Ever hear comments like these,
“Beauty in the eyes of the beholder is
giving ugly a break!”
“Why,
I declare that poor child is so ugly she could sue her mother for damages!”
“A little paint on an old barn is not a
bad thing!”
We learn very early in life, don’t we,
to categorize people based on physical appearance and mental prowess. Oh, how quickly,
we add to the list! We see people as pretty or ugly, clean or smelly, tall or
short, skinny or fat, athletic or wimpy, rich or poor, smart or stupid, wise or
foolish, white, black, red, yellow, brown, and so forth; there is a whole host
of descriptors at our disposal, yes?
Youth can be pretty cruel and direct in the
personal assessment of others. There is an intense focus on the way people look,
and I don’t think this really abates with time (cf. 1 Sam 16:7). As believers, we should
be looking at the heart, right? Right… In time we see that there is more to a
person than what is on the outside. As we mature, we see the value of the
person within; well, most of us do.
Now, I have known people who were
physically unattractive but were beautiful from within. Jesus was in that group
while on earth (cf. Isa 53:2). So much so, you didn’t even pay any attention to
the outer appearance. It’s a beautiful thing. Conversely, I have known some
people who were beautiful on the outside but ugly on the inside. I have also
known some who were not only beautiful on the inside but on the outside, too!
We all have.
Supposedly, we get better at camouflaging
our remarks about a person’s looks and intelligent quotient, et al; it can be
cutting, nonetheless. Others bludgeon people over the head with some ugly stick rhetoric. But
as we get smarter and savvier, we catch the gist of that, too! No matter how
educated, wise, powerful, influential, rich, wealthy, attractive we have become,
a spiritual fact remains constant; our sin nature is still as ugly as the day
we were born again; now, that’s some powerful ugly, deserving every bit of that
epithet! The Scriptures refer to it as “the old man,” “the flesh.”
We can deny its existence, of course,
educate the mind, explain it away, and give the body a cosmetic makeover with
surgery or makeup. Sometimes, even that doesn’t help! The ugliness of our sin
nature just bleeds through, right? We
can wear the finest of clothing, speak delicately and properly, refine our
behavior, buff our bodies to culturally-induced obsessions, place our bodies in
palatial homes, hobnob with the “beautiful” people, travel the globe in jet-set
fashion, and take from the world the best it has to offer and be the envy of
the world in every category appealing to human nature. The problem is; our
sin nature is going with us no matter where we go.
The truth of the matter is that we are
still a sinner, totally depraved in spite of all our attempts of cultural
sophistication, capable of committing the vilest of sins! Our present time has seen no improvements of the sin nature
since Adam fell thousands of years ago. Our hearts, the seat of our cognition,
emotion, and volition, are still the same today since the expulsion of Adam and
Eve from the Garden because Adam sinned in knowledge and Eve sinned being
deceived (cf. 1 Tim 2:14); both violated the one and only prohibition in Eden.
This is what makes the Word of God so
relevant to us today; we are all born sinners, having the Adamic nature which
is sinful (Job 14:4; Psa 51:5; 58:3; Rom 5:12; Eph 2:3). It’s not theological
rocket science for a believer! I get why Eve ate the forbidden fruit; she
was deceived, but that is no excuse, right? But Adam, what was he thinking? Did
they think that God was joking – “…for in the
day that you eat of it [the tree of the knowledge
of good and evil] you shall surely die?” Sadly, they both discovered it was no joke.
Nobody wants to think there is something
ugly and dark about themselves, but gazing into the mirror of Scripture tells a
different story, a divine perception, not a human one of mankind. It reveals
something unaffected by natural beauty as well as all of the cosmetic makeovers.
The Scripture portrays a crystal-clear picture
of the spiritual aspect of man (cf. Jer 17:9, et al). Whenever I delve into
hamartiology or the study of sin, I cannot help but recall a collegiate banter,
“U-G-L-Y, you ain’t got no alibi! You ugly! You ugly! You ugly, ugly, ugly!” Let’s
graduate from that and call it what it is, the Adamic nature, and everybody has
one because we have all descended from Adam, to state the obvious, provided you
believe Adam was truly a literal, historical figure.
