And God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.[i] God created a beautiful world and placed into it two magnificent humans, Adam and Eve, invited them to enjoy a personal relationship of intimacy with Him, and told them to multiply. Humans were in an ideal relationship with their Creator and with each other. All the ingredients for a perfect society were present. The world was a beautiful place inhabited by loving and gentle people who, at least at the outset, trusted and obeyed their God and took good care of each other. All was right with the world. Now we live in a world of violence, poverty, crime, homelessness, hunger, war, injustice, terrorism, and all sorts of unspeakable evil. Who wrecked the world? Our culture seems to be sold on the idea that some group of evil people wrecked the world, though there is no agreement as to who those evil people might be. Some put the blame on the conservatives or the liberals, the socialists, the communists, or the capitalists, the Democrats or the Republicans, or maybe those who adhere to some other religion, or people who have no religion, or those of a different race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation. We are the “good guys” who wring our hands and complain and stand by helplessly while the “bad guys” wreck the world. If only they would come around to seeing things our way, so says our culture, the world would be a better place. Shame on the bad guys. We good guys can pat ourselves on the back because we “like” all of the right things on Facebook and show appropriate displeasure toward those with whom we disagree. God bless “us” for blowing the whistle on “them”. The human dilemma is reduced to a battle between competing ideologies, and that ideological battle is further reduced to billions of one-liners plastered throughout social media. This is the ultimate trivialization of our culture. The biggest tragedy in all of this is that many Christians have bought into this odd way of thinking. Especially here in the U.S., we Christians can play the “blame game” as well as anyone else, maybe even better. When Christians start to pit “them” against “us” then we have declined to a low level indeed. We have forgotten our own Gospel of redemption. We have lost site of what it means to be a Christian. When Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden of Eden, all of humankind sinned. We all rebelled against God, corporately, as a human race. We all were sent out of the Garden as the human family. We all wrecked the world. We are all guilty. When we ask “Who wrecked the world?” we need only to look in the mirror to see the answer looking back at us. If we are humans, descendants of Adam and Eve and therefore part of the human family, then we are all part of the problem, and we are all guilty. We all have a part in wrecking the world because we have all rebelled against God and chosen not to love, trust and obey Him, thereby bringing destruction into what God created as a world that was both beautiful and good. There is simply no other way to read Genesis. When Jesus died on the cross it was so that he could redeem humanity, not just the “bad guys”. Jesus came as the “second Adam”, a second representative of the human race, to undo the sin of Adam and to reverse the effects of that sin. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all shall be made alive.[ii] Do we admit that we are the bad guys who wrecked God’s good and beautiful world?[iii] Then we are acknowledging our need for Christ’s redemption. Do we blame the wrecking of the world on someone else? Then we are saying that we don’t need Christ’s redemption. Jesus himself said that he came not to call the righteous, but sinners.[iv] If we don’t recognize that we are fellow sinners, fellow earth-wreckers, fellow humanity-destroyers, together with the rest of humanity, then how can we have a part in the redemption supplied by Christ on the cross? Jesus taught a parable about the Pharisee and the tax collector: And He also told this parable to certain ones who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and viewed others with contempt: “Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee, and the other a tax-gatherer. The Pharisee stood and was praying thus to himself, ‘God, I thank Thee that I am not like other people: swindlers, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax-gatherer. I fast twice a week; I pay tithes of all that I get’. But the tax-gatherer, standing some distance away, was even unwilling to lift up his eyes to heaven, but was beating his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, the sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other; for everyone who exalts himself shall be humbled, but he who humbles himself shall be exalted.” [v] Yet somehow we Christians have made ourselves schizophrenic. On the one hand we look at the cross and we say “that was for me”. Then we look at the condition of the world, the poverty, the wars, and all that is wrong with humanity, and we say “that’s their fault”. Am I the only person who sees this as a glaring contradiction? If I claim that Christ died for me, then I am admitting that I am co-responsible for the horrors of the world. If I claim that it’s “not my fault”, then I am implying that I don’t need the death of Christ on the cross. We can’t have it both ways. One way that some Christians have tried to get around this is by making an artificial distinction between personal sins and social sins. We say that we are guilty of personal sins (against God alone) but not social sins (at least not those of the world-wrecking and humanity-destroying magnitude). Those are the sins of the terrorists, the violent criminals, the evil world leaders and the warmongers. That’s a false dichotomy for two reasons. 1) Any personal sin will have a negative effect on those around me, and through the ripple effect will have a negative impact on society. A sin against God will always hurt another person and will always have some negative effect on society. 2) We are all part of sinful society and are complicit in its ways, whether our complicity is overt or more subtle and passive. We can’t live in the world without somehow being complicit in the evil that is woven into the fabric of society, for we participate in the structures of that society. We may contribute to the overall sin-sick environment in small ways, for example, by an angry or selfish attitude, but what may seem “small” to us makes us in no way less than contributors to what society has become. Didn’t Jesus teach us that if we are angry with our brother it’s the moral equivalent of murder? But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be guilty before the court; and whoever shall say to his brother, ‘Raca,’ shall be guilty before the supreme court; and whoever shall say, ‘You fool,’ shall be guilty enough to go into the fiery hell.