1. The Human Condition

Endless hours over centuries and millennia have been spent by philosophers, priests, psychologists, sociologists, criminologists, pastors, and politicians attempting to understand human nature.

Why do we do the things we do? Why do we say the things we say? What motivates one to rejoice while another grieves? One to run in while another flees? One to give freely while another takes all?

Why does a hero who never once flinched in the presence of danger, all of a sudden turn tail and run, while an inveterate coward all of a sudden rises up to commit an act of unbelievable courage and selflessness?

Why does one set of eyes see the same scene of natural beauty as another and declare that there must be a God while the other shakes his head and says “no way”?

Human nature is a great mystery, but there is One who understands it perfectly – the One who designed it.

However, the matter is complicated by an issue that most investigators are either unaware of or who ignore it as being an irrelevance. This is the issue that has corrupted our nature and turned us from being sensible, self-controlled, and honourable people to being the unpredictable, self-serving chancers that we are by nature.

It’s one thing to try to understand human nature, but another thing to get to grips with the human condition. That is what we will endeavour to do in this article.

Much of this has already been covered in What's The Problem?, What Is Sin, and Why Does It Matter?, and A Tale of Two Kingdoms, so, if you have not already done so, you may want to read those articles before proceeding.

Here is a brief resume of what took place with our first ancestors at the beginning of the human race:

When Did It Start?

Let's take a moment to remind ourselves of the background to this event.

God has created the first man, Adam, and placed him in the Garden of Eden to tend and care for it. Since Adam was not designed to live or work alone, God has provided him with a helper, a companion, and a lover - a woman named Eve. Everything in the Garden is rosy, and love is in the air.

Delightful! Beautiful! Wonderful!

In the centre of the Garden God has planted two trees: the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. He has told Adam that he is free to eat of any of the trees in the Garden, with a single exception. Should he eat of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, he will surely die.

Time passes. Adam and Eve go about their life together, tending the Garden, making love, looking after the animals, eating the fruit from the trees as and when they like - but steering clear of the forbidden fruit; avoiding the trees in the middle of the Garden.

Bliss! Peace! Happiness!

Every evening, God comes into the Garden to spend time with His son and daughter. They tell Him what happened during the day, and He tells them the secrets of Heaven. They ask Him for advice on how to do the things they don't yet understand, and He instructs them on how to bake bread, how to make a wheel, how to light a fire, how to sow seed.

Joy! Exhilaration! Rapture!

Enter the dragon.

We know from Revelation 20:2 that the serpent is associated with the Devil, or Satan, whose name literally means "Adversary". He is the enemy of God and the enemy of man, whom God made in His own image. I have dealt more fully with him in another place. For the present it is enough for us to know that it is Satan who is behind the serpent.

It is important for us to remember at this point that God has given Adam and Eve everything that they need for a wonderful life together. He has even planted the Tree of Life in the centre of the Garden, and they can eat as much as they want from it as often as they please. The one and only prohibition that He has placed upon them is that they are not to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, as the result of so doing will be their certain death (Genesis 2:9,15-17).

Now, let us examine Satan's tactics.

First of all, he does not approach Adam with the temptation. Adam is the embodiment of reason, strength, and authority. He would give the serpent short shrift should he approach him in this way. Eve is the embodiment of intuition, sensitivity, and submission. She is more likely to be gullible, to listen to the Devil's argument, to be taken in.

Satan begins his temptation with a question: "Did God really say ... ?" His opening gambit is to sow in Eve's mind the seed of suspicion. Until now, it has never occurred to her to question God's purposes, His motives, His goodness. She has taken it for granted that God knows best and has her and Adam's best interests at heart, just as a child implicitly trusts his parents and never doubts their love (assuming, of course, that they are treating the child well).

Having sown the seed of suspicion, he moves on to contradict God's word and to make out that God is actually withholding from Adam and Eve something which is of benefit to them and which would make their life even better than it is, if only they would reach out and take it. In fact, he tells her that they will "be like God".

The Devil here employs a half-truth. God Himself asserts, in chapter 3 verse 22, that after eating the forbidden fruit, "... the man has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil ...". However, the "benefit" of being a party to that knowledge is not immediately apparent.

In verse 6 we now find that Eve's perception of the forbidden tree has changed as a result of the serpent's advertising campaign. It now appears to her as being good for food, pleasing to the eye, and desirable for gaining wisdom. In short, despite the fact that God, who knows all things, has warned them away from that tree and told them of the danger that it embodies, Eve has decided that she knows better. She has said to herself, "I want this, and I can justify my desire for it. Why should I be denied that which I desire? Why should I not be like God? Is that not my birth-right?"