And you know what? We can’t say anything
nice about Adam’s nature! There is no way we can domesticate or eradicate this
beast from within, only corral it like a brute animal that it is! We have all
heard, “You are an animal!” That is true of all of us in more ways than one,
yes? The worse thing to do with this troublesome nature is to feed it or attempt to cultivate
or foster its presence. God wants us to feed the new man of faith and starve
the old man or the flesh or our sinful nature (cf. Rom 8:13; Col 3:5).
We literally cannot kill this thing
inside of us because that can only happen during glorification on the other
side of eternity, but through the enablement of the Holy Spirit, we can limit
its activities in our thinking, speaking, and doing by yielding to the leading
of the Holy Spirit (cf. Gal 5:16) and growing in the grace and knowledge of our
Lord Jesus Christ; it’s called maturing in the faith, renewing of the mind (cf.
Rom 12:2).
We just need to come to terms with this
understanding that regardless of how much we know about the Bible, what degrees
we have earned or going to earn, our sinful nature is still as ugly as it was the
day when we were born again! No amount of time, training, and discipline will
ever tame or domesticate that beast within us. It remains a wild, untamable
buck from our birth to our death until we are glorified on the other side of
eternity. The best thing that we can do is maintaining a steady supply of
pressure on it. The moment we let the pressure off, like a jack-in-the-box, it
rears its ugly head in our lives.
The byproduct of the reality of sin is
all around us. Secular psychologists describe it as anything but sin; in their
expert opinion it is some kind of psychosis, a dark side of the inexplicable nature
of man; but as believers, we know it as sin, the great spiritual cancer that
affects 100% of the earth’s population. The number one cause of death in the
world is sin (cf. Rom 5:12).
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, many
consider Adam and Eve and this thing called sin as something allegorical rather
than literal. Someone once said that you can tell the difference between a
liberal and a conservative of Scripture in how the first eleven chapters of
Genesis is being treated. Physical death is as real as it gets. When the body
ceases to function, that person inside that body is gone, even if the body is
hooked up to life-support, in most cases. No sane person is claiming death is a
figment of our imagination. Once we are born, we are on a one-way trip to the
grave, yes? It is what happens afterward lies the great unknown, the great
debate, the endless debate!
Unbelievers do not view sin as God does;
that makes sense (cf. 1 Cor 2:14), but I am persuaded that many of us as born
again believers do not understand sin as Yahweh by our misperceptions of it and
our insensitivities to sin and what we allow it to do to us. Yes, sinning in
knowledge is a choice.
Holiness to the Lord is not a killjoy, willful
sin is! Sin messes with our holiness before the Lord (1 Pet 1:16; 1 Jn 3:3) and
is a fellowship-breaker, yes? Christ did not wrestle with holiness like we do (cf.
Heb 4:15; cf. Heb 12:1; 1 Jn 2:1), but through Him in the power of His Holy
Spirit, we can deny the impulses of the flesh (Gal 5:16).
Some commentators advocate that neither salvation nor fellowship can be broken. I agree that salvation is eternal, but I take issue with the idea of an unbreakable fellowship. So, please pay close attention to my explanation, if you will. Fellowship with
God is only possible through a personal relationship with God via
salvation. Those who place their faith in Christ are saved to the uttermost, eternally! Truly, our salvation is unbreakable! Selah. Fellowship, on the other hand, on this side of eternity, can be temporarily
disrupted due to willful sin or disobedience on the part of a believer.
One of the byproducts of our eternal
relationship (salvation) with the Lord is the privilege of experiencing fellowship with
God, an interaction that goes beyond salvation. Salvation is a one-time event; fellowship can potentially be a continual event provided we stay clear of sin. Through salvation in Christ, we have peace with God (Rom 5:1); through
loving obedience to His commands (cf. Jn 14:15), we have fellowship with God
and enjoy the peace of God (Php 4:7; Col 3:15).
