Podcast: Gospel: The Wicked Heart

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The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the LORD was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.
-Genesis 6:5-6

I have spent several weeks now trying to spread some good news. It may not seem like that’s what I’ve been doing, because what I’ve said has been what most people would consider negative. But a lot of times, if you don’t know the bad news, the good doesn’t seem all that important. A patient is not going to rejoice at a cure unless he already knows he has the disease. A criminal is not going to rejoice that his case was dismissed if he doesn’t know he was charged with anything.

So I’m done being rough on you for a while. Maybe not long, but for a little while. Today I want to talk about the evil heart, but that evil heart is my own.

I was one of those “well-behaved” kids. My teachers loved me because I had good grades and never got into trouble. I was a Boy Scout, a third baseman with a good eye at the plate. I was successful in most things I tried. Academically, I was an A student (with a rare exception), but I was big and strong, so I was a good choice in physical games too. I was raised to be courteous and respectful. I was a good kid.

By my actions, it really seemed like I had it all together. And in a worldly way, I did. I was on the road to becoming successful and well respected.

I bring all of this up because I know what lurks in the heart of a good kid. I was proud, quick to anger, and full of lust. I really thought I deserved to be rich and famous, like it was my right. I never thought much about God, because why would I? I didn’t need Him.

I bought into the lie. I bought into the lie that it’s what I do that makes me a good person. If I blow up in anger every once in a while, well, I made up for it in other ways. If I sought my own ends rather than the good of others, well, doesn’t everyone? And, hey, I was better than most!

Eventually, the darkness of my heart began to come in out in my behavior. I would get impatient more often. I got upset when I wasn’t the focus of attention. I thought I deserved that. It comes out pretty innocently, but it’s not innocent at all. When I had a problem, I expected my friends to drop everything to help. When with a group, I expected everyone to talk about what I wanted to talk about.

My outward life became very closed off and dark. There was only room for me in there, so with others weren’t meeting the needs that I had, I would get mad.

I wasn’t loving anyone at all, but I expected them to love me. I wasn’t loving God, but expected Him to honor me.

This is narcissism on the level of dictators. I wouldn’t have admitted that then, but it is. It is the worst criminals in history that seek their own needs over anyone else, and that’s where I was – I just wasn’t acting on those thoughts like the worst criminals do. And you know what, this sort of selfishness is rampant in our culture. Our laws constrain most of us, but most of us have that sort of selfish and evil heart.

I can’t tell you exactly why it happened when it did, but God opened my heart to a little of His light. I was shocked and disgusted with the evil in there. For so long I had pushed stuff aside, telling myself that my thoughts don’t matter, or that it’s not a big deal. But at once I became aware of the lust, pride, selfishness, greed, and anger in my heart.

I couldn’t put it aside anymore. I couldn’t ignore it anymore. I felt so ill that I wanted to vomit. I spent the next several days crying whenever I thought of what I had made of my life.

How do you fix that? How do you make up for that? See, I was always judging my life by my actions. You know, more good than bad. But I realized that even my good deeds were often done out of selfish motives. I realized that my actions weren’t as good as I thought, because they were done with an evil heart. The good was done with evil motives, and the evil was more of a reflection of who I truly was. It was a startling realization, and it destroyed me.

The reason I’ve done this series is because I want you to see that too. It’s counterintuitive, but the more we concentrate on our own hearts, the less we realize how dirty it is in there. I want you to look at what God says about us and realize that your heart isn’t as clean as it should be. Most of the time, we’re okay with ourselves, so we expect God to be okay with us too. Except that God sees clearly all that stuff that we hide away. God is going to judge us not only by our actions, but by our words and thoughts. How is any of us going to pass that particular test?

My pride was broken, but that still left the question – what do I do with that? You can try to bend your will to fix the problems in your life, but they’ll only bring up new ones. You know, this all happened five years ago, and I still struggle with pride and anger. It’s still plaguing me. So I can try my best to be good, and I’m still going to be spouting some sort of garbage.

