Jesus once asked some lawyers a simple question, “Why
are you thinking evil in your hearts?”[1]
That is a good question.
The other day I was on my scooter at the drive up window of
my bank. I was third in line. As I sat waiting, I thought, “I wonder if it’s weird for the car in front of me to see me on the
scooter behind her? I am outside the normal confines of a car.”
Then my
thoughts changed directions.
“I
wonder if she thinks I could just walk up to her passenger window and demand
her money.”
My thoughts quickly flashed as to what that would look like,
including popping back on the scooter and making my getaway. (I had been told
once that a man held up that bank and escaped on a bicycle.)
Then I snapped back to reality. “What am I thinking about? This is crazy!” The motorist in front of
me drove away.
The truth is, it was
crazy.
But haven’t we all had thoughts like that before? I mean dark,
off-the-wall thoughts? What is worse, haven’t we all done shameful or guilt-producing things?
I’ve heard it said, the one doctrine of Christianity that you
cannot argue with is the doctrine of sin. We are all sinners with corrupt hearts.
We have all experienced it. We’ve been on the receiving end and we’ve dished it out.
We have all experienced it. We’ve been on the receiving end and we’ve dished it out.
Although my thoughts that day were evil in nature, I did not
sin. Had I dwelt on them, and eventually acted on them, it would have been sin.
But just having the fleeting thought without premeditation, and then rejecting
it, was not a sin.
The Bible says these evil thoughts come from our hearts.[2] My
criminal thoughts originated in what theologians call my “sin nature.”
Spiritual philosopher Dallas Willard writes about
the sin nature. “The condition of normal
human life is one where the inner resources of the person are weakened or dead,
and where the factors of human life do not interrelate as they were intended by
their nature and function to do… The person is effectively turned away from his
or her own good. The individual may and often does wish to be good and to do
what is right, but he or she is prepared, is set, to do evil. It is what the
individual is ready to do without thinking. In this condition, the mind is
confused, ignorant, and misguided. The emotions are simultaneously dominant of
personality and in conflict with one another. The body and the social
environment are filled with regular patterns of wrongdoing and are constantly
inclined toward doing what is wrong.”[3]
If Willard is right, we’re all out of whack. We’re crazy.
People can argue about who Jesus was and what he did. They
can argue about teachings of the Bible. They can say this religion is better
than that one. They can say there is no god.
But the one doctrine that cannot be argued against with intellectual
integrity is the doctrine of sin. It’s our universal experience and is captured
in phrases like, “Nobody is perfect,”
“I don’t know why I did that,” or “My bad.”
If it’s true that we’re imperfect and bad, then what else in
the Bible might be true?
Maybe this statement: “…he
shall save his people from their sins.”[4]
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