Confronting Community Sin

As a believer, your sin is your responsibility to confront and remove from your life as you follow God. As a believer, the sin of others in your community is also your responsibility.

One of the hallmarks of a true follower of Christ is that they actively attempt to rid themselves of their sinful practices as they are sanctified by their relationship with Jesus, the evidence of which is seen as sinful behaviors fade from a person’s character and are replaced with the Fruits of the Spirit.

And in concert fashion, the distinction between a true community of believers and a community of “church-goers” involves the removal of selfish and sinful behaviors, reactions, and outlooks in the local community and the addition of selflessness, outreach, and good will towards the local community.

But contrary to what many might believe, the responsibility to push away sinful behavior and bring in righteous behavior in the church does not belong to merely the pastoral staff or those whose sin is more easily visible, but to all members of the church.

The Sin of the Few is the Responsibility of All

Deuteronomy 13 tells the Israelites what to do if someone tries to entice them away from God and promote sinful behavior, starting with family members and expanding to entire cities.

Verses 6-11 say, “If your brother, the son of your mother, or your son or daughter, or the wife you embrace, or your closest friend secretly entices you, saying, ‘Let us go and worship other gods’—which neither you nor your fathers have known, any of the gods of the peoples around you, near you or far from you, from one end of the earth to the other—you must not yield to him or listen to him. Show him no pity, and do not spare him or shield him. Instead, you must kill him. Your hand is to be the first against him to put him to death, and then the hands of all the people. Stone him to death for trying to turn you away from the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the place of slavery. All Israel will hear and be afraid, and they will no longer do anything evil like this among you.”

This starts the idea that God wanted to provoke among the Israelites: when one person falls to sin, it is the responsibility of those closest to the idolater, then the entire community surrounding the idolater, to end the idolatry and purge the sin. In the OT times, before Jesus’s reconciliatory death, the only true purge was death—complete and total annihilation of the sinner to keep the community from being infected. This is especially true with the post-Exodus Israelites, whom you’ll notice are an incredibly fickle people, ready to jump back and forth between God and idols at the drop of a hat.

The Consequences for the Few have Far-Reaching Effects

And, in true biblical fashion, there are consequences if the community fails to do what it is supposed to do. Verses 12-15 say, “If you hear it said about one of your cities the Lord your God is giving you to live in, that wicked men have sprung up among you, led the inhabitants of their city astray, and said, ‘Let us go and worship other gods,’ which you have not known, you are to inquire, investigate, and interrogate thoroughly. If the report turns out to be true that this detestable thing has happened among you, you must strike down the inhabitants of that city with the sword. Completely destroy everyone in it as well as its livestock with the sword.”

If the idolator manages to spread his/her view enough that word of the heresy is heard elsewhere, it becomes the responsibility of the entire nation of Israel to wipe the idolatry out. The consequences of such action means that not only do the idolaters in the city die, but the innocent, too.

But were the innocent actually innocent? Not really. By virtue of verses 6-11, we know that if the idolatry has spread beyond one person, the people sinned by going against God’s orders to stop that idolatry. So, they must face the consequences of their own inaction.

Current Day Sin-Banishing Responsibility

It’s entirely likely that some people reading this are thinking “But this is about the Israelites, and obviously, we can’t go around stoning idolaters.” And, well, you’re right. Please don’t go around trying to kill people who are not believers.

But, despite the fact that this passage is directly intended for the Israelites and the Israelites alone, there is a modern-day equivalent given to us by the New Testament.

Matthew 18:15-17 says, “If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.”

Let’s run the parallels: In the OT, family members were to take care of sin in their family on their own, only calling in the community to help after they had done their part. In the NT, one person is to confront the sin of another, only bringing in more members of the church if that fails. The Israelites were meant to treat cities that failed to stop idolatry as enemy nations, wiping every last bit of life in them out for good. We are to treat those who fail to confront their sin as if they are not believers, but outcasts to the Christian community.

Confronting Sin is not Judgment

This subject is something the church fails at so often. We’re afraid to confront sin in others because we don’t want to lose friends, we don’t want our own sin to be called out, or we feel like it’s not our place. But it is our place.

“Do not judge lest you be judged” doesn’t apply here. Confronting sin is not judging someone. Our cultural definition of the word “judge” has changed from its original meaning, which involved sentencing someone for their actions, to mean mentioning someone’s wrongful actions to them in any way. Confronting the sin of a brother or sister in Christ is not judging them or a statement of condemnation; instead, it is a show of concern for their spiritual welfare.

Don’t let people point out your log as a way to avoid confrontation of their sin, either. You don’t have to be perfect to point out sin when you see it. (I’ve written more in-depth on these verses here, if you want to have a read, as I don’t have time to explain it more thoroughly in this post.) We’re all sinful—each of us has a log worth pointing out, and it’s time we started drawing attention to them so we can remove them.

A Call for Christian Qualification

As a, hopefully, quick last word, I think it’s time we start living out Matthew 18:17 a little more. Folks calling themselves Christians, but who are actually idolaters, are hindering the Christian community in a huge way. When people who aren’t actually believers start calling themselves believers while perpetuating a false gospel, we need to say something against it. We need to step up and qualify Christians as separate from “Christians” or we risk the Church falling apart as idolatry and sin topple it from within and without.

It’s time for us to call out prosperity gospels and pew-sitters who throw dirt on the name of God and His people and make sure the world knows they are not part of us because they’re hampering the mission, the Great Commission. We have “churches” like Westboro Baptist tarnishing the name of Christ under the guise of Christianity because we have become too lax in our qualifications, letting nearly anyone call themselves a Christian, and that needs to stop. The quitting begins by confronting sin.

Completely Destroy Sin

I champion the Israelites as our (current Christians) people because we are, in so many ways, exactly like them. Put simply, we are mirror images of each other in every way that matters, which is why it’s so brilliant to read through the struggles of the Israelite people and identify with them as I do so. It also makes for great teaching material because we can see exactly what helped them succeed and what caused them to fail. If our God is a God of metaphors, which I say He is, then the Israelites are our big metaphor, our great comparison.

And in Deuteronomy, they have quite a lot to teach us on how to best sin.

Doing What We Don’t Want

For me, it’s a fact of the matter that I sometimes feel too weak to stand up to the sin I perpetuate in my life. When I’m in a cycle of, as Paul says, doing things I don’t want to do, that I know are wrong, I frequently feel incapable of driving out the feelings, temptations, and behaviors I know are incorrect.

But what is truly factual is that I, and we, have the strength to destroy sin at its source in the flesh, just as the Israelites did, thanks to the power of God going before us and fighting the battle.

The Big Metaphor

If you pay close attention as you read the Old Testament, you’ll find an incredibly stark contrast between the Israelites and everyone else, and if you break that contrast down to its simplest pieces, you get two different adjectives to describe them. For the Israelites, we have righteous; for everyone else, we have sinful.

It’s fairly easy to work out: God’s people are righteous, just as we are made righteous when we become His today, and everything that is not with God is against God. Every person and thing that does not belong to God is sin.