The truth is, you can’t do anything with it. You can’t fix it. You can’t make it up to God. You can’t repair the damage you have done. And you can’t cover it up with good deeds, because even those get tainted by your evil heart. We are selfish at heart. We are lustful at heart. We are proud at heart. We are sinners at heart. At heart, we seek ourselves rather than God. We’re guilty. We’re guilty before a Holy and just God and deserving of punishment.

Someone must to pay for my sins. God is a just God, and He doesn’t let such crimes go unpunished. A good judge doesn’t let criminals go. If he did, he wouldn’t be a good judge. It’s the same thing. God is just, and He wouldn’t be just if He let sin go unpunished. And frankly, the punishment was more than I can pay in this lifetime, because sin can only be atoned for by the shedding of blood.

Trying harder wasn’t going to save me. I wasn’t going to be able to make up for my sins. It wasn’t going to be enough to keep pushing it back into the corner of my heart. Good deeds wasn’t going to do it. It wasn’t anything I did at all. It was Jesus.

Someone has to pay for those sins. I could have spent eternity in eternal torment to pay for them. But I won’t. I don’t have to, because Jesus did.

Jesus came to earth in the form of a man, lived a sinless life, and died on a Roman Cross. He had no sin of His own to pay for in the shedding of His Blood, so He paid for mine, and not just mine. Because He is God and of infinite power and value, He has the ability to pay for an infinite number of sins, the sins of all those who repent and put their trust in Him. On the third day He rose again, insuring that I will rise again into eternal life also.

The thing that saved me was Grace. It’s the thing that saves me today, and will continue to save me. I couldn’t do anything with the evil inside me, but He took it from me. In exchange, He gave me His righteousness. In repentance and belief in Jesus we can be saved.

But the Spirit had to knock down that pride of mine before He could really start rebuilding, because before that I could barely acknowledge that I needed a savior at all.

I think that’s where most people are. They don’t turn to Jesus because they don’t realize they need a Savior. Every other major religion in the world tells you to try harder and do better, and that’s sort of the way our brains are wired. If something is wrong, then we can fix it! What God says is this – “You can’t fix it, but I can.” Jesus can fix it. That’s what He was doing on that Cross, and if it were just a simple matter of us trying harder, then His death was in vain.

The best period in my life was that time when He revealed to me that I wasn’t making it on my own. Now I stand on Grace. Where do you stand?

Podcast Episode 7: When did it all begin?

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Then the LORD God said, "Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever—” therefore the LORD God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken.
-Genesis 3:22-23

We began this series on the Creation several weeks ago, and I said then that I would like to get back to the question of whether there was a literal six-day Creation or not. As we end the series, I would like to address it.

Unfortunately, we don’t have a lot of time to address it fully, so we’re going to try to get to the root of the issue here. The Bible does describe, very specifically, a six-day Creation. There’s not much wiggle room in the words it uses. Even if you were to use the Hebrew word of “day” as an indefinite period of time, you still have the definite time distinctions when we learn that “there was evening and there was morning, the first day.”

So you can believe that, or you can believe that this section of the Bible is poetical, rendering the great Creation of the universe into more common and immediate wording. Finally, you can believe that the Creation account it just wrong. As for me, I believe the Bible is true, and, in this case, literally true.

Why do I believe the six days are literal? For a very simple reason, really. The Bible tells us that death came about because of the Fall. So if the Fall happened millions of years after the Creation of the world, then how could there have been death?

Honestly, we don’t have the time it would take to go through the evidence. There are plenty of good websites that address the science in all of this. But science is secondary for me. I have faith in God, and that changes everything.

C. S. Lewis once wondered if Hamlet could have possibly known anything of Shakespeare. The only way it could have happened is if Shakespeare had written himself into the play. There is no other way.

Let us speculate more. What if Hamlet had taken it upon himself to discover the origins of his world. Would he have come to the conclusion that a playwright in England had dreamed it all up, or would he have arrived at some scientific explanation? In truth, he would have arrived at whatever conclusion Shakespeare wanted him to find.

