conditions, patterns of abuse, etc. I get that. I am exposed to that
daily in the field I work in and I’m all for helping people but the root cause
of why such conditions in people even
exist remains unanswered. The best of us know how to restrain bad instincts but
we cannot deny that we have tendencies that are wrong.
There is
another question that I have never had answered outside of the Bible: why do people
die? The best we can do is detect the causes of death and decay in our bodies
but we cannot ultimately escape death. One day, we’re all going to die. The human
remedies we have are great for enjoying the quality of life we live but they
are temporary. Everywhere we look in
nature we see things that are temporary. They are beautiful in some seasons but
everything we behold in nature has a beginning and an end. God told Adam after
he sinned in disobeying God that the ground was going to be cursed for Adam’s
sake. I believe nature points to a beautiful Creator and its imperfections are
there to remind us that things are NOT as they should be. Some blame pollution
or climate change and I’m all for taking care of resources but I think anyone
would agree that nature with all of its destructive “natural disasters” hasn’t
ever been entirely stable.
We live
in a fallen state of being in a fallen world.
Why?
Man,
seduced by a real devil, decided to reject God and choose for himself what is
right and wrong. God told Adam not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of
good and evil (never mind that He commanded Adam TO eat from every other tree
and enjoy the entire pre-fallen creation). Man was not intended to know evil. When
I say “know” I mean he came to experience the absence of God by rejecting God with
the free will that God gave him. God told Adam that he would surely die if he ate
from that one tree. But He gave Adam everything else to enjoy and cultivate in
loving relationship with Himself. The purpose for man’s existence, Biblically
speaking, is for us to know His love with our whole beings and glorify Him by
loving Him back. God created an environment in which humans could live out
their ordained purposes with gladness. Humans cannot rid ourselves of the
desire for the ideal for which we were created. But we cannot be reconciled to
that ideal without being reconciled to God Himself.
The primary
problem that we have isn’t bad morality or decaying bodies – those are
indicators. Jesus said He came into this world to save because we needed
saving. He didn’t cleanse the whole world of death and decay and teach us
better morals. He came and He suffered judgment as a perfect human being. Our
primary problem is that we are under judgment. All of the evil in the world and
the decay will be purged. God is not limited and His plans will stand. There
will be a new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells, the Bible tells us. God’s primary agenda
however is to restore what He purposed before the foundations of this world and
that is to have relationship with human beings. He did only what He could do:
the Creator entered creation to suffer and die and rise again. As our mediator,
He restored us to our original position in God as His Beloved. The Bible says
that those are “in Adam” will die and those who are “in Christ” will live.
Those who put their hope in Jesus Himself will live. They will live with a
quality of life that Jesus called “eternal life” and that He defined as “knowing
the One True God and the One whom He has sent” (John 17:3). Remember that I said that when man fell, he
experienced evil and death. Those who are in Christ are “new creations” in Him
and they experience what true goodness is – the presence of God inside of them.
There
are feelings associated with this such as peace and joy. Any peace and joy in
this world is as temporal as the shifting seasons but peace with God is
eternal. It’s the assurance that we are what God desires us to be because He
took our sin and judged it at the cross. When Jesus took the abhorrent
suffering of the cross, He was standing in the gap for the enemies of God – us.
God in His love satisfied His justice on our behalf so that He could make us
complete. He didn’t just pay for our sinful deeds but His death showed me that
I could die and truly live. I know that sounds weird but we are either in one
of two states of existence: dead in sin or alive to God. You can’t be both. In order to be restored to what God intended,
we have to die and this evidenced by renouncing not only sinful deeds but our
sinful self and that we cannot do
without God’s help. We cannot die to sin any more than we can give ourselves
life. Dying and being risen spiritually is what the miracle of becoming a child
of God is. Christ’s death to sin becomes our death and His very life becomes
our life – it is the very essence of being united to someone and that is only
experienced with God through Christ. This is what the sacrament of baptism
traditionally meant – going beneath the water and coming out is to be public display
of an inward spiritual reality called resurrection.
I
started this by stating that the more I walk with Jesus, the weaker I see
myself and the stronger I see Him. The psalmist recognized this principal when
he saw that his own heart and strength fail but God is the strength of his life
and his portion forever. The psalmist wrestled with what isn’t right in this
world and what wasn’t right in himself – until he entered the sanctuary of God.
Until he was reminded that everything is from God and for God – nothing is
outside of God’s ultimate, final authority. The psalmist withheld saying what
vexed him because he knew it would injure others but he wrestled transparently
with God until his perspective was renewed. Then he realized that God Himself
was his goodness and that all truly desired was to be found in God.
The portion
of those who trust in God is His presence.
Those who trust in Christ can have and be satisfied with eternal life here and
now. Wrestling with what we see in this world and the temptations from our
depraved nature and the spiritual oppression of the devil is a part of living
in faith. The apostle Paul cited weakness, needs, pressures, insults – insert everything
else that a believer deals with in living against the current of this fallen
world – as the very platform through which he experienced the sufficiency of
God’s grace and learned to be strong in Christ. We are meant to experience His
sufficient grace not just for own sakes but because as we genuinely experience
God’s grace we are better purveyors of it. The psalmist said, “I have made the
Lord God my refuge, so I can tell about
all You do.” What God does in our lives when we trust in Him is meant to be
told to other people because it is proof that God Himself is the answer to the
real problem that we have.