Encapsulated in this short passage is the principle that underlies sin, and we can say that all sin that men and women commit has the same rationale: "I want this, and I will have it, no matter what anyone else says - even Almighty God!"

The sin of Cain, which is reported in Genesis 4:1-10, differs from Eve's sin not in kind but only in degree. He also said, "I will have my way, and no-one will stop me". The root attitude is the same.

The stories of Eve and Cain illustrate very clearly that the root of sin is self.

Why Do We Sin?

Why is it considered sinful to be motivated by a desire to gratify our natural appetites? Why is it wrong to seek pleasure and self fulfilment?

Let's look at one of the sayings of Jesus to see if that can point us towards the answer:

The apostle Paul expresses this slightly differently in his letter to the Christians in Rome:

So, what is this thing called love?

The essence of love, as it is used in the Christian context, is to desire and work for the best interests of someone else without any thought of personal reward.

The apostle John says that "God is love" (First John 3:7-8).

Let's say something here about God.

He is perfect. He was not created by someone or something else. He is the Eternal One (Deuteronomy 33:27). When Moses asked Him, "Who are you?" He replied, "I AM!" (Exodus 3:14) He did not have a beginning, and He will not have an end. And He can never change. Why? Since He is already perfect, and always has been, any change would necessarily make Him imperfect.

When my will is in line with God's will, I am living in love. When my will is out of line with God's will, I am no longer living in love. If I am no longer living in love, I must now be living in such a way that the good that I could have been doing I am no longer doing. If I continue to deviate, I will begin to cause harm. The more I deviate from the perfect, loving will of God, the more pain and hardship I cause for other people.

We have all hurt somebody at some time in our lives because of selfishness. Whether it was intentional or unintentional, we did it. We sinned.

Selfishness ends up hurting somebody. That is why selfishness is sin, and that is why sin is a problem.

We all start out in life believing that we are the centre of the universe. Babies are totally self-centred. All they know is what they experience in their bodies. When their body feels good, they gurgle and smile; when their body feels bad, they gowl and howl. As we mature, we learn that there are other people in the world as well as ourselves. Our parents (hopefully) teach us to be polite, considerate, respectful, caring. Most of the time we do our best to be decent, upstanding, responsible citizens. But if we look at ourselves honestly we will find that, underneath all that respectability, that foundation of self-centredness has not gone away. When the chips are down and the pressure is on, that root of selfishness will manifest itself.

In eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, Adam and Eve sinned:

• Against God, in that they failed to respect His authority. In fact, they suspected Him of trying to pull the wool over their eyes, whereas He was actually trying to protect them from the consequences of allowing evil to find a place in their paradise.
• Against each other, and against all of their descendants, by opening the door to death, pain, poverty, grief, sickness, failure, bondage, and every other expression of evil that has plagued man since the day that Adam's teeth closed in on that fruit.

Sin is the big issue in the lives of us all. It is the root cause of all of our problems. It is not something that we can treat lightly, or sweep under the carpet. It must be dealt with. It must be tackled.

Are you willing to tackle the problem of sin in your own life?

What Are The Effects Of Sin?

Let us now consider what happens when sin is committed.

God had said to Adam, concerning the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, "On the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die" (Genesis 2:17). It is clear that Adam and Eve did not drop dead that very day, but death became the inevitable end-point of their time on the earth. The aging process with which we are all familiar today began in their bodies that day.

The first noticeable effect of the sin was shame. All of a sudden, their nakedness is a problem, and they scurry about looking for something with which to cover themselves, and then go hiding among the trees. Their dignity is gone. Adam is no longer the majestic lord of the creation; Eve no longer its regal lady. Where is their honour now, and where their greatness? Crumpled and trampled under-foot like autumn leaves, dried up and perishing.

God also pronounces curses upon them after the sin has been committed (Genesis 3:14-19). This introduces to us the principle that where sin is committed, it is not sufficient that the sinner suffers the immediate consequences of the sin, but there must also be a commensurate punishment.

We should bear in mind, at this point, that partaking of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil would result, of itself, in Adam and Eve, who had known only good up until that time, being introduced to evil. All at once, evil became an essential feature of human life. Things could never be the same again. The primal innocence was lost forever.

The Bible does not go into any detail about how Satan came to be the enemy of God, although there are a couple of passages which give an indication of what may have taken place (Isaiah chapter 14:12-17; Ezekiel chapter 28:12-19). We do know, however, that once Adam and Eve had listened to his voice and disobeyed God, all of a sudden the world that had been under their control fell into his hands.