It’s simple, then, to carry on this idea of the Israelites driving other peoples out of the Promised Land as driving out sin. (It’s even easier to carry on the idea when you read Deut. 7 because the Bible just tells you, but I had to explain the big comparison between the Israelites and us for teaching’s sake.)

The Strength to Thoroughly Destroy Sin

Jumping back up to the idea from the introduction in this post, the Israelites, then, felt too weak to destroy the sin they faced in the Promised Land. If you’ll remember, they were exiled from the land for 40 years because they were too afraid to fight for it, thinking they would be destroyed by the nations in it.

But, what the Israelites, and we, often forgot in fear, is that they had the strength from God to drive out that which does not belong, that which is not good.

Deuteronomy 7:15b, 17-19 says, “He will not put on you all the terrible diseases of Egypt that you know about, but He will inflict them on all who hate you. (17) If you say to yourself, ‘These nations are greater than I; how can I drive them out?’ do not be afraid of them. Be sure to remember what the Lord your God did to Pharaoh and all Egypt: the great trials that you saw, the signs and wonders, the strong hand and outstretched arm, by which the Lord your God brought you out. The Lord your God will do the same to all the peoples you fear.”

Fear of being incapable, fear of the sin we face, even fear of facing God in our failures can hold us back from defeating sin. But God has given us the strength to destroy it, just like He gave the Israelites strength to destroy the nations inhabiting the Promised Land if they would stop being afraid of the people because of what they looked like.

But if we remember the strength of God to defeat our sinful natures and pull us to Him for salvation, if we remember the miracles He worked to draw us away from death in the first place, we’ll remember He easily has the power to inflict destruction on our sin now that we are His.

Why We Fail to Defeat Sin

Sometimes, even though we have the strength of God on our side, we still fail to defeat sin, though, right? Paul most certainly had the Lord with him whenever he was tempted, and still he sinned and did things he didn’t want to do. That’s because, so often, we fail to completely drive out and annihilate sin in the place we live.

Deuteronomy 7:1-2 says, “When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess, and He drives out many nations before you—the Hittities, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations more numerous and powerful than you—and when the Lord your God delivers them over to you and you defeat them, you must completely destroy them. Make no treaty with them and show them no mercy.”

And just like the Israelites, when we fail to completely destroy sin and route any chances it has at coming back to us, it slithers its way back into our lives. That’s why Matthew 5:29-30 urges us to gouge out our eye or cut off our hand if it causes us to sin because that’s the kind of extremism we need to go to in order to completely eliminate sin. (Please don’t actually go cutting your hands off and pulling your eyes out at the behest of this blog post.) It’s a metaphorical expression of extremism: whatever it takes for you, do it to stop yourself from sinning.

Extremist Application Methods

God’s goal with the Israelites was to create a land without even the barest hint of potential temptation for idolatry because He knew that was the only way the Israelites could resist putting the gods of Earth above Himself. That’s why Deuteronomy 7 is almost completely full of God telling them to destroy literally every last bit of the culture, practices, and evidences of the people who once lived there.

For us, it’s much of the same. When you allow yourself to even briefly consider sin, you’ve opened yourself up to temptation that is difficult to resist (Matthew 5:27-28). That’s why you must go to incredible extremes to avoid the hints of sin all around us. If that means you have to give up social media, TV, music, reading, sports, games, whatever, you should do it until you are capable of standing up to the temptation with God-given strength.

You have to destroy the world around you (metaphorically) to keep it from infecting you with sin until you glow brightly enough with the power of God to walk through the darkness without stumbling.

Harshness of Sins

If you grew up going to church, it’s likely that, at some point in your life, you were told all sins are equal, for the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23). And that is fully true; I’m not here to discount that fact in the slightest. All sin leads to death—a final, eternal death followed by everlasting torment in Hell. The Bible is frequently very clear on that subject. But this known fact presents an interesting moral quandary—at least it does to me.

The Moral Quandary of Sin Equality

When you only acknowledge that all sins are equal because they all lead to death, you create some interesting thought patterns. All of a sudden, you must determine whether you treat all sins as harshly as murder or rape, or as lightly as a white lie. For if all sins are equal, they must all be treated the same, as the reasoning follows. With this follow-through, you can’t treat a murderer as any worse than a liar, and you can’t treat a liar as any better than a murderer.

For me, this completely fails to satisfy the innate morality impressed upon me by the image of God I am made of. And I believe that if you seriously consider it, we can all come to agreement on this. The nature of this sinful world is actually that all sins are equal. It’s built into phrases like “the ends justify the means,” which dictate that, so long as the end goal is accomplished, whatever is done to make it to that goal is perfectly allowable.

But God’s character doesn’t work that way. For God, the means justify the end, such that what is done on the journey leads to the final result. That is precisely why we cannot work our way to Heaven—our means are not good enough to get us to the end. Only by the means of Jesus’s death and resurrection are we justified to the end.

One Sin Cannot be Forgiven

If you truly pay attention to the Bible, you can find many instances when one sin was regarded as a less grievous offense than another, but let’s start with the biggest.

Matthew 12:31-32 says, “Therefore I tell you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven people, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. And whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this are or in the age to come.

It really doesn’t get clearer than this. All sins can be forgiven except blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. But that does mean there is a distinction among sins—some can be forgiven, and one cannot be. (There are different people who interpret what, exactly, blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is. It’s not the purpose of this article, but in my opinion—based on the character of God—blasphemy against the Holy Spirit likely means a rejection of the Spirit, i.e., a rejection of the gift of salvation. That’s literally the only thing that will keep you from Heaven.)

Distinction Among Sins in the Old Testament

There are further distinction among the severity of sin offenses, too. Some of the clearest levels of sin distinction appear in Exodus and Leviticus as God lays down laws for the Israelites to follow, and more importantly in this case, how to profess repentance and find forgiveness for breaking those laws.

Exodus 21:12-14 describes a difference between planned murder and an accidental death. To murder was to invite the death penalty as punishment, but if it happened by accident, punishment was exile.

Fighting someone and injuring them required one to pay for lost work time and provide for the recovery of the person who was injured, as stated in verses 18-19. There are far more distinctions in chapters 21-23, but you’ll have to read those on your own time.

In Leviticus, God requires the Israelite people to provide different sacrifices depending upon the severity of the crime they committed against Him. Leviticus 4:3, 22-23, 27-28 and chapter 5:14-15 detail different sin sacrifices one must offer up based on their position within the people and the sins they committed.

We can even find direct contrasts of sins in situations like Abraham lying to Abimelek about Sarah being his sister and not his wife. There’s an argument to be made that Abraham was not lying because Sarah was technically his half-sister but lying by leaving things out is just as much a lie as directly stating incorrect information. Yet, Abraham did not receive punishment worth mentioning in the Bible for his lie, whereas we are told Abimelek would’ve been punished harshly had he been intimate with Sarah.

A Hierarchy of Commandments

God is incredibly purposeful in how He does everything He does, so it should be no surprise to any of us that the numbering of the Ten Commandments was more than just a way to keep track of how many there are. They’re listed in order of importance, the first being “Do not have any other gods beside me,” from Exodus 20:3.