There is another way of looking at this.
One is positional sanctification (salvation) and the other is practical or
progressive sanctification (fellowship, living in obedience to the Lord,
maturing in the faith). Our salvation is eternal so there is no fear of ever
losing the blessing of salvation; we will always be a part of the family of God.
Fellowship with God is temporal only because it can be disrupted through willful
disobedience.
With the Holy Spirit living within our hearts, we have the capability of being obedient and enjoying the
peace of God in fellowship. The peace of God is disrupted but never the peace with God. Does that make sense to you? It doesn’t
mean we lost our salvation by any means or that God no longer loves us; God forbid such a
thing! The truth is that Yahweh can love us no more or no less, yes? When we were growing
up, we may have disobeyed our parents, but no matter what, we were always the
son or daughter of our parents. That would never change whether we obeyed or disobeyed
our parents while we were growing up.
What we need to realize is that sin or willful disobedience to God will cause a break in our fellowship with Him until we repent of it (cf. Psa 32:2-3, 4-5; 66:18). God is not going to bless us if we are disobedient any more than a father would his children; it’s called chastening a loved one. Fellowship or the peace of God is restored by confessing or agreeing with God about that sin (or disagreement about that sin) we allowed to come between us (cf. 1 Jn 1:9 which is talking about fellowship). Yes, fellowship and the peace of God are intertwined. We are not going to experience the peace of God while being out of fellowship with God. Sin in our lives does not produce any kind of peace, which is part of the fruit of the Spirit, yes: love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control (Gal 5:22-23).
Repentance (doing a 180 turn) restores
us to fellowship and living in the will of God, in the peace of God, to be
blessed of God. Such a fellowship is based on our salvation which is the prerequisite,
but fellowship is actualized by obedience to His commands. One of them is
personal holiness (1 Pet 1:16), He is
faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanses us from all unrighteousness
(1 Jn 1:9b, emphasis mine).
So, yes, sin, which is unloving, can
break fellowship or the peace of God in our lives because sin is always an
inhibitor to the fruit of the Spirit and the antithesis of holiness
(1 Pet 1:15-16; 1 Jn 1:10). Obedience brings blessings; disobedience fetches burdens.
Another way of understanding this distinction is understanding that salvation
is referring to judicial forgiveness. Restoration of fellowship is about
familial forgiveness. Salvation is being judicially declared righteous
by Yahweh; fellowship involves familial matters in obeying His Word. It is hard
to conceive of having the peace of God while being unloving to Yahweh for
disobeying His commands, yes?
Sin in any shape or form is ugly because
it exacerbates the holiness that is to be exemplified in and by our lives in
all that we think, say, or do; it's a tall order, no doubt. This verb confess (1 Jn 1:9) means to agree,
truly agree, making a change in conduct. It is not relief for the moment and continuing
on in a lifestyle of disobedience later.
Such a confession would be superficial by
making promises to God we do not intend to keep, lying to Him in other words!
He knows the heart of man (Jer 17:10); so reverse psychology on God is useless!
Unlike us, Jesus always keeps His promises to us, yes!?
It is a peculiar thing to me that one
would want to spend eternity with Jesus but have very little to do with Him in
the fleeting moments of life on earth. Fellowship with Him reveals a love for obeying
His Word. It all begins with salvation and is realized by a heart that chooses
to be holy and loves (agapao) God as shown in obedience to His Word. It
really is not complicated. If we have peace with God but are not enjoying the
peace of God, we are really missing out on the greatest blessings on this side of eternity
– joy in the Lord!
The joy of Yahweh is my strength (cf. Neh 8:10)!
Do you know what is really ugly? Whenever you and I choose to sin against Jesus Christ, who died for our sins, we are as ugly as sin when we should be reflecting the countenance of Christ in our lives; it’s the worst kind of ugly we could ever be! How much do we truly value our fellowship with Yahweh? Enough to spend more time with Him in fellowship sweet? <><
