Scripture tells us that those who believe in Jesus have been freed from the corrupting power of sin, and it no longer has a power over them. However, many of us don’t experience it quite so easily, and the question is: why?
Could it be that we keep going back to sin even though we’re free from it? But yet not, however, in the obvious ways we think we do?
This is part 2 of my experimental podcast reading from my book “Holy Sin” - a book about coming back down to earth on the question of living a holy life as a Christian. Part one can be found here.
Lofi Theology is an experiment in podcasting where I will read theology to a unique soundtrack. No big production. No hype. Just relax on a Friday evening and love Jesus more. New episodes on Fridays, 10pm CST. Subscribe for updates!
Romans 5 - 8 speaks of the “old man” of sin, and I think this does not refer to the person who commits obvious sins - things we would call “immoral”. In fact the “old man” is the person that seeks to become like God, just as Adam and Eve did. This is the way the scriptures begin to uncover what sin really is, at its core. The serpent did not tempt Adam and Eve with lust or political power or tax-free cash under the table, but with the idea of being like God (Genesis 3:5) - knowing good and evil, having the ability to discern it, and ultimately being a master and judge of such things. What tempted Adam and Eve was not unbridled hedonism but, in fact, what tempted them was righteousness.
A righteousness based on themselves.
Many people probably don’t carefully consider the Bible calls the fateful tree that Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Why knowledge? Well, the Jewish word used there has several meanings, but it appears that it has to do with discernment and judgment. Becoming judges of good and evil, like God, is what tempted Adam and Eve.
Our problem is we don’t want to be human, we want to be God. But God didn’t want us to know good and evil - rather, he wanted us to know him. Only in that relationship is there true righteousness. The problem now is that we know good and evil but we can’t do anything about it! Because we don’t know God! We know what goodness is but we’re powerless to live by it! We prove this again and again and again. And because we can't live up to it, we often try and redefine what goodness is, in such a way that evil can be called good, because our chief problem is we want to be our master and judge and we want to justify ourselves all the time as having hit the standard. We’ll sooner blind and twist ourselves than admit that we’re unable to live up to what is good. The trouble is, even when we redefine things, we often find we still can’t live up to our redefinition! We even fall short of our own ever-evolving standards! Whatever we do, we always set up hard task-masters who we judge ourselves by and judge others by. When you look carefully you note that even those who claim to be morally free are actually restrained and constricted by their own worldview, which makes demands of them some way or another. Legalism has many shapes and forms.
Often to hide our own inability to actually do good we’ll look for some kind of evil out there that we can rise up and protest against, which is often when social justice goes wrong. Self-righteousness eventually leads to no righteousness at all. Violence is often the result of a person or a party or a society seeing itself as more righteous than another. History proves this again and again - those who are the oppressed soon become the oppressors.
What is my point? It’s this: the “old man” that has been crucified with Christ when we come to Christ, as the New Testament frequently puts it, is actually the old man of human self-righteousness. It’s the old man that believes the flesh, the self, can live up to righteousness. It's the old man that insists it can be like God and be a judge and be righteous on its own - that it can be justified before God, itself, and others, by its own works and own brilliance and own holiness. It is Man’s pride. It is the old man of excuses, of justifying why we behave like we behave, and pointing fingers at others to be either at blame or to not be able to live up to the standard; or making excuses about our lack of ability or intelligence, or our background and upbringing; and never actually taking responsibility for our decisions. It’s the old man of self-glory, the old man that looks to climb the ladder of holiness and shine like the stars--to be as righteous as God; so righteous that even God will congratulate them.
How much of the idea of becoming righteous tugs on you? Does it not seem right that we ought to be such good people that God congratulates us on our goodness? Isn't that what the Christian life is all about? Aren't I supposed to be progressing so that God Himself will be amazed at how self-sacrificial I am? At how loving I can be? At the good example of virtue I am? Isn't this the kind of thing we're supposed to be aiming at? Isn't my righteousness what glorifies God?
The answer to these questions is very surprising, when you start digging into the motives behind them. God did not invent a ladder of holiness, man did. All our paths and struggles to righteousness are often simply paths of humankind’s core problem--to want to be like God and have knowledge of good and evil, and be the master of these.
All man-made religions face the problem of self-righteousness. The goal of these religions is to provide something we can do that will help to satisfy our inner desire to be righteous ourselves, to show God that we are righteous; or, in the case of some types of atheism, perhaps show ourselves as even more moral than God! But don't think it's only "those people" in man-made religions (or non-religions) that are like this! Christians are many times so interested in outward signs of works and experiences instead of relationship and trust (which is what faith is) that we get caught up in all sorts of things that are resounding gongs and clashing cymbals, but are not really love--even if we call it love.
We can get so concerned about whether we dress the right way or whether we vote for the right party or whether we believe the right philosophy or whether we support the right country or whether we are a part of the right movement or whether we go to the right church every week; or whether we believe the right theology or whether we protest for the right cause or whether we're those who "truly stand for the powerless" and "speak truth to power" better than "those other people", that we silence the small still voice in exchange for our own grandeur and righteousness. We are so full of ourselves. I've never really seen much activism that doesn't soon degenerate into a harbinger of collective self-righteousness instead of ushering in the righteousness of God. As Paul says in Romans 2: “For on whatever grounds you judge another, you condemn yourself, because you who judge practice the same things… therefore you who teach someone else, do you not teach yourself? You who preach against stealing, do you steal? You who tell others not to commit adultery, do you commit adultery? You who abhor idols, do you rob temples?” (Romans 2:1; 21 - 22.) These are areas where we start to see the contrast between God’s love and the world’s self-righteous love.
Christianity is primarily not a moral religion--something that we need to come to terms with if we want to live in the Holy Spirit. We can’t water-down Jesus’ teachings to moralism and activism and being in the right club. Jesus was pointing to things that are far more profound than that! God’s righteousness is not moralism. God’s righteousness goes beyond morals! God’s salvation is about moving us toward his Son, Jesus, who is His perfecting love.
So this is how we ought to see sin differently if we want to actually face the real problem with how we view and live in God’s holiness. Instead of seeing sin or the Biblical word of “flesh” as obvious acts and thoughts of immorality, we need to go deeper into the scriptures and see the glorious and scary truth that our real problem is not often our immorality but, in fact, our morality. Our real problem is actually our righteousness. Our real problem is the belief that we have to climb some sort of ladder of virtue; that we have to make ourselves into holy people; that we can be like God and be moral and righteous and good. This is the work of the flesh: we are full of ourselves, when we need to be full of God. We believe that we can be like God--knowing good and evil, and able to decide what is good and choose to be good without God. Why we think we can do this is actually beyond explaining. When we think about it carefully, the reason why we think we can be like God is, well, “just ‘cause”. It is nothing but arrogance.
Every moral failure of humankind is the result of the self-righteousness that lives at the center of us all. It is what corrupts us. Our refusal to accept that we need God to be human and to come to Him leads us further away from true righteousness and further down the road of corruption.
Share this post