Word of Salvation – Vol. 44 No.28 – July 1999

 

God and Our Human Misery

 

Sermon by Rev M. P. Geluk on Lord's Day 3a (Heid.Cat. Q&A 6)

Scripture Reading: Genesis 1:26-31; Psalm 8

Suggested Hymns: BoW 420; 8a; 389; 533

 

Beloved Congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ.

We discover what our human nature is like from the biblical doctrine of sin.  Without this teaching from God's Word as to what we are really like, we will never become enthusiastic about Christ.  Everyone needs to be saved by Christ but not everyone wants to be saved because they don't know or don't realise what a sinful person they are.  When we have been made aware, then we are very interested in Christ and we learn what a wonderful Saviour Christ really is.  Knowing that makes us want to serve the Lord in thankful obedience.  So sin, salvation and service all tie in together.  And as we now look more specifically at the doctrine of sin then we need to keep on believing that Christ has provided salvation and that God is glorified when we serve Him out of love and obedience.

Lord's Day 2 says that knowing about our human misery comes from the law of God.  God commands that we love Him totally and our neighbour as ourselves, and when we carefully take stock of what that implies then we see that the law actually exposes our sin and sinful inclinations.  We can live blissfully unaware of us dishonouring God and not seeking the well-being of others until it is brought to our knowledge that God says, “but this is not what you are supposed to do.  I want you to live this way and not that way.”  It's the law of God that brings us knowledge of our sinful human nature.  Our sinfulness was there all the time but God's law made us see it.  However, to see it is one thing, to know why we are sinful is quite another thing.

1.  Our Searching Questions

 We are talking about these kinds of questions: where did that sinful nature in us come from?  How did our human misery start?  Every one of us must have asked that question in one form or another.  Perhaps you asked it in frustration when you can't overcome that secret sin.  Why can't I stop this sinful habit?  Perhaps you asked it when you lost your temper again, when you quarrelled again, when you wanted to do good but ended up doing evil, or when the wrong you did was not what you wanted to do but you did it anyway.

We search our hearts as to why we so often fail to be the nice, good person that we like to be and we sometimes wonder if we can help being the way we are.  I remember a teenage daughter being told off by her mother for her wrong behaviour and her unpleasant attitude.  The girl knew that she had been hard to get on with but found it difficult to improve her behaviour.  In her frustration she angrily protested to her mum that she had not made herself, she couldn't help the way she was.  It was actually her parents' fault for, after all, she was their daughter.

Although the daughter ignored her own responsibility, what she said was partly true, of course.  She had inherited her sinful nature from her parents, like we all do.  But it wasn't exactly the right moment to remind her mother of this.  And blaming our parents is of course not going to solve the problem.  For from where did our parents get their sinful nature?  Why are so many people in our society doing the wrong things?  Why do people commit terrible crimes?  How can it be that even neighbours do evil when you had always thought they were decent people?  Why do church members sometimes do bad things that make you shake your head in disbelief?  Yes, why do I, why do you, do things that fill us with shame?  Why can't we love God totally and always?  Why can't we always care for our neighbour as we care for ourselves?

You can imagine that sometimes the thought creeps into peoples' mind – it is God's fault.  Did God perhaps create people so wicked and perverse?  Christians believe that God is the Creator and sovereignly rules over all things.  We live because He gave us life; we die when He takes our breath away.  God directs our steps, says the Psalmist.  God knows our thoughts before we even consciously think them.  God has made us in our mother's womb.  Did God perhaps not do such a good job then, when He made us?

It's a terrible question to ask.  But when we can't get our act together, when we fail without meaning to, when we say the wrong thing and do not intend to, when we are just not the person we want to be, then haven't we all thought of God, who gave us life and on whom we are so dependent, and wondered, did God make us like that?

Then there are also the taunts of non-Christians.  They, too, see the crookedness in human nature.  They also are faced with their own failures.  They, too, see the evils of our society and, indeed, of the whole human race.  So they say to Christians, “this God you believe in – if He made people, then He didn't do a very good job, did He?"

In fact, there are people who once considered themselves believers but lost their faith in God when they saw what people did to each other in war.  People have left the church when they saw what some church members had been up to.  Some young adults decided to give Christianity away because of the hypocrisy that took place in their own homes.  Some people just don't want to become Christians because they are not impressed by what they see some Christians doing.  And each one has the same reason – how can I believe in a God who says He is all-powerful but who allows His creatures to act the way they do?  They draw a straight line from the behaviour of people to God who is supposed to have made the world and its people, and they say, “I can't be a Christian any longer," or, “I can never be a Christian!"

So, there's the problem.  What's the answer?

2.  Our Origin

The Bible tells us in 1John 1:5 that “God is light, in Him there is no darkness at all."  Now that alone already makes it simply impossible to hold God responsible for the wickedness and perversity that we find in human nature.  Repeatedly the Bible emphasises that God is altogether pure and holy.  It is totally unfair to God to draw a straight line from peoples' crooked behaviour to God Himself.