In a similar way, whenever you or I disobey God and go the way of evil, we put ourselves into the enemy's camp and, to some degree, under his control. This is a very serious side-effect of sin, because it may be simple enough to obtain God's forgiveness, but it is not so easy to get Satan to agree to release us from his power or influence. He does not give up easily. He is a fighter.

There are many people today who are depressed, even suicidal; who have given way to drink or drugs, or both; who live night and day under a burden of guilt and shame that they cannot understand and do not know how to cope with. The cause of this is sin.

We live today, in western Europe, in a culture where morality is redefined at our convenience; where men are legally married to men and women to women; where every year thousands of unwanted babies are ripped apart and discarded as so much effluent; where promiscuity is accepted as the norm and promoted on both the large and small screens; where belief in God is considered, by many in the scientific arena, to be irrational; where we teach our children that they are no more than naked apes, that human life has neither meaning nor purpose, and then throw up our hands in horror when many of them take it to heart and begin to live as if it were really true.

People often ask a question such as, "If your God is so good and loving, why is there so much evil in the world? Why does He let it go on? Why does He not put a stop to it?"

The answer is here, in the opening chapters of the Bible. Evil is a reality. It existed before man. God is a realist. He gave man a choice. Man chose the way of self-determination and independence, and so invited evil into his world and, in so doing, lost the very thing that he aspired to gain.

God will deal with all evil once and for all in His own time. For now, we must learn to deal with it as it affects us.

The Love Thermometer

In What Is Sin? I introduced the concept of ‘the Love Thermometer’. Let’s expand on that idea for a bit.

Rather than measuring temperature, this thermometer measures the depth of love in a person’s heart, bearing in mind that the love that we are talking about is not the Greek ‘philia’, which means the love of friendship, which is driven by personal feelings, but the Greek ‘agape’ (pronounced ‘a-ga-pey’), which is a selfless love, where your concern is for the well-being of the other person, and you are motivated to do whatever you can to provide them with what they need, irrespective of how you personally may be affected, for good or ill.

The apostle John tells us that God is love (1 John 4:7-8). We can understand from this that God is motivated by ‘agape’ love, which is perfect and unadulterated by any personal, selfish motivation.

So, let’s put God’s perfect love at the top of the scale in white, for purity.

Beneath that, let’s illustrate the decreasing depths of love in the scale using the seven colours of the rainbow, with red being the ‘hottest’ and violet being the ‘coldest’.

At the bottom of the scale is black, which indicates the total absence of love – absolute zero.

I would suggest that the majority of people who live in cultures that have been influenced by Judaeo-Christianity, or other religions which have an emphasis on righteousness, would be found in the ‘green’ band right in the middle.

Here, we are motivated by a fairly well-balanced see-saw with selfishness at one end and kindness at the other. Depending on our mood and how things are going in our lives we will either manifest kindness or selfishness to some degree or another, but we are neither consistently selfish nor consistently kind. Even when we are being kind, the kindness is contaminated by self-interest, and even when we are being selfish, the selfishness is moderated by our understanding of the need for kindness.

The yellow band, above the green, is where we find those people who have made a commitment to caring for others. They are consistently concerned for other people’s welfare, and may even have adopted a career which reflects this, such as in nursing or other caring professions, or people who are life-guards or fire-fighters, or those who work with the homeless or down-and-outs, or even some politicians (given that there are indeed politicians who are genuinely more interested in the welfare of their constituents than in their own advancement).

The yellow band people still go home at night and take foreign holidays and treat themselves to spa weekends and fancy cars, but most of the time they’re looking after somebody else.

The orange band is a step closer to God. In here you’ll find the people whose lives are dedicated to the service of God and man. Everything that they have, including their money, their time, their home, their skills and abilities, are devoted to doing good. Some may have left their homes and gone overseas to live among the disabled, the destitute, or the otherwise disadvantaged. Others may have stayed at home to do the same thing. These are the people who have to be commanded to take a break, or to have some down-time, or to buy themselves some new clothes, because their entire focus is on service.

The top band, fiery red, is for those whose hearts are totally devoted to God and on fire for Him and His service. They can spend hours, and even days, in fervent prayer and lose all sense of time. For them, life is utterly meaningless if it is not spent in God’s presence and in the execution of His will. They live in God’s pocket and have a hand-to-mouth existence – God’s hand to their mouths. They consider nothing to be their own – not even themselves. To live or to die for them is all the same, so long as it is done for Him. They walk, not day by day, but moment by moment in the footsteps of Jesus Christ.