Hamlet, trapped within a play, could not have possibly stepped out of the play and seen the workings of the real world except by the whim of Shakespeare. It seems equally absurd that someone, trapped within space and time as we are, to look at this same space and time and declare he has proof that there is no God. It would be like Hamlet declaring that there is no Shakespeare.

Ultimately, for me it does not come down to evidence. I have met God, and He has never misled me. Science is great and wonderful. I do not want to come across as some anti-science nutjob, because I’m not. I love science, but it has historically been wrong on nearly every topic. So it tries to tell me today there is no God, when only a few centuries ago it was telling me that sick people needed to be drained of blood. God has never been wrong, never misled me, and I believe.

In our case, our Author did step into our earthly drama. He came first through prophets who declared and wrote down His Words. Next He came as a man, Jesus. We can know Him. We can talk to Him, and we can read His very Words. He has told us who He is so that we can know Him. So we can be saved. In His death He is able to pay the price for our sins. If we repent and believe in Him, He will save us.

It’s not about science. It’s about someone who invented science for our benefit, but remains outside of it. Try talking with Him. If you are really ready to know Him, then just ask Him to teach you about Himself.

Podcast Episode 6: Two Temptations, Part 2

This is a transcript of Saturday's podcast. To subscribe to the podcast using iTunes, please click here. To listen to the podcast without iTunes, please follow this link.

But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
-Genesis 3:4-5

For those of you who were with us last time, we are taking a look at the Fall in Genesis 3, where Satan, in the form of a serpent, tempts Eve to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Satan uses two approaches, and we already looked at the first, where he tries to place doubt that God even said what He said.

This time, He will use a much more subtle approach: he will question the meaning of God’s straightforward command.

He was refuted when he suggested that God did not make the command at all. Eve rightfully puts him in his place then. But that does not stop him. He says, in essence, “Oh, you’re right. God did say that. I remember now. But that’s not what He really meant. See, you have to take what He says in cultural context. It doesn’t come across that way in the original Hebrew. There’s no way you can take God’s command for that time and place and apply it to the modern world! See, God is putting us on a trajectory where one day we would be able to eat from the Tree. when He said ‘eat,’ God was really referring to an old Hebrew tradition of cutting fruit in half before you eat it, but it’s perfectly okay to eat it whole. Or maybe God said, ‘do not eat,’ but if you don’t chew it, it’s not really eating.”

I’m exaggerating, of course, but it’s to make a point. The Church today is filled with interpretation. We use all sorts of excuses to ignore the very clear Word of God. We try to claim that passages are cultural, as though the Holy Spirit meant the Word to only apply to certain people in a certain place and time. We pretend certain words do not mean other words, such as taking the phrase “sexual immorality” to mean that fornication is perfectly okay, because the word “fornication” was not specifically used. We try to say that God meant for us to evolve beyond certain passages, so that the words of His only begotten Son aren’t important anymore. We try to take the Grace of God and say we don’t have to worry about the rest of it. We make new laws and ignore old ones. We have pet passages and skip the others. We take things out of context and make doctrine out of it.

And every bit of it comes from the devil.

Every bit.

It’s the old lie: God didn’t really mean what He said. Well, I tell you the truth, “no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:20-21).

I’m going to tell you something else. It’s better that way. It’s better that we can trust the Word of God. It’s better because we’re not worthy of Him. We know it. If you think otherwise, then I urge you to take a look at your life, at the greed, lust, undue anger, selfishness, and ambition. Look at the motives of your heart, and tell me that you don’t need to fear a just God.

But we can trust the Word of God, and that Word tells us that Jesus paid the price for our sin when He died on the Cross. He died for us, so we might live. And the Bible also tells us that if we repent and believe in Jesus, that we will be forgiven.

There may be parts of the Bible you don’t like. I would ask you to try to understand them fully instead of dismissing them. Study them. See, because if we discard of the Bible, then we have thrown away our only chance at life, because it is the Bible that teaches us about Jesus.