Jesus reaffirms this in Matthew 22:34-38. The greatest commandment: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. The second: love your neighbor as yourself.

And if there is a hierarchy of laws, it stands to reason there is a hierarchy of transgressions against the law. Thus, the worst sin would be to not love God. The second worst would be to not love others, and so on.

The Greatest Conundrum

I could go on and on listing sins and their punishments for thousands of words, but I leave it up to you to continue doing research in your own reading of the Bible, but it really all boils down to this: we believe all sins are equal because one price was paid for them all: Jesus’s death on the cross. But if you truly believe a murderer is no worse than a liar, then I challenge you to view Jesus’s sacrifice for sins not as one massive sacrifice, but as many, many trillions of sacrifices, each one equal to a sin that was, or will be, committed.

See, the sacrifice wasn’t just His death. It was the experience of separation from God He took on for every transgression against God. For the murderer, Jesus would’ve experience the punishment for murder. For a liar, He would’ve experienced the punishment for lying. For sexual immorality, the punishment for it, etc. For a God who is just, who outlines justice in His very character, who loves what is good and hates, detests, what is bad, there is distinction.

We see things as black and white or varying shades of gray far too often. Instead, many things are both. Character, morality, sin, and the law are both black and white and shades at the same time. There is a distinct line separating what is good and what is bad. Of that there is no doubt in the Bible. But there are things on the bad side that are farther away from the line. Liars stand much closer to the line of the law than murderers.

How Should We Treat Sin?

That is a far easier question than, “Is all sin equal?” The Bible is far, far clearer on this subject. In John 8:7, Jesus says, “Let he who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.”

When it comes to your own sins, let your understanding of God’s character be the drive for your own choices—know that, even though some sins are more grievous than others—for the thousandth time I’ll state that it is far worse to murder than to lie—they are all, indeed, punishable by an eternity of separation from God. If you are a follower of Christ, seek to be like God, seek to emulate His character, and you’ll find that you worry less about how to avoid grievous sins and more about how to pursue righteousness. Hate your sin and resist temptation to escape from its grasp. Whether your sin is as harsh as murder or as small as a lie, you still sinned, and you still require redemption. As a liar, you are no better than a murderer in that regard.

When it comes to the actions of others, hate all sin. If you find you have a harsher reaction to murder or rape than thievery in your heart and mind, don’t worry for your salvation, your thoughts, or your heart and their place with God. But do remember that you do not get to mete out justice to those who commit sins against God. God has His holy system, as well as Earthly systems, in place to do that, and it’s not our business to act outside of those.

But truly, when it comes right down to the question of how we should treat sin, there is only one answer: Love your neighbor as yourself. Don’t deny someone the chance to seek Jesus because of their transgressions and your hatred. Until someone dies, they always have a chance to be redeemed, for all sins can be forgiven but one. If God loves them enough to give them a chance by continuing to breathe the breath of life into them, you have no right to take away that chance.

God of Metaphors

Our God is a God of metaphors. Whenever you can’t understand something about His nature, character, choices, actions, etc., it’s fairly likely that you will be able to find a metaphor in the Bible or in His creation, Earth, to help you grasp that part of God.

Metaphors are pretty unique because they excel at turning the abstract into concrete, along with other forms of comparison, such as similes and analogies. And when it comes to God, you can find millions of concrete existences that serve to reveal a small part of the picture of who God is.

My favorite is the marriage/family metaphor because the further you dig into it, the more it reveals of God’s nature. You can literally go as far down the rabbit hole as you like, and you’ll always be finding revelation after revelation. And I loved it even more when I discovered how it applies to free will.

To start from the top, let’s acknowledge and prove that marriage is an earthly representation of the divine relationship we are to have with God.

God, through Paul, states this in Ephesians 5:23, 25. “For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church. He is the savior of the body. (25) Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave Himself for her.”

There’s a reason marriage is a holy institution, and that is solely because it is meant to represent a holy relationship on Earth. When you apply the selfless love of Christ in the context of marriage, you get a godly relationship in which a man sacrifices himself to provide and care for his wife, and a wife sacrifices herself to love her husband and follow him.

This is the ideal relationship of Christ and church. Christ sacrificed Himself in fully selfless love for his bride, the church, and He provides for us, taking care of our needs. In exchange, we need only sacrifice ourselves and wholly commit ourselves to following Him.

Let’s move beyond marriage, then, and turn to the family structure. The family structure flows from the divine marriage structure, and it then becomes an example of something divine as well. The relationship of parents to kids is literal inasmuch as it is figurative.

In the literal sense, children are just that, children. They are the children of their parents, and they are also children of the church. In both manners, they are meant to be raised and taught about Christ as they grow. A community of believers is meant to come together and train and teach children (Deuteronomy 6:4-9).

But the figurative begins to stretch and define the relationship we are to have with God. When we become believers, we become children of God, and our relationship with God then functions like a child’s relationship with his/her parents does.

When we examine it from the side of faith, we are to look to God as children look to their parents. Like children view their parents as having no ability to do wrong, we are to look to God. Children have the utmost faith in their parents; it’s practically unshakable. We are to have that same faith in God, as Jesus implies in Mark 10:13-15.

From a discipline point of view, we can gather how God disciplines us for doing wrong and rewards us for doing what is right. I think this one is one of the simplest because it’s fairly clear. When a child breaks a rule, the parent provides a consequence, and especially when the child is young, teaches them something in the process. The parent provides this consequence, not out of anger, but from love so the child does not do something they may regret later.

To put the metaphor into another metaphor, let’s say a parent tells their four-year-old not to touch the stove. The child doesn’t listen, touches the stove, and nearly burns their hand after turning it on. The parent, then, stops the child from touching the stove, and puts the child in timeout after explaining what they did wrong and why it was bad. The parent doesn’t take this action just to punish the child, but to keep the child from getting hurt.

Sometimes, even, God allows us to experience the consequences of our own actions to teach us rather than do it Himself. Some parents may choose, in lieu of punishing the child afterward, to allow the child to briefly touch the stove while it’s hot. They do this not to cause the child pain but because they know that’s the only way their child will truly learn the lesson. We’re stubborn people, and sometimes the only way God can be sure we learn to avoid sin is to let us experience the consequences of sin.

If we take the parent/child relationship yet another way, we can discover how free will works in alignment with God’s plan. Typically, parents have plans for their children when they are born. Whether their plans are just as simple as a name or as complex as having everything they want their child to do planned out through high school, parents don’t wing it when it comes to their children. They’re too precious to do that to.

Likely, parents plan out where their kids go to school, what sports they play, who they interact with around home and with family and family friends, where they go to church, what they get to do at home, etc. I think you get the point. But kids are not perfect little angels who are willing to do everything at their parents’ behest. As they grow into their own person, there will be times they go against the will of their parents. They’ll make friends they shouldn’t, do things they shouldn’t, skip church a few times, skip school just as much.

