Today, if I’d like, I can have a take on what people think about what an NBA owner thinks about what Chinese basketball fans think about what another NBA owner thinks about what the people of Hong Kong think about their communist overlords. Or I can tend to the log in my own eye.
Jesus’ message about the one with the log in his eye trying to help the one with the speck in his eye isn’t just about measuring different sized irritants in our eyes or different sized sins in our hearts. It’s message isn’t simply, “Be sure to rebuke only those who are less godly than you are.” Rather it reminds us of the importance of giving our attention to our own weaknesses before we worry about the supposed weaknesses we see in others.
CS Lewis made a similar point in his Screwtape Letters. Therein he had Wormwood, the senior demon encourage Screwtape, the junior demon to encourage his “patient” to cultivate an amorphous and powerless love for distant abstractions while disdaining a love for his annoying neighbor in the pew beside him. We do the same with sin. We find it so much easier to raise up our moral outrage against people and sins that are far from us. It’s a rather handy distraction from ourselves and the sins that are in us. Angry Greta can hate with the heat of a thousand suns those nameless capitalists that are fiddling while Gaia burns, and in so doing pay no attention to the large sinner footprint she is laying down on her way to eternal warming.
We should not be surprised when unbelievers do this. But aiming close, we find we have much the same problem. I too find it easy to rage against the sins of people I’ve never met, and in so doing construct a delusion that they are worse than I am. The good news, on the other hand, is that there is so much more I can do about my own sins and failures than I can do about geo-politics in the NBA and Hong Kong, however brutal things may be there. Whether it is a log or a splinter, by looking into that mirror which is the Word of God, I can, with the help of the Holy Spirit, take it out. Not so I can then give my attention to the sins of others, but that I can turn my attention to the other sins of mine.
When you and I determine to debate over the relative merits of him, whomever he may be, whichever side I may take, we have both taken ourselves out of the one arena where we can do the most good- worrying about our own sins. Yes, of course there’s a time and a place to warn of wolves, to mark the divisive man. That time, however, isn’t in the midst of our battle with our own wolves, nor when we are being the divisive man. Let us pick up the prophet’s mantle, and prophesy against our own failures. And God will have mercy.
It is surely possible for different people to share the same goals, but to employ different strategies. What I am increasingly seeing, however, is how easy it is for strategies and goals to meld together. We all want, I trust, to grow in grace and wisdom, to bear the fruit of the Spirit. We can all agree also, I trust, that careful study of theology can be used as a means to that end, a strategy if you will. What if, however, the strategy and the goal get so entwined that we end up measuring our spiritual maturity not by the standard of godliness, but by the standard of our libraries?
I first noticed this shift in the pro-life movement. Everyone, presumably, wants the babies to be protected. Along the way some have adopted what might be called an incrementalist strategy- we work on stopping the most heinous abortions, and eventually move on to the “exceptions.” For a time that meant pro-lifers were encouraged to support both legislation and candidates that allowed for these exceptions. What totally flummoxed me, however, was in 2000, when the National Right to Life Committee not only encouraged us to vote for George W. Bush, but bestowed on him the title “Pro-Life.” This for a man who expressly, straightforwardly affirmed his conviction that the federal government ought to protect the “right” of doctors and mothers to murder babies conceived in the process of rape or incest. This is the “pro-life” candidate that evangelicals and pro-lifers voted for in droves.
More recently we have seen whole swaths of the “pro-life” movement embracing and laboring for informed consent laws, waiting periods, and clinic regulations- all bits of legislation that conclude, after every hurdle has been jumped- “and then you can kill the baby.” After nearly forty years of this “strategy” we have sunk to crafting, lobbying for and electing officials in support of legislation on how, when and where babies can be murdered. We have confused our strategy and our goal.
All of which tells us how important goals are, and how dangerous strategies can be. My goal with respect to me is that I would become a more godly man, that I would more faithfully obey the law and more joyfully embrace the grace of God. On the life issue the goal isn’t to limit the availability of abortions, nor reduce the number of circumstances in which they might take place. The goal isn’t even that the sanctity of life would be more widely recognized, nor that more babies would be saved. The goal is that God would be honored, in the faithfulness of His people, and in the protecting of His image bearers. Life is not sacred. God is sacred.
