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.