Likewise, God has a plan laid out for each of us before we are born. He knows who He wants us to know, where we should go to school, what friends we should make, what career we should choose, who we should witness to, everything. But we’re not perfect little angels, either. As we go through life, we’ll inevitably choose to go against God’s plan sometimes. We’ll make friends with the wrong people, not witness to someone we needed to, skip church a few too many times, choose the wrong career for us.

See how perfectly that fits? There’s a ton more, too, but I don’t have space in this post to fit it in. God is incredibly complex—He is literally more than our minds are able to comprehend in so many ways—but when you take a look around, you can turn parts of Him into simple, easy to understand ideas so that you can get to know Him better.

I challenge you to look around the next time you find yourself struggling to understand God or why He would do something one way or the other. You may find that the answer is in something as small as the flower by your front porch or as convenient as your best friend.

God is Goodness

I feel fairly certain in saying that the phrase “don’t beat a dead horse” came around long after Solomon lived. Perhaps, someone came up with the phrase after reading Ecclesiastes for the first time, because it sure does feel like Solomon is absolutely demolishing the dead horse that is the troubles of wealth. Thankfully, it’s only for awhile longer to lead into the second topic he discusses in chapter six: goodness.

I won’t lie to you; this chapter gets fairly dark, and I will be discussing a very heavy topic that might be difficult for some and will sound extremely harsh. Unfortunately, though, it does make sense with what we understand of life and eternity. For those affected, I understand your pain, as my family and I have been affected by similar circumstances. The good news is that there is hope.

The first two verses of chapter six are merely a transition from the last subject into Solomon’s final statements on the matter, so we’ll jump straight into verse 3, which says, “A man may father a hundred children and live many years. No matter how long he lives, if he is not satisfied by good things and does not even have a proper burial, I say that a stillborn child is better off than he.”

I think a lot of people recoil from that because of our perspective of live on this Earth being good. How can someone who lived, was rich, and had a large family here ever have it worse off than a child who came into the world dead and never got to experience what could be had on Earth?

First, we have to understand what happens to a stillborn child, or indeed, any person who passes away without having knowledge of good and evil. This can extend to young children whose brains cannot yet comprehend such things, or those born with genetic and mental diseases that prevent them from grasping the subject.

This is an issue that becomes rather clear if you can understand even a portion of God’s character: that He is just. He gives punishment where it is deserved, and He provides salvation where it is deserved. Punishment comes because of knowingly committing evil acts. Salvation comes from having never committed an evil act in the sight of God—being washed clean by Jesus’s sacrifice is how this works for most people.

But for those who cannot knowingly commit evil, well, can they really sin against God? I argue no, and for a couple of reasons.

The first is that Adam and Eve could not commit sin until they had the knowledge of evil. Because they knew God, they already had knowledge of good, but until they knew what was evil, they could not commit evil. Really think about why the tree is called “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” That name is important, and I think it’s likely for this very reason, among a few others.

The devil’s advocate argument for this belief is that we are born into a sinful world and thus must suffer the price of sin no matter how long we exist in it, but we know from Ezekiel 18:20 that no child is punished for the sins of their parents. And we know from multiple places in the NT (2 Cor 5:10, and Rev. 20:11-12, to name a few) that we will be judged by our own actions.

So, what really happens to that stillborn child? They experience no evil. Their first experience will be Jesus’s arms wide open accepting them into Heaven. The only thing they will ever experience is pure goodness and joy from being in the presence of the Father.

And that child is much better off than the man who lives a long life on Earth without knowing good because all it will know is good while the man experiences the evils of this world.

Furthermore, the real importance comes when we talk about what he is satisfied by. What is a “good thing?” From our perspective, there are a lot of things we consider “good.” Grades, jobs, cars, houses, kids, parents, restaurants, clothes, food, views…I think you get my point. But are those things actually “good?” From God’s perspective, not really. The things that are good are the things that are godly. If something is not in line with God’s character, it cannot be good. Put simply, this is because God is the only thing that is good.

So, if he is not satisfied by good, thus by God, then what happens to him to make a stillborn child better off? Verse 4-6 explain.

“For he comes in futility and he goes in darkness, and his name is shrouded in darkness. Though a stillborn child does not see the sun and is not conscious, it has more rest than he. And if he lives a thousand years twice, but does not experience happiness, do not both go to the same place?”

Now it’s time for me to test your memory of what I’ve been writing about all this time: what things can satisfy us? Nothing on this Earth can satisfy us. Nothing we do here that is spawned from here can light up the world around us. The only thing that can satisfy us is God and his goodness. Without that, there is not joy; there is no true happiness.

So, this man who lives a long time with a large family and incredible wealth is stumbling around in darkness if he does not allow God to satisfy him. Life is evil for him and there is no rest in this world for him. Everything he does has no meaning.

And from there, we can interpret verse six two different ways. The first is that the “same place” Solomon is referring to is the grave. As simple as that, he just meant they both die. On the other hand, he could be referring to a man who will go to Heaven just as that stillborn child will, but he did not enjoy life because he did not lean on Him strong enough. You can take your pick because the meaning of the comparison doesn’t change either way, but the imagery does get stronger depending on which interpretation you choose.

If the man does not get to Heaven because he did not believe in God, then the stillborn child is far better off. On top of the fact that it did not experience evil on Earth, it will never experience evil or suffering. On the other hand, the man will forever suffer on top of experiencing the evils of the world.

For the second interpretation, while both get to experience the ultimate good that is being in God’s presence, the man still had to go through the suffering and evil on Earth wile the stillborn child did not. Both ways, the stillborn child has it better.

The rest of the chapter pretty much just doubles down on this illustration, but there are a couple more verses I want to talk about in particular.

Verse 8 says, “What advantage then does the wise man have over the fool? What advantage is there for the poor person who knows how to conduct himself before others?”

I really like these illustrations Solomon uses because, to me, they indicate the great equalizer that the gift of salvation really is. The way to salvation isn’t to be wiser than someone else. You don’t get any advantage for that over someone who isn’t as intelligent. Likewise, knowing how to work social circles will not get you to the front of the line to receive salvation. No matter your lot in life on this Earth; poor, rich, wise, foolish, capable, incapable, strong, weak, whatever it may be, not one of these has a better chance at salvation than any other.

I like verses 11-12, too. “For when there are many words, they increase futility. What is the advantage for man? For who knows what is good for man in life, in the few days of his futile life that he spends like a shadow? Who can tell man what will happen under the sun?”

I read this almost as Solomon being facetious. It’s like he’s saying, “You can talk and talk and talk about what life’s purpose is and what happens after you die, but you don’t know, and you won’t figure it out by yourself.”

The only one who knows what is good and who knows what happens after we die is the one who created us. We can deliberate about it all we want, but unless we’re getting our information from God, we’ll never know anything good.

If you would like to read through a more complex argument for children going to Heaven than I included, you can check out the excerpts from an essay written on the topic at this link: https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/do-all-infants-go-to-heaven/

Resisting the Devil

This last week has been a week preaching to my heart about resisting temptation. My pastor’s been teaching on it for the last three weeks, and though it wasn’t the focus of my Sunday School lesson last night, it did come up in the verses we covered, and I had a pretty neat revelation that I felt I needed to share (yeah, we’re doing Sunday School on a Tuesday because of Coronavirus, but it’s working quite nicely).

