WHY CAN’T WE LIVE IN PEACE?

There is so much hate, rage and conflict in the world. Where does it come from? We are called to love one another. Can education, censorship or legislation eliminate the source of hate? Christianity teaches the dignity and the degradation of humanity. What did Jesus think and say about human nature?

“The first thing to be said is that he taught the essential dignity of man. Although he is never recorded as having used the expression, there is no doubt that he accepted the Old Testament assertion that God made man in his own image, endowing him with capacities – rational, moral, social and spiritual – which distinguish him from animals. And despite man’s fallenness and sinfulness (to which we shall come in a moment), Jesus evidently thought of him as still retaining vestiges of his former glory. So he spoke of man’s value. Man is of more value than a sheep, he said; of much more value than many sparrows (Matthew 12:12; 10:31). And the clearest evidence he gave of the value he placed on man was his own mission, which was undertaken solely for man’s benefit. Like a shepherd who, having lost a single sheep, first misses it and then braves hardship and danger to rescue it, so God misses human beings who get lost and sent Jesus Christ as the Good Shepherd to seek and to save them. Further, his search for straying sheep would take him to the cross. ‘The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep’ (John 10:11). Nothing reveals more clearly the preciousness of men to God and the love of God for men than the death of God’s Son for their salvation. As William Temple put it, ‘My worth is what I am worth to God, and that is a marvelous good deal, for Christ died for me.’

Nevertheless, side by side with his teaching on the essential dignity of man Christ affirmed man’s actual degradation. The Old Testament had taught that ‘there is none that does good, no, not one’ (Psalm 14:3); Jesus took over this doctrine and endorsed it. Two or three times he referred to his contemporaries as an ‘evil and adulterous generation’ (Matt. 12:39; Mark 8:38) – ‘evil’ because of their unbelief and disobedience, ‘adulterous’ because they had transferred their love and loyalty from the living God to idols of their own making.

Nor was he passing judgment on his own generation only; he was alluding to mankind as a whole. Thus in the Sermon on the Mount he said: ‘If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!’ (Matt. 7:11) This statement is particularly striking because it concedes that fallen men can give ‘good’ gifts; ….and at the same time they do not escape the designation ‘evil’. That is, even when we see people at their very best, following the noble instincts of parenthood, Jesus still calls them ‘evil’.

Jesus confirmed his view of man’s sin and corruption by all his teaching about man’s lostness and sickness (Luke 15; Matt. 9:12). His vivid metaphors of the shepherd seeking the lost sheep and the physician healing the sick tell us as much about man’s hopeless state as about his preciousness to the God who loves him.

Jesus taught that within the soil of every man’s heart there lie buried the ugly seeds of every conceivable sin – ‘evil thoughts, acts of fornication, of theft, murder, adultery, ruthless greed and malice; fraud, indecency, envy, slander, arrogance, and folly. All thirteen are ‘evil things’, and they come out of the heart of ‘the man’ or ‘the men’, every man. This is Jesus Christ’s estimate of fallen human nature.

So then, according to Jesus, the ‘evil things’ which we think, say and do are not due primarily to our environment, nor are they bad habits picked up from bad teaching, bad company or bad example; they are due to the inward corruption of our heart. This is not to say that environment, education and example are unimportant, for their influence for good or bad is very strong, and Christians should set themselves in these spheres to promote the good and eliminate the bad. What we are saying (because Jesus said it long ago) is that the dominant force in a person’s life is his heredity, and that the ultimate origin of his evil thoughts and deeds is his evil heart, his nature which is twisted with self-centeredness. As God has said through the prophet Jeremiah centuries previously: ‘The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately corrupt; who can understand it? (Jer.17:9)…..We say and do evil things because we have an evil heart or nature; it is from inside, out of our heart, that evil things and evil thoughts arise.

Modern psycho-analysis has tended only to confirm this teaching of the Old Testament which Jesus endorsed, because it has further uncovered the horrid secrets of the human heart. Psychology and experience tell us that the subconscious mind (which is roughly equivalent to what the Bible means by ‘heart’, namely the center of our personality, the source of our thoughts and emotions) is like a deep well with a thick deposit of mud at the bottom. Normally, being at the bottom, the mud is safely out of sight. But when the well-waters are stirred, especially by the winds of violent emotion, the most evil-looking and evil-smelling filth breaks the surface – rage, spite, greed, lust, jealousy, malice, cruelty and revenge. These base passions keep bubbling up, raw and sinister, from the secret springs of the heart. And if we have any moral sensitivity, we must at times be appalled, shocked and disgusted by the foul things which lurk in the hidden depths of our personality.” (John Stott, Christ the Controversialist, 139-144)

Excerpted from the forthcoming THE GLORY OF CHRIST: The Theology of John Stott, Ted Schroder. More to come on this subject.