Who doesn’t want to be decent? Who wakes up in the morning and says to themselves, Today I will be evil . . . Today I will treat people poorly . . . Today I will be unkind? I don’t know anyone who does that, and yet every day we are inundated with acts of discourtesy, unkindness, and, yes, even evil. I imagine that police office in Minneapolis didn’t wake up that fateful morning and say to himself, Today I am going to kneel on a black man’s neck for several minutes for no good reason until he dies. And yet, he did exactly that. I have never once woken up and said, Today I will behave poorly and do bad things, and yet, every day of my life I have fallen short of my stated intentions—to be kind, to be honorable, to be decent.
The evidence is in. Our natural state, our default position, is one of self-serving motivations and unthinking natural reactions to provocations and influences. We nurture our nature, and our nature is base and carnal. We are, as the Bible says, sold into sin (Romans 7:14). Time and time again, despite our best intentions and our lofty declarations of better intent, we return “like a dog to its vomit” (Proverbs 26:11) to doing what comes easily and natural to us. We act out our deep-rooted prejudices, racial and otherwise. We exact our own eye-for-an-eye revenge, forgetting that God has reserved the right of vengeance to Himself (Romans 12:19).
The Lord invites us to use our minds, to reason together with Him (Isaiah 1:18), but we forego the higher workings of the mind to dwell in the lower chambers of the emotions—bitterness, anger, self-centeredness—and we react instead. Every inclination of our hearts is towards evil (Genesis 6:5), and like the beasts of the fields, we follow our natural instincts instead of the higher path marked out for us by Christ. We are Nebuchadnezzer stripped of his royal nobility and roaming in the wild, devoid of his senses and intellect (Daniel 4:33).
In our modern times, we lie to ourselves about this, and we convince ourselves that our prejudices, our unkindnesses, our evil behaviors, our reactionary tendencies, are all justified because of the wrongs we have suffered, or because of the evil “they” have committed. But, “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.” We believe that lie because we want to believe it, and we hold to it so tightly that in the end, God will leave us with it (Romans 1:24).
Oh, we have forgotten, haven’t we, that God called us out of all this confusion and distress (Revelation 18:4). Not only did he call us out, he himself paved the way for us to rise above our base and evil natures, to choose better. As Paul asked rhetorically, “As wretched, as base, as I am, who can deliver me from the body of death” (Romans 7:24, my paraphrase)? The answer? We are delivered from baseness, from wretchedness, by Jesus Christ, who “makes a way in the wilderness” (Isaiah 43:19) and who, Himself, is “the way and the truth and the life” (John14:6).
The way of the natural, unredeemed man, is to return evil for evil, to act unthinkingly upon his prejudices and base emotions, to wallow in his animal nature. But that is not who we are who have claimed Christ and who have been claimed by Christ. My prayer, for myself and for all who might read these words, is that we will truly “cast all our cares upon” Christ (1 Peter 5:7), so that we might truly experience the “peace of God which exceeds our ability to comprehend,” and that His peace will be a hedge around both our hearts and our minds (Philippians 4:7).