We need to learn what Joshua learned outside the walls of Jericho- we don’t seek to enlist God on our side. Instead we seek to serve Him, the Captain of the Lord’s Hosts. Our calling is to fidelity. He will bring the victory. May we go forth into this battle, as with every battle, not following our strategies, but following the Ark of the Covenant- His law, His grace, His presence. And the walls will come tumbling down.
That question is likely above my pay grade. I don’t pretend to know what the deepest weakness is, but I do have some thoughts on one great weakness- we don’t believe God. We don’t believe God when He warns us with respect to His will, telling us what we must do, and what we must not do. Neither do we believe God when He tells us what we are in ourselves, nor when He tells us who we are in Christ. And, we don’t believe the beauty and the glory of all that He has given us and all that He has promised us. I recognize those weaknesses in the church because I recognize them in myself. That said, I know I come by it naturally. My first parents had the same problem.
What we do with all that God has told us is reduce it, make it small, make it reasonable. We believe we’re mildly sinful. We believe God’s law has some wisdom to give us. We believe our sins are forgiven. What we don’t believe is that we are wretched sinners, still in a titanic struggle with our old nature. What we don’t believe is that every command of God is a gift, an invitation to joy. What we don’t believe is that He is our Father, that He loves us infinitely and immutably, and that we will be with Him forever.
All of which works itself out in our worldliness, in our anemic worship, in our stunning lack of joy, in our jockeying for position with the world and bickering over standing among ourselves. It works itself out in our bad theology, in our bad behavior and in our bad psyches. It is fed by a deep lack of spiritual discipline and a hunger for “safe” preaching. It is driven by pride, the same pride that brought to pass Satan’s downfall.
What then shall we do? The ultimate answer to every, “What shall we do…” question is always the same- repent and believe the gospel. To repent is to believe God about who we are, and where we are. It is to turn to Him. To believe the gospel is to believe His promises, and to live in light of them. What we don’t need is yet another new program designed to help Christians repent and believe. What we need is the same old program designed to help Christians, and those outside the church, to repent and believe. That program is the faithful proclamation of the gospel, the faithful practice of the sacraments and the faithful exercise of church discipline. What we need for Christians to be better Christians, to become more like Jesus is for the church to be a better body, to become more fully the bride of Christ. And what we need for the church to be a better body is for Christians to be better Christians. There is no magic potion, no secret formula, no second blessing sitting on a shelf. There is Jesus, sitting on His throne.
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There is a potent cure for rubber-necked ghouls. You know the pattern. An accident takes place on the interstate. The lanes are cleared, but traffic remains backed up. Why? Because too many people when passing by slow down to take a look. The cure, of course, is success. That is, those who look for carnage find that finding it isn’t all too positive an experience. They look only long enough to see, and then look away, repulsed. I understand the need to look away far better than the need to look in the first place. Why would anyone want to see anything that ugly, that brutal, that disturbing?
Though in our sin we like to argue for aesthetic relativism, the notion that there is no objective standard of beauty, that beauty is subjective, in the eye of the beholder, our lives tell a different story. There is no rush, for instance, down at the I-Tunes store to download the sounds of animals being slaughtered. There is no local radio station that specializes in sundry versions of “Fingernails on Chalkboard.” The same is true of visual beauty. Precious few of us adorn our homes with medical waste. I’ve never looked above a friend’s mantelpiece and found a painting of maggots getting to work on rotten meat. That which remains of the image of God in us, whatever our ideology, will turn to beauty and away from ugliness. Which may explain why we are so prone to look away from our own ugliness. It is because we are made in God’s image that we hate to see just how badly that image has become distorted in us. We know the difference between what we are and what we are supposed to be.
Because we are twisted and distorted, however, our desire in the face of our disfigurement isn’t to be made well but, like our parents in the garden, to hide. We cover up our festering wounds rather than seek healing for them. We cover, we hide, we treat death with fig leaves. Sadly, even we who are being made well, who have not only been covered by the blood of Christ but are being remade into His image, fall into the same temptation. We cover our sin in the gauzy fabric of rationalization, in the gaudy fabric of distraction. We construct ghastly effigies of ourselves, parading them around in front of our leprous selves crying out “Clean! Clean!”
