And
even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave
them over to a debased mind, to do those things which are not
fitting; being filled with all unrighteousness, sexual immorality,
wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder,
strife, deceit, evil-mindedness; they are whisperers, backbiters,
haters of God, violent, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things,
disobedient to parents, undiscerning, untrustworthy, unloving,
unforgiving, unmerciful; who, knowing the righteous judgment of God,
that those who practice such things are deserving of death, not only
do the same but also approve of those who practice them. (Romans
01:28-32, NKJV).
In
the news recently there was an enhanced view of Earth from a
spacecraft 4 billion miles away, which on the scale of the solar
system is just “down the block”. Our planet appeared as a pale,
blue, barely visible dot in a vast sea of emptiness. The “Big Blue
Marble” was rendered as a mote of dust from that perspective.
That
our barely visible “third rock from the sun” is the center of the
spiritual universe seems to be an absurd proposition when looked at
from the merely physical side of things, but what does size have to
do with essential importance? The smallest microorganism can wipe out
whole populations.
Despite
that blue dot's surrounding emptiness, God views us as so significant
that He sent His Son to save us; to enable us to be transformed from
unrepentant sinners into sons and daughters of God. Remember that
when someone tries to argue that we are accidents of time and chance,
residing on a tiny sphere on the edge of a nondescript galaxy in the
backwaters of the Universe. When viewed without God, we appear as
nothing, but from His perspective we are the second most important
things in existence. The first is His Son.
And
while the physical space around us may appear empty, what God sees
from Heaven's viewpoint is a planet whose resident human population
is full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, and
evil-mindedness that
expands and rises to the heavens. Understanding
that perspective requires us to acknowledge first that God is holy
and righteous, and in Him there is no darkness at all (1John 1:5). We
need to realize that everything about us that we might consider good
and right is skewed by sin. We can't see straight, but God does and
His view is that ...we
are all like an unclean thing, And all our righteousnesses are like
filthy rags; We all fade as a leaf, And our iniquities, like the
wind, Have taken us away. (Isaiah 64:6, NKJV).
The
good news is that while God is perfectly righteous and holy, and
cannot abide sin, He is also a God of mercy and grace and love and
has provided us a means to escape the inevitable and eternal
consequences of our sin through His Son's substitutionary death on
the Cross. As Paul writes later in Romans:
But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (Romans 5:8, NKJV).
But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (Romans 5:8, NKJV).
It
is instructive to understand a bit more of what while
we were still sinners
means, for it shows us how unlovable we are in ourselves, and
broadens our appreciation of that love God demonstrates toward us.
Before
looking more deeply into Paul's continuing list of human evil, it is
necessary to keep in mind that not everyone is guilty of doing
all these things outwardly, but that each one of us, if left to our
own devices, is naturally
capable of every item in the list. That we may go to our graves not
having actually committed some of these is only through God's grace
and our own lack of opportunity. Also we must remember Jesus' Sermon
on the Mount in Matthew 5-7, wherein we are taught that, from God's
perspective, thought and intent make us just as guilty as the done
deed. Without Christ, therefore, we are utterly helpless in our
depravity.
By
full of envy,
the Apostle is describing that state of our being which makes us
crave
what we do not have, and despise
those who do.
Being
full of murder
means that while we may not physically take someone's life, if our
thoughts or feeling could kill, corpses would be strewn across the
path of our life. I believe that it is only after we are saved that
we can begin to understand how truly murderous our impulses are, but
there our hints even in our speech, amply sprinkled with casual
references to “murder” and “kill” those people or things that
get in our way.
Full
of strife paints
the picture of our inherent, reflexive impulse to be contentious,
argumentative, and divisive because we are incapable of living in
peace. It is not that this strife is intended to accomplish anything
on our behalf, though it may incidentally get us what we desire, it
is that, like maliciousness,
it is something that bubbles up from the cauldron of our natural
badness. And while the unrepentant may succeed in controlling this
impulse somewhat, it takes nothing away from the fact that being
contentious is who we are and what we do.
When
Paul includes full of deceit
in
his list of evil attributes he is emphasizing something about us that
we all know to be true: the impulse to lie. Even very young children
never have to be taught how to lie since they are born with that
knowledge. It is a natural as breathing. And unless instructed
otherwise, that impulse will pervade all their interactions with
others.
You
can also see the collective effect of deceit in this fallen world.
Lies permeate our modern culture, from preaching Evolution as fact
and Abortion as good, to Christianity as intolerant and regressive.
When you think about it, the concept of lying, of communicating
something not supported by reality, is a form of mental illness, and
yet from the human perspective, we believe it to be perfectly normal.
That is because we are all perpetrators of deceit. It is reflexive as
breathing.
Does
this mean we are all afflicted with mental illness? Yes. Sin is a
sickness that afflicts first the mind, and then metastasizes into
other more obvious areas of our lives. Of all the warnings in
Scripture against evil, guarding against deceiving and being deceived
is the most prevalent. And from where does this evil originate? Jesus
Himself provides the answer:
“You
[the Pharisees, and by implication, all mankind] are of your father
the devil, and the
desires of your father you want to do. He was a murderer from the
beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there
is no truth in him. When he
speaks a lie, he speaks from his own resources, for he is a
liar and the father of it.
(John 8:44, NKJV).
Finally,
Paul writes that unredeemed humans are full of
evil-mindedness. This is
from a Greek word that means all-pervasive malignity. Think of a
lesion or tumor in the physical body. When it is diagnosed as
malignant, it
means it is life-threatening, and usually in a slow and agonizing
way. Evil-mindedness is evil for evil's sake, meaning there is no
other purpose from which it derives its energy. It is like that
mindless tumor, sucking the life out of someone by destroying the
healthy tissue cell by cell. It is the natural state of being of an
intelligent life form without God. It is far more than lack of
empathy. It is overt malevolence.
The
ultimate expression of this in modern society is the serial murderer,
someone who seeks out victims for the pleasure of inflicting upon
them agony and death. Our culture attempts to explain such behavior
with a raft of high-sounding psychological terms, but this is mostly
to deflect the simple truth that it is the result of sin and evil,
and that attempt at deflection itself is an act of deceit that
perpetuates and facilitates the very evil it attempts to explain. It
does so by postulating that it is a neurological condition amenable
to some, as yet, undiscovered treatment, rather than a spiritually
terminal affliction only treated by being born again.
Given
Paul's divinely inspired list thus far, we should not be surprised at
the very bad things we see going on in the world around us. What
should surprise us more, is that in this life, things are far from
being as bad as they could be, and that is God's grace and mercy, for
which we should be increasingly grateful.
Love,
Dad.