There is a small joke that has been running around the Gen Z-younger Millennial Christian community about being convicted of sin by the Holy Spirit and repenting from it. The joke that follows this line of thought regards being convicted of your “favorite sin,” and not wanting to give it up because it’s comfortable or feels good or whatever.

And let’s face it. We all have a “favorite” or “pet” sin that we constantly fall prey to. For some of us, it’s lust, for some it’s anger, for others greed, for others jealousy, for many, it’s gossip. Whatever it is, I feel confident in saying we’ve all got one; I’m sure you’ll find yours if you properly examine your thoughts, words, and actions.

I would argue, however, that it is less our “favorite sin” and more our most common, and easily given in to, temptation. It is the one thing that Satan can trick us with that he knows will get us more often than it won’t. Just as much as I guarantee you that you have a “favorite sin” as it were, I guarantee you that you are tempted by far more things than just that one you happen to give in to.

Just take a few moments to go through your day and all the things that happen in it; mark down all the times something that could have led to sin occurs. I’ll give you a typical example of what could happen by describing a potential day I could live through:

I could wake up in the morning and lie in bed until I’m almost late for work—laziness. I could rush out the door, jump into my car, and drive ten over down the road—Failed to be subject to governing authorities. I could get stuck at a stoplight and yell a few choice words—foul language. I could arrive to work late and tell my boss I got stuck in road work—lie. I could see a pretty girl at work and fantasize about her—lust, adultery. I could hear of my coworker getting a raise and bitterly wish he were fired because I was supposedly next in line for promotion—jealousy. I could arrive home and be short with my parents and refuse to do chores—disrespecting my father and mother.

See what I mean? You can be tempted hundreds or thousands of times a day. But you’re not likely to pay most of those temptations any mind thanks to the renewing of your mind by the Holy Spirit as a believer. This also serves to back up the point that temptation isn’t the sin. Even Jesus was tempted, as seen in Matthew 4:1-11. Temptation is something we cannot control; it’s our reaction to it that we have to work on. And that leads me to the verses that prompted this whole article: Ephesians 4:26-27.

“Be angry and do not sin. Don’t let the sun go down on your anger, and don’t give the devil an opportunity.”

First, let’s note that anger is not sin. Anger may lead to sinful behavior, but being rightfully upset by something is not, in and of itself, wrong. Even Jesus was rightfully, and righteously, angry at times—flipping tables in the temple comes to mind. But anger is a temptation to give in to incorrect behavior, just like all the actions I mentioned earlier are temptations to give in to sin.

The important part is not necessarily that you were tempted, but how you react to the temptation, and verse 26 gives us the method. It says to not let the sun go down on your anger. One of the most common things associated with the movement of the sun is the passage of time. So, how do we avoid falling prey to temptation? Deal with it in as short a time as possible. Don’t let it be present in your heart and mind for any longer than it takes you to recognize that it’s temptation. Turn away from the thought, separate yourself mentally from the setting, and turn to Jesus.

There are a number of methods to doing this, though the best is obviously having scripture at hand to quote and remind yourself of the God who can give you all things and provide for you in every way. Whatever works for you, do it. But don’t give Satan time to work, chipping away at your defenses.

If there is one thing the devil is, it’s an opportunist. He’s not omniscient, he’s not omnipresent, and he’s not omnipotent. But he is incredibly sneaky, quick, clever, and dedicated. His only goal is to make sure you suffer with him in Hell. And he’s great at taking advantage of any openings you give him to work at you. While he may not be able to punch a hole in the armor you wear for protection in one hit, give him enough time and he’ll find the hold and slip a blade through.

That’s why verse 27 is so important. To avoid giving the devil an opportunity, you have to make sure you give him as little time as possible to study you while you’re in duress from temptation. If a lustful thought comes across your mind, don’t play around with the idea and flirt with fantasies. Cast it away from you as quickly as you can. The longer you ponder that lust, the more likely you are to give into the temptation and actually commit adultery. (Doing inappropriate things with someone in your head is just as much adultery as doing it physically—Matt. 5:28.)

When your friends start gossiping, either get them to stop or remove yourself from the conversation so that you’re not convinced to join in. Even if your resolve is strong at first, you will break down eventually just to become part of the conversation. For every second you remain, you give Satan an opportunity to get you to sin.

Combat jealousy with encouragement, greed with thankfulness, anger with love and understanding. And do it quickly so that you don’t sit and stew in the feelings and opportunities to do what you know feels good temporarily, what appears to satisfy.

The reason I love verses 26-27 so much is because the whole picture lends itself to this lesson so easily. When you’re really angry at someone, it’s so easy to sit and stew in your emotions and imagine all the mean things you’d say or do to get back at them for how they wronged you. The longer you stew in that anger, the easier it gets for your “justice” to become harsher, and the harder it becomes to show them love and forgiveness as we are called to do.

It’s the exact same with sin and temptation. The longer you play with that temptation, the easier it is to give in to the sin, and the harder it becomes to do what you know is right. So, don’t let time pass in temptation. Hurry and turn to Jesus, rebuking Satan all the while so that you can be protected by the righteous shelter that is Christ.

The Appropriate Time

Ecclesiastes chapter three expands upon the latter statements in chapter two, wherein Solomon indicates that it is a gift of God to enjoy the things of this Earth. But, chapter three also provides some context in an important caveat to remind us that, even though many things are appropriate for enjoyment, they are only appropriate in the right time.

When we study the Bible, we know that context is absolutely key to understanding what is written and ensuring we don’t misunderstand what was being written for us. Of course, this is true for any teaching, as many sentences on any single subject can be misconstrued if removed from their appropriate setting. But context is especially important with Ecclesiastes—I’d even argue that it is the book of context in that each chapter builds off itself to show us a narrative of Christian behavior and thought processes we should adhere to.

That being said, on to the verses! The first eight verses talk about “an occasion for everything, and a time for every activity under heaven.” Notice a change in word choice here. When talking about activities we partake of in this life in the first two chapters, Solomon continuously referred to them as being “under the sun.” Now, however, we’re talking about activities “under heaven.” This distinction is important.

I don’t think there’s any clear, definitive separation between “under the sun” and “under heaven,” but contextually, there is a separation of drastic importance. Culturally, there are many parallels between the style of Egyptian literature and the style of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, both of which were written by Solomon, who would have had a view and understanding of Egyptian culture due to marrying Pharaoh’s daughter. Egyptians worshiped Ra, the sun god, as their most important, most powerful deity; therefore, “under the sun” could have referred to the pagan religion of the Egyptians. This would lead “under heaven” to mean “under God.”

But, even within the book of Ecclesiastes itself, there is a contextual difference between the two. “Under the sun” invokes things that are sinful in nature, while “under heaven” invokes things that are of God. You’ll likely notice that each time “under the sun” is mentioned, it is in a negative tone to refer to sinful actions that do not satisfy us. The first verse of chapter three is set in direct context to that as a tone shift.