Podcast Episode 5: Two Temptations, Part 1

This is a transcript of Saturday's podcast. To subscribe to the podcast using iTunes, please click here. To listen to the podcast without iTunes, please follow this link.

He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’”
-Genesis 3:1-3

In the third chapter of Genesis, we come to the Fall. This is where Satan comes to the Garden of Eden in the form of a serpent and tempts Adam and Eve to sin. They do, and God’s perfect Creation becomes tarnished.

It is interesting to me what Satan says to tempt Eve away from God. Basically, he has two approaches, and they are approaches he still uses today, which makes them important to understand. We’ll look at the first today.

“Did God actually say that?” he asks.

What a challenge! He even misquotes God, just to plant doubt. “Did God command to not eat of any tree?” God said nothing of the sort! It is only the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil that is forbidden. He is taking the Word of God and misquoting it for effect.

He is probing, trying to figure out what Eve knows. Does Eve remember the command of God, or is there wiggle room in her memory that he can exploit? In truth, there is wiggle room there. Eve responds that they are not even allowed to touch the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, which God never said. He only said not to eat of it.

But even though Eve does not remember the command perfectly, she does pass this test. She does not eat when Satan says these things. Not yet, anyway. I wonder if we pass this test. Frankly, I hear this challenge made against God’s people all the time. Did God really say that?

Did God really say that it is only through Jesus that we can be saved? Did God really say that wives are supposed to submit to their husbands? Did God really say that we should not have sex outside of marriage? Did God really say that we shouldn’t desire to be rich?

And sometimes the challenge comes misquoted, as Satan does to Eve. Did God really say that money is the root of all evil? Well, no He didn’t. He said that the love of money was the root of all sorts of evils. This next one is a favorite misquotation amongst atheists to discredit the Bible. Did God really say to not kill and then command the Jews to wage war? Well, God actually said to not murder, which is distinctly different than the word “kill.”

The world calls the God of the Bible all sorts of terrible things. They call Him a barbarian, a butcher, a chauvinist, a racist, a hate-monger. In all of these things they are asking, “Did God really say . . .” But Satan will often twist the words of God to claim something that God never claimed.

The challenge is going to come at us from everywhere: Did God really say this? The only way we can answer the question is to know what He said. He gave to us the Bible so that we would know exactly what He has said.

Let me tell you something God really did say: “but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8).

Every day we fall for the temptations around us, but God does not want these sins to remove us from His Glory. So He sent His Son to die in our place. Satan tries to bring us into sin and trap us there, but the Blood of Christ can bring us out of that trap. If you repent of the ways you have fallen for those lies and believe in Jesus, you will be saved. Jesus said “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). Believe in Him, for He is the way to life.

Podcast Episode 4: In His Image

This is a transcript of Saturday's podcast. To subscribe to the podcast using iTunes, please click here. To listen to the podcast without iTunes, please follow this link.

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
-Genesis 1:26-27

A brand, for good or bad, is something that means something to us. We see a brand, whether on clothing, food, or even cattle, and we understand it. It brings up certain emotions and ideas. I, for one, avoid certainly clothing brands like the plague. The reason is very simple: I bought clothes with that brand and they fell apart. Other brands I trust quite a bit more.

We brand things to tell something of their source. A movie studio will put its brand at the beginning of each movie to let you know who was behind it. Even the title of this podcast, Christian Pilgrimage, is a brand of sorts. It is the same name we use for the written blog, and the same as our website, www.christianpilgrimage.org, because we want you to know where these come from, that they are connected.

It is fascinating to me that God put His brand on us, in a way. He made us in His image and likeness. He set us apart from the rest of the Creation as His own. Of everything we see and touch and smell in this world, no matter how wonderful, nothing else has the spark of the eternal as man does.

And we can see the quality of His workmanship in ourselves. So intricate are the organs and systems that make us work.