On the other hand, beneath the green band we come to blue. Here we find those who, while not necessarily criminal, or even law-breakers, are the ones who habitually bend the rules or twist the laws to their own advantage. For them, generosity is a means to an end, an investment which may be called in at an opportune time in the future. They are impatient with those who are weak or in any way needy, as they are comfortable with taking but uncomfortable with giving away even a few minutes of their time, which would otherwise have been spent on themselves, because everything that they do, they do for one of two purposes: for profit, or for pleasure. However, they still have enough decency in them to avoid hurting someone else unnecessarily, but if you do get hurt, don’t expect the sympathy to be long-lived or the apology to be heart-felt.

Beneath blue is indigo. In the indigo band are those whose concern for the welfare of others is negligible, and for whom laws and rules exist, not to be broken, but to be ignored. The rules of the game are, “I get what I want, and if you get in my way, you get hurt”. Most criminals live their lives in the indigo band.

As we go deeper into sin we reach violet, where we find the depraved wretches who actually derive pleasure from inflicting suffering on other people. Abusers of all kinds are found here: child abusers / paedophiles, wife-beaters, rapists, traffickers, pimps, pushers, dictators – the Hitlers, Pol Pots, Stalins, and so forth of this world, whether they be rulers of empires, nations, families, or gangs. For these individuals, other human beings are but resources to be exploited for power, money, or self-indulgence, because self is all that matters here.

The lowest level is black. I suspect that very few, if any, human beings are to be found here, for this is the level of Satan himself and his demons, who are totally wicked and entirely beyond redemption. For those even in the violet band there is still hope of redemption, for Christ died for the vilest of sinners, not just the half-decent ones. However, He did not die for the devil, nor for those who have committed the unforgiveable sin, which is to see the work of the Holy Spirit and maliciously to attribute it to the evil one (Mark 3:22-30).

It is possible for any one of us to move out of the band in which we normally live and for a time behave according to the standards of a higher or a lower one. For example, a normally self-centred (blue) individual may, when faced with a situation of extreme danger, act totally out of character and risk his life to save someone else (yellow), perhaps from a burning building, or from drowning. By the same token, a dedicated missionary in a foreign land (orange) might give way to a mixture of stress and temptation and end up seducing a native woman (blue).

The average green-band person, during the course of their life, has probably veered on many occasions into blue below or yellow above for a short period of time.

But the problem that we all face is this: whereas according to the standards of our own society, or even our own personal standards, someone may be a very good person – for instance, we would consider those living in the yellow band to be very good people and worthy role models for our children – but the standard that God requires of us is much higher.

Let’s remind ourselves of what Paul said about this:

In our natural state, we are able, if we so choose, to endeavour to live according to the law. However, when we do so we discover that, whereas each individual law in itself is easy enough to obey, when we put them all together and attempt to obey them all consistently, we invariably fail.

This is not good enough for God.

In His eyes, it is sin for us to ‘fall short of the glory of God’. But, what does that mean?

I would suggest that we should understand this to mean that God requires of us that His glory should be manifest in and through our lives 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, throughout our days on this earth.

Is this possible?

In our natural state, the answer is definitely ‘no’!

Do any of the coloured bands in our love thermometer correspond to ‘the glory of God’?

I would suggest that probably the red band would answer to the need.

Could anybody live at that level without God’s help?

Again, the answer is ‘no’. Listen to what God says through the prophet Jeremiah:

It is not in us, by nature, to devote ourselves to draw close to God in the way that He wants us to, for the primary reason that we can only enter fully into the presence of God when we die – not by a physical death, but by the death of the self-will, the natural instinct of self-preservation, which is probably the strongest of all of the drives in our flesh.

So to live at the level of righteousness that God requires of us, we are helpless without His input. Every single human being who has ever lived on this earth, from Adam onwards, is in the same boat, no matter how good, selfless, and exemplary their life might appear to be in the eyes of other people. In the eyes of God, however, it’s just not good enough.

Every single human being, that is, with one remarkable exception:

The eternal Son of God, the Word of God (John 1:1-18), emptied Himself of all of His heavenly glory (Philippians 2:5-11) and walked among sinful men on this earth but, rather than falling in step with them and becoming a sinner like them, He retained His perfect righteousness and, as a result, manifested the glory of God (John 1:14) to those who had eyes to see it.

In his powerful hymn “And Can It Be”, Charles Wesley states that Christ “emptied Himself of all but love”, meaning that the perfect love that He had in His heart while dwelling as God in His glory was somehow contained in its fulness while He lived and worked and served as a frail and physical human being.

Love is the key to overcoming sin and embracing righteousness to the full, but, apart from Jesus Himself, none of us have been able to attain to that level of love that is necessary.

This is why God has had to step in to provide us with a solution to this intractable problem.

That solution is something called GRACE.