So, with the background set, chapter three is meant to contextualize and clarify some of the final statements in chapter two, mainly the idea that it’s okay to enjoy some of the things we have to experience in this life. It does this by first separating things that are inherently under the sun—evil—and under heaven—good.

The things that are inherently evil are not listed in chapter three, but it’s pretty simple to determine what those things are. Merely take those things that God commands us not to do and understand those are evil and there is no time or place for them. The good, however, are those things which God has gifted to us: friendships, marriage, sex, money, knowledge, entertainment, food, happiness, etc.

All these things, which are not inherently sinful, have their place. Sure, overindulgence or an idolization of these things can lead to sin, but they are not sin in and of themselves. That’s what Ecclesiastes means by things being appropriate in their time. If you were to have sex outside of marriage, that is sin. If you have sex in its time in marriage, it’s not sin. See where I’m going with this?

There are also double and triple layers to the information provided here. There are three important separations within the listed activities: one group is a list of actions where one must happen before the other; the second is one that requires understanding of one to truly understand the other; and the third are antonyms—direct opposites.

An example of one leading into another is verse two, “A time to give birth and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to uproot.” You can’t die before you are born, and you can’t pull up a plant that hasn’t been planted. In other words, some things are only able and appropriate to occur after something else has, so trying to do them out of order makes them inappropriate, i.e., marriage and sex.

The second group involves things like in verse 4, “A time to weep and a time to laugh; a time to mourn and a time to dance.” We’re doubling down on context here: you can’t fully understand the extent of happiness until you have experienced sadness. For you to know the full measure of one, you must know the other.

And the third is as in verse 8, “A time to love and a time to hate; a time for war and a time for peace.” Yes, there are appropriate times and things to hate and war against. Love and hate are complete polar opposites, but they each have their place. Even God loves and hates things. He loves us but hates our sin. These are to let us know that there are times even for actions that we don’t necessarily like.

The appropriate context of actions is stressed so heavily in Ecclesiastes to, once again, remind us of the limitations of our life here. As Solomon says in verse 11, “He has made everything appropriate in its time. He has also put eternity into their hearts, but man cannot discover the work God has done from beginning to end.”

I’ll point your attention mostly to “He has also put eternity into their hearts, but man cannot discover the work God has done.” As I’ve said time and time again, our problem with these actions comes about when we try to use them to fill what only God can fill. We try to take these contextualized things and fit them into eternity because we know we need something for eternity, but we cannot understand the vastness of what God has done. So, in its time, the things we do are appropriate. Just don’t take them out of their place and put them in the place of God because there is no adding to or taking from God.

Healing is Uncomfortable

On Sunday, my pastor preached about healing with the main focus being what Jesus asked a sick man at the pool of Bethesda in Jerusalem (John 5:6) “Do you want to get well?” And the sermon hit home with me, so I wanted to share it in my own words here.

Sometimes, we become far too comfortable in our character flaws. It’s a lot easier to tell people “Oh, I get angry pretty often,” or “My eye wanders too often to places it shouldn’t go,” or “Well, I just don’t mince words. I call it as I see it” than it is to fix the underlying issues: that you are an angry person, easily set off, that you lust after every attractive person you see, or that you are rude to people.

For me, it was always more comfortable to be angry at, and rude to, people who upset me or I didn’t feel comfortable around. I was standoffish and unwilling to become close to anyone because I was anxious. For a large part of my life, I didn’t handle people well, and I convinced myself it was just part of my character. It was easier to get angry at people than it was to confront other thoughts and emotions when they asked for forgiveness. It was easier for me to get upset than it was to think about what happened in their life recently to cause them to act that way.

But after confronting those things and working to change how I react to people, I’ve found myself settling into my new behaviors and living far more at ease with those around me than I ever did before. It sucked at first; things were always awkward, and I probably made myself look silly a few times, but I got past the embarrassment and discomfort and became more like Christ.

We act like our sins are part of who we are as if nothing’s wrong because we’ve lived with them so long we don’t know who we’d be without it. But, specifically when it comes to sinful behavior, God calls us to rid ourselves of that, even though it’s uncomfortable, but you have to want it.

As with all facets of our faith in Christ, changing who you are to become who God wants you to be is a choice. There’s no magical change that’s going to happen in your life when you’re saved or when you ask God to confront your sinful behavior that will immediately stop you from sinning. You have to actively choose every moment to not partake in that behavior anymore until the new action becomes more ingrained and natural than the old.

And that’s why Jesus asked the man if he wanted to get well. The man in John 5 had been sick with his malady for 38 years. That’s 16 years longer than I’ve been alive. He had all that time to grow comfortable and live with whatever it was that kept him from walking, working, and doing daily activities that most people did. He likely had few to no responsibilities. He probably never did anything on his own.

So, it was probably more of a dilemma that we all thought when Jesus asked him, “Do you want to get well?” He had to confront within himself whether he’d rather finish out his life living as he did where he had others to take care of him and nothing to do but live and relax or deal with the pain and discomfort that would likely come from learning how to walk again, dealing with moving muscles and joints that hadn’t been exercised in 38 years, getting a job, providing for himself, paying taxes and tithes, etc.

Now, the Bible doesn’t tell us what happened with this guy after he was healed, but I can at least tell you what would’ve happened physically. Given time, the man would beat the pain and awkwardness of learning to walk after 38 years of not being able to. His legs would’ve become comfortable with the movements, and not only would his quality of life have been greatly improved thanks to his walking, he would find so much more enjoyment in living. He would’ve been able to go out with his friends, take a walk at sunset and see God’s beautiful creation, or pick up a hobby.

What we’re dealing with in behavior change looks like this: a false comfort in sin, discomfort through change, and then perfect comfort in Christ. As I’ve said frequently in other articles, sin is not fulfilling, but Christ is, and in fact, He overflows you with fulfillment. While change invites discomfort, once you reach the top of the hill, things become so much better.

I know when I first read this chapter, I thought the question was kind of silly. Of course he’d want to be well, I’d thought. But when I considered it this way, I realized how important of a question it was. To become more like Christ, you have to want it, and you have to choose it all the time, even, and especially, when it’s uncomfortable.

It will be uncomfortable for awhile. Healing usually is: as cuts heal and scar, they itch; as your body fights off disease, you get a fever; and as your heart and mind change, you deal with discomfort as well. But once it’s all said and done, you’ll find you’re much better off having gone through the healing than you were living in the sickness.

Get up Again

I’m choosing to talk about the themes in this song, “Up Again” by Dan Bremmes, now because of the subject covered in my Ecclesiastes study on Friday. Part of the song talks about living your life on this Earth well, but what’s more important is the acknowledgement that you are going to fail. You just need to get back up afterward and continue to chase Christ.

One of the things I haven’t really talked about in Ecclesiastes is that Solomon sinned, a lot, in his attempts to find joy in the things of Earth. His having 700 wives and 300 concubines was not a cool thing by God. His massive collection of gold and silver that he idolized at one point was not a cool thing. He even had too many horses according to one of the laws in Deuteronomy 17:16.