[vi] Put a thousand angry people together and you’ve got a riot. Put two groups of angry people into the same place at the same time and you’ve got a war. Social sin is just personal sin multiplied. We are also complicit when we do not do the good that we are capable of doing. Whether it’s by sins of commission or by sins of omission, we are all responsible for what the world has become, so let’s not let ourselves off the hook. It doesn’t work. Not if we are going to take the Sermon on the Mount seriously. OK, so what if we were to live on a remote mountaintop somewhere, isolated from the rest of the world, so far from society that we neither influence nor are influenced by the surrounding society? Even if living in a vacuum were possible (and it’s not), we would still be guilty of our share of humanity-wrecking sinfulness simply by virtue of the fact that we are part of the human race, which has been and continues to be in rebellion against God. We see a biblical example of this principle in the prayer of the prophet Nehemiah: Let Thine ear now be attentive and Thine eyes open to hear the prayer of Thy servant which I am praying before Thee now, day and night, on behalf of the sons of Israel Thy servants, confessing the sins of the sons of Israel which we have sinned against Thee; I and my father’s house have sinned. [vii] Nehemiah was confessing the sins of those who lived in Jerusalem, but he was nowhere near Jerusalem and hadn’t been there for many years. He could have easily said “it’s not my fault”. Yet he identified himself with his people, so that their sin was his sin. Nehemiah understood that the sin of his people was his own sin, even though he hadn’t personally participated in their sinful behavior. He was guilty because He was part of a guilty group, so he identified with his own people and confessed their corporate sin as though he himself had participated in the sin. This runs counter to our American individualism, but it’s a biblical way of thinking. We take ownership of the sins of the people with whom we identify. Jesus showed us the way by taking responsibility for sins that he had not committed when he died for us at the cross. Jesus was the perfect and spotless Lamb of God, completely without sin, but so thoroughly had he identified with humanity that our sin became his sin, the sin for which he died. The cross is all about identification. For Christ also died for sins once for all, the just for the unjust, in order that He might bring us to God, having been put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit…[viii] One of the reasons that Christianity has become so trivialized in our age is that we no longer have a deep appreciation for the cross. We don’t have a deep appreciation for the cross because we don’t have a deep awareness of our own sinfulness. If someone else is a really bad, world-wrecking and humanity-destroying sinner but I am just a small sinner who never wrecked anything, then someone else needs the cross more than I do. If I start to think that way then I will soon start to devalue the death of Christ on the cross for me. Without a deep appreciation of God’s mercy that is rooted in a deep awareness of my own sinfulness, the cross will be trivialized in my own life, and my Christian experience will be superficial. I will become a cheap salesman for a Gospel that has never affected my soul in the deepest places, and no one will want it. My sharing of the Gospel will be less than genuine, and I’ll be reduced to repeating a formula. My Christian experience will lack the ring of authenticity. I am not able to invite others into a process of forgiveness and healing that I myself have not entered. I am inviting us to embrace with consistency the worldview that we claim to hold as Christians. We need to begin with a profound appreciation for our unspeakably magnificent and glorious God, for the beautiful world that God created, and for the perfect society that would have appeared on the earth had it not been for our sinful rebellion. Then we need to look with horror at the results of our willful rebellion against our good and holy God, shudder at the ugliness of the destructive effects of our own sinfulness, and take ownership of our own utter sinfulness. We need to recognize, with great remorse, that we are fellow sinners against God and against humanity, fellow earth-wreckers. Then we need to return to the cross with repentance and humility, with a deep and remorseful sense of appreciation for all that God has done for us by sending his Son to identify with us in our broken humanity and to die in our place, wearing our nametag, so that we might live. Only then we can celebrate the fact that we, the guilty, world-wrecking, humanity-destroying sinners that we are, have been fully forgiven and eternally reconciled to God, that it took nothing less than the bloody death of the Son of God to accomplish this, and that God was willing to do the unthinkable because of His great love for us. Let this grip us to the depths of our innermost being. Then we will stop blaming “them” because we will have an authentic message that stands as a true antithesis to everything this world has to offer. If we think that we are justified in blaming some evil group for the evils of society, then we have been greatly deceived. We speak and live our message authentically not by differentiating ourselves from other human beings but by identifying with them. The point of Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector is that we are “like other people”, equally in need of God’s mercy, and we need to own that. Otherwise we are implicitly saying that the death of Christ is not as necessary for us as it is for others, and we reduce Christianity to a knock-off version of the real thing. The Gospel that we proclaim ends up being a counterfeit of what Jesus intended for it to be, and we, the Church, end up being a counterfeit of what he intended for us to be as the company of the redeemed, eternally proclaiming the mercies of God and inviting others to share in His mercies. Scripture quotations taken from the NASB. [i] Genesis 1:31 [ii] 1 Corinthians 15:22 [iii] See Blamires, Harry. (1978). The Christian Mind. Ann Arbor, MI: Servant Publications (see especially chapter 2, “It’s Awareness of Evil” on pages 86-105). [iv] Luke 5:32 [v] Luke 18:9-14 [vi] Matthew 5:22 [vii] Nehemiah 1:6 [viii]1 Peter 3:18
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