Tuesday, November 20, 2018

Pursue Righteousness: Calling Evil Good

Society has become so gifted at confusing evil with good. It all started in the garden with Adam and Eve and it continues today. 

Our present-day social righteousness is a complete contradiction from the righteousness talked about in the Bible. It has been said, “A wrong deed is right if the majority of people declare it not to be wrong.”  This very principal has set in motion the shifting of our standards over the generations. The Bible says, “What sorrow for those who say that evil is good and good is evil, that dark is light and light is dark, that bitter is sweet and sweet is bitter (Isaiah 5:20). The standard God sets for us has not changed and the Bible tells us that one day we will be held accountable for our sins (Romans 14:12). 

Evil makes its way into our lives each day. It presents itself as harmless.  We often wrap it up in a pretty little bow but sin is divisive and dirty. And it often leaves us to lie to ourselves as we call it tolerance and confuse it with love. 

We have to step back and ask ourselves how we have become so deceived. How have we fallen into the trap set for us by the enemy?  A lot of it boils down to our sinful desires. The need for immediate pleasure instead of God‘s desires that lead us to believe that evil is good.

 It is so easy to make excuses for what God blatantly calls sin. A lot of that comes from people choosing to say that morals are relative. It has been said that, “As the occasion, so the behavior.” We’ve reached a place where our morality has been modified to fit our sinful behaviors instead of our sinful behaviors being determined by our morality. Today nothing is solid. People will shift from one extreme to the other because they lack Truth. The present-day ideology is twisted and distorted so badly that it is near impossible to know Truth from lies. 

Self-centeredness is also a factor in this idea that evil is good. It makes us more prone to call evil good because we tend to think that if sin or immorality brings a profit or gives pleasure it has to be good. Even if we know it’s wrong. 

However, if we were really listening to the voice of Jesus we would hear him say, “Seek the kingdom of God above all else, and live righteously (Matthew 6:33).  And what does living righteously look like? Second Timothy says, “To run from anything that stimulates youthful lusts. Instead, pursue righteous living, faithfulness, love, and peace. Enjoy the companionship of those who call on the Lord with pure hearts” (2 Timothy 2:22).  And in James we read, “You must all be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to get angry. Human anger does not produce the righteousness God desires. So get rid of all the filth and evil in your lives, and humbly except the word God has planted in your hearts, for it has the power to save your souls. But don’t just listen to God‘s word. You must do what it says. Otherwise, you are only fooling yourselves" (James 1:19-22).

Sadly we look at Christianity like we look at everything else in they world…by asking what’s in it for me? We think that God wants to do what we want of Him and that His plan is to give us the desires of our heart. We have basically turned God into a genie. We also rationalize. We make excuses for the sin in our life or we try to blame it on other people or other things. Even Adam, in the garden, tried to blame Eve for the choice he made. So this issue has been around for a long time. 

The question becomes how do we correct our warped sense of thinking?  How do we remove the blinders that the enemy has so cleverly placed upon our eyes? 

The only answer out there is the Bible. The Bible is the only thing that we have to tell us what God considers good. Evil exists within everyone of us yet it disguises itself as good while controlling and deceiving us (Romans 3:10). But it is only by the death of Jesus on the cross that we are good.  That we are made righteous. His death was necessary because man without God is a contradiction and an atrocity.  This very thing is why some people love evil and then hate what is good because they are still so attached to their own sin. 

It can be difficult to make our way back to Truth when the enemy has placed such blinders over our eyes. However, Scripture is very clear to those things that God hates. You don’t have to look too hard in the Bible to find them.  God hates pride, He hates a lying tongue, He hates hands that shed innocent blood, He hates hearts that devise evil plans, He hates evil thoughts that eventually lead to sinful actions, and He hates those who create discord among their community. (Proverbs 6:16-19). 

I think we would each do well to sit down and carefully think about the things that God hates. The hypocrisy we create by believing that it is always someone else that is evil gets us into this whole vicious cycle of calling evil good.   Because at the end of the day I believe it all begins with pride and our own sinful desires to be right and to do as we please. 

"Examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Or do you not realize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you? -unless indeed you fail to meet the test!"

2 Corinthians 13:5

No comments:

Post a Comment