The point is, there was a lot that Solomon did wrong. He has a lot of people beat purely on the wives and concubines portion, if we were to compare sins—not that we should. But even though he sinned often, he was, and is, considered the wisest man to ever walk the Earth. 1 Kings 3:12 says, “I will therefore do what you have asked. I will give you a wise and understanding heart, so that there has never been anyone like you before and never will be again.”

So, how much more allowable, then, is it for us to fail if Solomon could fail? And look at David, too. He was called a man after God’s own heart, and even he sinned many times. That’s why the following is one of my favorite lines:

And I guess not every little thing

Works out just the way you dreamed

You can take a couple wrong turns

Still end up where you’re supposed to be.

Sometimes, I catch myself looking at my past for too long—all the horrible decisions I’ve made, friends lost and found, opportunities missed—and I worry and fear for my future. Did I mess it up? Have I lost my chance at God’s promises for my life? If you think about that, too, know that the answer to your questions is: no. You absolutely have not messed up God’s plan for your life. You’re not strong enough to do that.

You can mess up. You can step off the straight and narrow. You can turn around and walk away for a time and still go where God will have you go. Especially if you didn’t just look God in the face and say, “I’m not doing that, God.” Jonah basically told God no and still ended up doing exactly what God had planned for him to do. So will you. A few steps in the wrong direction because you couldn’t resist temptation briefly in your human imperfection cannot stop God from doing what He plans to do through you and for you.

But it’s hard for us to think about that because we have trouble stepping outside of our past. We remember our mistakes for so much longer than we remember the good we’ve done. That’s another reason I like this song. It confronts our shame and tells us to leave it behind, which is exactly how God would have us do it:

The other day, I was thinking to myself

Made a list of all my mitakes

Oh, I wish I could’ve run to you

And tell you all about my heartbreak

And I wondered to myself ‘wait a minute

Am I even on the right path now?’

Had a couple wins, but I got knocked down

But I know that if you were here right now, and you’d say

Sometimes you lose, sometimes you win

You gotta get up, up again

Keep holding on, it’s not the end.

Hear it from me: God doesn’t want you living in shame. He’s forgiven you of your sin. It’s time that you forgive yourself and let your heart move on to serving God fully. Trust me. Living in your own shame will only hold you back from doing what God asks you to do. You don’t want that, and God doesn’t want that.

Feel guilt, because you are guilty of sinning. But let that guilt drive you to Christ. Then give it all to Him and move on. Get back up from your fall and keep on fighting. As the song says, you’ve only got one life, so don’t let it get away by staying down when you’re knocked on your butt. Hike yourself up and get after it again.

Listen to Up Again on Spotify. Dan Bremnes · Song · 2019.

Log vs. Speck

One of the great things about studying the Bible is that we get a chance to see the same verses from different perspectives as we grow in our faith and our lives progress into different times and situations. Some verses that I’ve been seeing a little different lately are Matthew 7:3-5.

“Why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye but don’t notice the log in your own eye? 4 Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ and look, there’s a log in your eye? 5 Hypocrite! First take the log out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.”

Every time I’ve heard someone mention this verse, they use it to tell people to stop judging others. And that is 100% the way it was intended. The context says it’s so. But, I want to take this slightly out of context to talk about it not as judging, but as helping out a brother or sister in Christ.

Think about how weird it is to not notice a giant log in your eye, obscuring your vision, and yet, despite that log, you can somehow see a tiny speck of dirt in someone else’s eyes. How do you see that speck? Well, first of all, you have to be close to that person to see something so small in their eye. And second, you can’t be looking through the eye that has a log in it. You have to be looking from a different perspective.

Different perspectives are important because they allow us to see different things. Especially in humans, it allows us to cover blind spots in our vision. Did you know that you actually have blind spots in your eyes? They’re infinitesimally small at a close distance, but the farther away you look, the larger that spot gets. The cool thing about how God made us is that the right eye is just far enough away from the left eye to cover the left eye’s blind spot. And the perspective of the left eye is just different enough to cover the right eye’s blind spot.

Now Matthew 7:3 talks about our enormous spiritual blind spot: our own sins. Our perspective of ourselves prevents us from easily seeing the things we do wrong. Our behavior is so close to us that we find it difficult to point out those things we do that are unbiblical behavior.

Think about it. How many times has someone mentioned how easily you get angry or jealous or do any other sinful behavior? And how often do you say, “I don’t do that,” right afterward? Yet, if you took the time to really analyze your own behavior from the perspective of someone else, you’d find that you do actually do those things.

That’s because, for them, it’s easy to see. They’re not blinded by the fact it’s their own behavior. And now we get to my alternate view of this verse. While we are not supposed to judge others for their sinful behavior, what we are supposed to do is spot it and point it out to our brothers and sisters. There are a ton of verses about helping other believers be accountable to Christ, including: Matthew 18:15-18, James 5:19-20, 2 Thessalonians 3:14-15, and Hebrews 3:13.

In these ways, when we see other believers acting in persistent sin, we are called to let them know and help them correct their behavior. That’s one of the reasons we have fellowship with one another. That’s why many Christians urge you to have one, or more, accountability partner(s). Someone you trust who will be the one to point out the speck in your eye you can’t see.

Now, I want to talk briefly about verse 6: “Don’t give what is holy to dogs or toss your pearls before pigs, or they will trample them with their feet, turn, and tear you to pieces.” This verse is incredibly important to the context I’m looking at here because it’s a warning to be careful with how you handle accountability.

Accountability is incredibly important, but just as important as the act is the person you choose to help you stay accountable to Christ. Accountability is a good, God-given thing for believers to stay strong in the faith. It’s like an incredibly valuable string of pearls. But it only works if you give that string of pearls to someone who is capable of appraising it properly.

If you allow a nonbeliever or someone who isn’t yet strong enough in the faith to hold your faith accountable, it will turn into judgment and tear down your walk with Christ. It’s like, as verse 6 says, handing pearls to pigs. They won’t know what to do with it.

But if you find someone who is close enough to you to see the speck in your eye, the flaws in your walk with Christ, and strong enough in the faith to know how to handle correction with love and care, then you become like iron sharpening iron. Together, you will only grow stronger in your walk with Christ. There won’t be judgment involved, just believers working together to raise their value.

So, find someone who can see your speck and speaks in love and correction, and you will find a good thing. Your walk with Christ will be better than before because of it.

Good is Intentional

You can’t make things good by accident. It’s not possible. No good thing that occurs happened by mere association with goodness. Goodness is not contagious. It is a choice, and it is a process. On the flip-side of that coin, bad is contagious. It occurs by accident. It occurs when one is not careful. It is the natural order of this fallen world. Bad things can and do occur from mere association with badness.

I’ll start you off with a common example and then we’ll move onto the Bible verses that prompted this article. Let’s talk about bread. Bread starts out as a bunch of inedible pieces that are put through a process to become edible. You take your yeast, flour, sugar, and salt, mix them together, cook them, and then you’ve turned a bunch of parts into something good. The baker has to do this intentionally. He can’t just put the ingredients next to each other, walk away, and come back to a good loaf of bread.