Let us be reminded again what God Himself says in His own Word about the way He made Adam and Eve, our first parents.  God says in Genesis that “on the sixth day He created man in His own image, male and female He created them” [1:27].  And a bit further on it says, “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.”

Now there is our origin.  We are from our parents and they from theirs and so on, all the way back to Adam and Eve.  God is the Father of all people.  He formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed life into him and the man became a living being (Gen 2:7).  Then a bit further on we read that God made a woman from one of man's ribs and brought her to the man [Gen 2:22], and so you have the first male and female.  God made them in His own image and God said it was very good.  Therefore our origin is impeccable.  It's spotless.  Yes, there is a line that goes from people back to God.  He is the Creator and we are the creatures.  But a lot has happened to that line since it left God.  God is light and not darkness, He is pure and not evil, He is holy and not crooked.

The rest of the Bible repeats the claim that God created man, male and female, in His own image.  It is mentioned again when the generations are listed from Adam to Noah in Genesis 5.  Man having the image of God is also the reason why we must not kill other people [Gen.9:6].  Animals do not have the image of God and you can kill them for food.  But people are different.  The apostle Paul repeats the claim that man has God's image in him [1Cor.11:7].  The apostle James warns that we must not curse man for he has been made in the likeness of God [James 3:9].

So one would think that people would have no difficulty with their identity.  You would think that they see themselves as being different from the animals.  When we believe the Bible to be true, then we can say, "I am a member of the human race whose beginning came from God.”  In Luke's gospel there is a genealogy, which is one of those lists of names that traces the generations through history.  It starts with Joseph, the husband of Mary, and it goes all the way back to Adam, and concludes by saying that Adam was the son of God [Luke 3:23ff].  That's where we began.  God made us.  That's our origin.

There was nothing at first, but then God created the world and He put Adam and Eve on it and it was all very good.  We are either a male or a female and that's the way God planned it.  Paul explained to the philosophers in Athens that God made the world and everything in it.  He is the Lord of heaven and earth and He gives all men life and breath and everything else.  From one man he made every nation of men [Acts 17:24-26].

But like these philosophers of a long time ago, many people today are still just as confused as they were about their origin and identity.  They ask, who am I?  How can I be happy?  And they have no real answer.  Some time ago a book came out called 'Sophie's World.'  It's a handy book in that it explains in very readable English what the main thinkers in the course of history have thought about man and his world.  It is also a pathetic book in that the claims of the Christian faith are looked upon as unreal, whilst all the other claims are looked at with great seriousness.  But none of the non-Christian claims give any real answers.

We often hear that the suicide rate has increased, and that is very sad.  But when people hear repeatedly that there is no God, that there are no absolutes, that we are really only a higher form of animal, that life is nothing more than survival of the strongest, and that there is nothing after death, then suicide almost becomes attractive.  After all, when life is tough, when you feel no one loves you, when you're addicted to something you'd rather be free from, when you're old and sick, or can't get a job, and when you're all depressed – then, no wonder people start thinking more about death.

Evolutionary thinking – and that is really what we are talking about – is guilty of a lot of things.  When God is pushed aside and the Bible is said to be irrelevant, then the alternative belief is that man's origin is from the apes.  But that's not an answer, for apes have come from somewhere, too.  So without a faith in creation, you have to go back and back.  Evolution believes in a most vague beginning.  Somewhere, something developed into something else, and that again into something else.  In the process, with lots of missing links, man is supposed to have evolved.  But there is no hard evidence to date that man came from the apes, let alone the question where the apes came from.  Even the evolutionists have to admit to this.

But it is not just some squabble about the origin of man.  It is much more serious than that.  If there is no Creator God, then who sets the rules?  Who determines what is right and wrong?  Man does!  But man's rules are not working.  People see that and it is making them depressed.  The wars go on, the violence does not stop and the greed and exploitation do not stop.  Human nature continues to be as sinful as it has been since The Fall.  History tells us that very clearly.  But according to evolution, things ought to be climbing up and up.  From a cell into a fish, from fish to land creature, from land creature to ape, from ape to man, and man to what?  To a still higher level, of course.  To becoming brighter, smarter, more educated, better equipped, better relationships, and so on and so forth.  But then how come the present state of society, of human nature?  Can't they see that people are not getting better in behaviour?  Can't they see that evolution is a lie?

Look at the Bible.  It says our origin is from God.  In the beginning man reflected God's being.  God is righteous, holy and full of knowledge.  Man was like that.  Men and women were the crown of God's creation and made to reflect the purity of God.

3.  Man's Destiny

We can see our remarkable beginning even more clearly when we see what purpose God had for man.  God blessed man and told him to be fruitful, to increase in number, to fill the earth and subdue it.  Man was told to rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground [Gen.1:28].