Yet one thing amazes me: how we image-bearers of God can so abuse the honor. We were given the world, and we have trashed it! We were given minds that can conceive of wonderful things, and we use them to wallow in filth. We abuse each other with violence, sin against one another sexually, lie and steal. We are self-promoting and egotistical. We are selfish and greedy. We have everything, and our response is to hoard it. I grow so disappointed in my own failings, friends. I have been given such a great gift in His image and likeness, and I have fallen so often.

If the owner of a company finds out that his cherished brand name is being abused at a certain factory, that they are making shoddy products and running his name into the mud, what will he do? He will go to the factory and fix the problem. This is exactly what Jesus did. The Son of God came to us to guide us back to where we belong. To restore us.

This is the great thing about this story. We were made in the image and likeness of God, but we went astray in sin. So Jesus comes in the image and likeness of us, and yet without sin, to bring us home.

Jesus told a story of a landowner who sends his servants and finally his son to his property to deal with some wayward renters. The renters kill the son, they were so drunk off their own power. That is what we did with Jesus. The created thing did not even recognize the Creator, and we killed Him.

Does that mean it’s too late for us? God’s Son is dead, so is that the end? Does He quit and leave us to our own devices? No, because God loves us. On the Cross, Jesus bore the punishment for our sins, and then He rose again to insure our place in eternity.

If we repent and believe in Him, we will be forgiven. We will be raised up like Jesus and given a place with God forever. We will be restored to what we were always meant to be.

We are His image-bearers, after all.

Podcast Episode 3: Light from Nothing

[ This is a transcript of today’s Christian Pilgrimage podcast. To subscribe to the podcast using iTunes, please click here. To listen to the podcast without iTunes, please follow this link.]

And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.
-Genesis 1:3-5

I don’t know how many times I’ve read this. You know, it’s Genesis 1, and even the most undisciplined Bible readers get at least that far. But recently, I noticed something I had never noticed before. I just read from verse 3, where God creates light. But as I read on, I noticed that it wasn’t until verse 14 that God creates the sun. He created light on day one, and the sun on day four.

A lot of people much smarter than me have noticed this a long time ago, and there has been a debate about it for some time. Where did the light come from? Those who take the Bible as myth use this to attack it, and others will come up with explanations to defend it.

But I think a lot of people miss the point here.

Even in the Church, there are a lot of beliefs about Creation. Some believe in a literal six-day Creation. Others believe in a God-guided evolution, and the “days” in Genesis aren’t literal. God willing, I would like to discuss these theories in an upcoming episode.

These theories are all fine, but there is one thing God will not let you do. He will not let you explain God out of Creation. Right from the beginning of the Bible, He is going to make you choose – do you believe, or do you not?

Perhaps you can fit a theory of evolution into the Bible. Maybe you can explain all the miracles away. Maybe you can even try to rationalize the Resurrection. But in this first chapter of Genesis, God is going to ask you to either accept Him or reject Him, and there is no way around it. You either believe in a God that can make a result before a cause, or you don’t. You either believe in a God that can make light before the source of light, or you don’t.

It is an important question to ask, because this God that created an effect of the sun before the sun itself also created you, and He created you to live forever. This question is critical, because this Bible that makes this extraordinary claim at its beginning also says a lot about you. It says that only absolute perfection will earn us heaven. Have you sinned? Have you ever been greedy? Have you ever lied? Have you ever been unduly angry at someone? Have you ever lusted? Then you’ve fallen short of the glory of God. “The wages of sin is death,” and we have all earned death.

But the same God through which the universe was created came to earth in the form of a man, Jesus. He died on the Cross for us. In that death, He is able to take all of our sins upon Himself, and He is able to give us His righteousness. If we repent and follow Him, we may have life.

What do you think? Do you believe there is a God up there with the power to make light without a source? A God that is holy and blameless? The Bible tells us incredible things, not the least of which is that there is a God there who loves us, despite all the evil we have committed. There is a God who loves us so much that He gave up His own Son so that we can be reconciled to Him.