Thousands of years ago the Canaanites placed their little babies in the fires of Molech. Why? Because they thought the terrible demonic god that they served demanded it of them. They sacrificed their children and wept. Today, in our own country, in our own neighborhoods, we sacrifice our children for mere ease, and we yawn. We do not know how sinful we are because we will not look in the mirror- the Bible. It shows us the very character of God, as seen in the very law of God. But we, vipers that we are, distort both, turning God into a tame lion, and reducing the law down to “Be nice.” If this is all God requires of us, that we be nice, then our sin, our failure is only that we aren’t as nice as we should be. Jesus then comes to atone for our failure to be sufficiently nice. We’ll die, our lack of niceness is forgiven, and we will be made to be nice forever. What a nice little gospel.
Our problem is far more profound. We’re the kind of people that receive the miraculous grace of God, who are fed by Him, cared for by Him. He leads us, directs us, taking us to a land flowing with milk and honey. When we get there He has to tell us, “Now, my beloved bride, when you come into this land that I have prepared for you, don’t worship Molech like your neighbors. Don’t kill each other. Don’t go next store and seduce the wife of your neighbor. Be sure, my children, not to take cattle from each other. Don’t lie about your friends.” We didn’t listen. Instead we crucified the Lord of Glory.
We fight a three front war against the world, the flesh and the devil. And because we lose so constantly we see the world as merely misguided, our flesh merely given to too much chocolate, and the devil himself comical and tragic. The reality is that the world is a massive, grinding, mauling, machine that swallows us whole, chews us to bits and spits us out the other side. The reality is that the devil is a raging dragon, a t-rex and a Great White. His demons are like swarming piranha. His forces are like an army of flesh eating, fast moving zombies that will stop at nothing to consume us. And our flesh- it is the love-child of the world and the devil. That same gnawing, raging won’t-be-denied hunger of self lives in us, just beneath our skin. The old man is not an old man but a Tasmanian devil, a howling wolf with blood dripping from its fangs. And we still manage not only to parade ourselves like Sunday School teachers, but fool ourselves into thinking that’s who we are.
We’re in a bad way. The answer to our problem, however, is rather simple. It is the answer to every problem- repent and believe the gospel. We don’t get well until we come to understand how twisted we are. The beauty only begins when we are given the grace to stare deep into our ugly. Jesus didn’t come to save the well, the healthy have no need of a physician. Those who think they need little will receive little. We need to look deep into the depth and horror of our sin, because that is where Jesus lives. Jesus didn’t come to meet us where we think we are. He came to rescue us from what we really are. His cross was not planted in our nice places where we don our Sunday best. His cross reached all the way into hell.
Our condition is altogether simple- we are wicked. Because we are wicked we seek to complicate the equation. We come up with scientific names to describe our selfish desires. We cast blame on our parents and their spotty understanding of the psycho-sexual implications of potty-training. We turn our base impulses into diseases at best and virtues at worst. We excuse, rationalize and marginalize. We do everything save the one simple thing we need to do- beat our breast and cry out, “Lord be merciful to me, a sinner.”
This, in turn, ought to be what drives the antithesis, how we understand our calling to be separate from the world around us, to be set apart. When we wake up to our worldliness, when we desire to come out from the world, the devil (along with our own flesh) is right there to encourage us, to remind us to thank God that we are not like other men. When we are proud at how different we are from the world around us, that is when we are most like the world around us. Pride started all this horror. What sets us apart isn’t our lack of sin, but the acknowledgement of our sin. We are called to be those swiftest to face what we are. We are the community of the repentant.
Our God has determined to manifest His glory not in making us heroes. He has determined to do so by being the hero. He does not swoop down and snatch us away from the bad guy. Instead He bows down and snatches us away as the bad guy. I am the monster. This is the way of His kingdom. Thus we march into His World, storming the gates of hell with this message- Jesus saves sinners. Repent and believe. If He can save me, He can save you. Hallelujah what a Savior.