I am reminding you of all this because we are dealing with the doctrine of sin that explains our human misery.  And we are working out where all that came from.  And with what has been said so far, it becomes increasingly obvious that our sinfulness did not come from God.  We can't blame Him because the overwhelming evidence from Genesis is that God made our first parents very good.  Our beginning was wonderful.

Psalm 8 also says that.  It says that God made man a little lower than the angels, and He crowned man with glory and honour.  God made man ruler over the works of His hands, God put everything under man's feet (vss.5-6).  Now that is powerful stuff!  Notice that God did not say that man would gradually climb to such heights over long periods of time.  No, God's image in man meant that right from the day man was made, God gave him dominion over land and sea – to rule, to govern, to take care of the creation, right there in the beginning.

Now why are we saying all this?  What is the use of reminding ourselves of this glorious beginning when the fall into sin ruined it all?  It seems as futile as reminding the beggar searching the rubbish bins for food scraps that he was once a millionaire.

Well, there is a very good reason for us being reminded of our wonderful beginning.  In Jesus Christ, the Redeemer, God brings it all back to those who believe in Him.  Yes, after the Creation came The Fall, but that's not the end.  God set about to undo the terribleness of sin.  He does it through Christ His Son.  The Catechism spends a lot of time explaining it all.  And it is all there in Scripture.  But we must just point to it here because we need to see right now that to be saved in Christ is to be recreated.  It is to be re-made.  The first Adam failed, so God sent a second Adam and He did not fail.  We inherited the sinful nature of the first Adam and it brings us misery and death, but we can also receive God's gift of grace and receive the nature of the second Adam, and He gives us happiness and life.

So it does us a lot of good to look at our origin.  In Christ it is being restored in this life it will remain still imperfect but when God has finished all of His saving work, then He will renew the earth as well and everything will be made new.  It will happen when Jesus comes again.

So, with all that in mind, let us not lose the plot.  Let us not be filled with despair.  Let us not be like those who have no hope.  Let us not be like the evolutionists whose theories about our origin are so unreal and who are clutching at straws when they think man will keep on evolving to higher levels.  The only bright future will be with Christ.

Look what happens when man no longer wants to be ruled by God.  You have atrocities like those committed by drunken soldiers in wars.  There's rape, torture, cruelty and death.  Every war is guilty of it.  All sides have done it.  It went on in the past and it happens in the present.  Look at drug addiction, turning godless made creatures into zombies.  Look at AIDS.  Look at suicides.  Look at what the love of money does to people.  Look at the breakdown of family life, look at the divorce rate.

Where has the dignity of being a man and a woman gone to?  Their beginnings are with a holy, pure God.  God intended a wonderful destiny for us.  But people have managed to make a lot of things ugly.

In a way, it is helpful to take stock of man's sinfulness because it gives us the opportunity to say that God did not make us like that.  Don't blame Him.  But we do not just look back and say, "how sad that all that wonderful beginning is gone."  No, we look to Christ and also say, “in Him I can be a new creature."  Christ's gospel tells us how we can all truly know our Creator again.  His gospel shows us how we can love God again with all our heart.  His gospel spells it out how we can live with God in eternal happiness.  All for His praise and glory!

So, in learning about sin from the Bible and seeing its reality in our own human nature, let us not sink into despair.  Neither let us become indifferent about our human natures' being sinful.  Let us admit that The Fall has broken our relationship with God, and let us repent about that; but then let us embrace Christ in faith and see how, through Him, that relationship with God can be restored.  In Christ let our relationships with other human beings blossom again with hope and happiness.  In Christ we are optimists of the best kind.

The best, of course, is yet to come.  All things will be renewed at Jesus' coming.  But let us not just dream away until that time.  People still have something of the image of God in them.  Let us remind them of it and invite them to trace their roots to God the Creator, and not to some primeval slime.  Let us offer them hope and say, by God's grace men and women can be born again.  Let us, even in this imperfect world, not sit down in ashes but bring back the claims of God.  Even though man's image of God is broken, let us keep on reminding each other of the rules of God.  They are for the well-being of people.  And thank God for human inventions and new discoveries.  Yes, praise God for man's accomplishments and abilities.  But remind yourself and others that we can't pin our hopes on them.  Man without God will often use them selfishly and even to help bring about the destruction of others.  We can say that good things are good.  They are there because man is from God.  But realise that many good things from God have been used against Him.  Man the caretaker, the ruler, the one placed in charge by God, has become a rebel.  That's why there is brokenness and chaos.  But Christ has come to repair the damage.  In Him all things are made new.

Our sinfulness, then, is a terrible thing but it does not go all the way back to God.  Our beginning was very good.  Let's be thankful for that.  The fact that we have Genesis 1 and 2 in our Bible helps us to believe with greater conviction what Jesus the Saviour can do to us when He recreates us and remakes us after His image.

Amen.