Now let’s talk about the enemy of bread—no, not carbs—mold. It’s the killer of all nice bread products left to sit for too long. I guarantee you: let that bread sit around long enough and mold will start growing on it making it bad to ingest. Making it useless for its intended purpose. It’s the inevitable result of something good being left to rot. And mold starts small, too, just a few spots here and there that got the worst exposure to air and moisture. But it spreads like a disease, and soon enough, it has taken over all the good, delectable bread, turning it bad.

That’s how good and bad works. You have to work to be good, while badness is innate in us all. By mere tangential association, you can be changed from good to bad if you don’t work quickly to catch it and remove it.

So, on to the Bible verses. Haggai 2: 12-13 says:

“‘If a man is carrying consecrated meat in the fold of his garment, and with his fold touches bread, stew, wine, oil, or any other food, does it become holy?’

The priests answered, ‘No.’

Then Haggai asked, ‘If someone defiled by contact with a corpse touches any of these, does it become defiled?’

The priests answered, ‘It becomes defiled.’”

I don’t know all the technicalities about purifying objects to make them holy, but I can assure you of this: there was certainly a process that each thing must go through to be made holy. Just like the bread before, there is a process to take something that is not good and make it good. You can’t sit touch something bad with something good and make it good, too. Just like you can’t place a loaf of bread next to flour and expect a second loaf of bread.

But as with mold, no such process exists to make something bad. You only need to touch something bad to defile yourself and anything you touch afterwards. You don’t have to do a ritual or intend to defile something. It just happens.

That’s how doing good and bad things work. Bad things happen by the laws of a sinful world. It is innate, born into our character as sinful human beings. You don’t have to try hard to do something bad to someone. You don’t have to scheme. Sometimes, you just do things that are bad because it’s all around us.

Have you ever heard the saying, “Garbage in, garbage out?” It means that whatever you intake in your life, you will output into your own life and the lives of others. In our case, the garbage is all around us. It’s like the oxygen we breathe to live in that we don’t consciously choose to breathe or to touch evil. It’s just there.

But good is intentional. It’s a process. It is, literally, sanctification, which is the process of being made holy. You can’t do good by accident; you most certainly can’t do good when you’re only associating with the bad. You have to be cleansed, purged of the mold that is suffocating you all the time, and purposefully go through the process God has lined out in the Bible to strive for righteousness.

You have to choose good all day, every day, in order to do good. You have to choose to cut away the mold and be what you were intended to be: good. You have to step out and make the good things happen for others and point them to the process of sanctification, of belief in Christ, so that they, too, can become good. Merely associating with them is not enough. It will only infect you with the mold once more. You have to choose to be good.

Stay on Guard

Here’s a fact that a lot of Christians have likely lived through: You are attacked most often by the enemy when you are at a high or low point in your walk with Christ. And I would argue that you’re attacked more often at the mountain tops than the valleys. Here’s why and how to combat these attacks.

We’re going back to the tried and true teaching method: the metaphor. We’re soldiers fighting in a war against sin. However you feel about that, that’s how it is. We are constantly waging war and fighting battles against an enemy that attacks us in numerous ways. Sometimes he’s sneaky; sometimes he overwhelms us with brute force. But he never attacks us with what we’re prepared to handle and alert to guarding.

It’s a war, and you never directly attack a position with alert soldiers with more strength than you. And let me be fully clear here: with God on our side, we have far more strength than Satan could ever muster. So, Satan does not attack us head on when we’re prepared because he knows that assault will fail to breach our defenses.

So, I’ve pointed out two main ways the enemy attacks us: with brute force and with stealth. The first occurs when we’re at the lowest point of the valleys. You’re worn out and weary. You feel all alone. You feel separate from God. So Satan attempts to overrun you with numbers. That saying, “Don’t kick a man when he’s down?” The enemy loves kicking us when we’re down, and then he’s going to try and beat us like a dead horse. It’s those times in your life when horrible thing after horrible thing comes at you.

I don’t want to get too specific because I risk ruining the comparison for some, but it’s like you get sick, and then you maybe lose your job, and then someone close to you passes away, and it just feels like you’ll never get up. (There’s actually a song that pretty much nails the description of this feeling that I’ve linked below this article. It’s not a strictly Christian song, but it pretty effectively nails the principle.)

How do you beat this? Well, as the song describes: you just keep moving. That’s a tough thing to do. You’re not going to have the strength to do it on your own, which is precisely why you’re being attacked in that manner. Satan knows that if you try and fight alone, you’ll be overwhelmed. That’s why we’re given two basic directives when being overrun in a battle:

The first is to lean on the strength of God. I like Psalm 18:39 for this, though there are many verses that share the same sentiment. “You have clothed me with strength for battle; you subdue my adversaries beneath me.” (Matthew West’s “Strong Enough” is a wonderful song about this subject.) The second is to lean on your Christian brothers and sisters, and share each other’s burdens, as Paul wrote in Galatians 6:2a “Carry one another’s burdens.” (Tenth Avenue North’s “No Man is an Island” is a good expression of the need to lean on others.)

On the other end of the spectrum is when we’re at the highest mountains in our walk with Christ. This is when the enemy employs sneak attacks to catch us off guard. Taking it back to our war metaphor, this is just after you’ve won a great victory and you’re celebrating. You take your gear off and lay down your weapon. Then, boom! Out of nowhere, a sniper takes you out, or a knife gets you in the back.

It’s here when you’re more vulnerable than even the lowest valleys. At least in the valleys you’re mentally prepared, even if you’re exhausted. But when you are without the armor of God, and the enemy comes around, you are woefully unready to defend yourself. At the mountaintops, we experience this intense euphoria that comes from growing closer to God, from achieving a victory over sin, and in that euphoria, we relax our minds and take off our armor. We stop thinking; we stop being ready.

In the climb to the top of that mountain, we’re in peak condition as we strive for the Lord. Our focus and awareness is so strong that no one could catch us off guard, but when we reach that peak, we drop that focus thinking we’ve won. Well, guess what? This isn’t a battle you win.

In the overall, yes, Christ has already won this war we fight against sin, but while we’re on this Earth as imperfect human beings, we’re just surviving. We don’t win until we go to be with Christ.

So when you reach that mountaintop, don’t lose your mental alertness. Don’t take off the armor of God. As 1 Corinthians 16:13 says, “Be on your guard; stand firm in the faith, be courageous; be strong.” Don’t ever give up. When you’ve reached the top of the mountain you’re climbing right now, get right up and head up the next one. Until the day you go home to be with the Lord, keep fighting the good fight.

And here’s a last little bit of hope for you that also goes along with one of the songs I’ve added below: The devil, unlike our God, is not omniscient, omnipresent, or omnipotent. He doesn’t know everything, he’s not everywhere, and he’s not invincibly powerful. He’s noticeable and beatable. If you’re on your guard and finding your joy and satisfaction in Christ, there is absolutely nothing he can do to defeat you and the God who stands beside you.

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