Restoration, Part 1

Virtuous and vicious every man must be,
Few in the extreme, but all in the degree.
~Alexander Pope

God knows we need restoration. In the face of common temptation we fall—voluntarily and repeatedly. The same old flaws and failures pursue us all through life. New vices awaken and dominate us. We stumble again and again into bad judgment.

Now and then we set out to restore ourselves. Perhaps, we say, this is the day I will deal with my jealousy, hate, and lust; I’ll find a way around my self-pity, self-defensiveness, self-indulgence, and all the other permutations and hyphenations of self-love that separate us from God and from one another.

Perhaps, perhaps, but probably not. Despite these periodic fits of morality, nothing enduring gets done. Sin remains our sullen master—untamed and intractable.

We blame bad genes, dysfunctional families, or demented ancestors, but no one ever has to push us into wrongdoing; we go all by ourselves.

[God] calls thee to cope with enemies; and first
Points out a conflict with thyself—the worst.
~William Cowper

Theologians write about original sin, which might suggest that we sin in novel, creative ways. But there are no innovative ways to sin. It’s all been done before. No, original sin simply means that we’re sinful in our origins—“sinful from birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me” (Psalm 51:5). We are thrown into  this world like a baseball with a spin on it; in time we break and the curve is always down and away.

Total depravity is the other term theologians use to describe our state. It means that sin affects the totality of our beings. If sin were blue, we’d be some shade of blue all over. In one way or another, small or great, hidden or revealed, we’re tinted and tainted by sin. Sin is biologic—inborn and immutable—a painful reality manifested in the things we do. We’re sinful in the core of our beings—not misguided or mistreated. There is something in our makeup that is dreadfully wrong; it makes us desire wrong, causes us to do wrong, and when we try not to do it, it makes it impossible for us to not think about doing wrong.

But then, we don’t have to be told that we’re defective. Who of us can say, “I have been blameless . . . and have kept myself from sin” (Psalm 18:23)? No, we need only to be reminded, not told. We know what we’re like, though we dislike exposing what we’re like to others. As Shakespeare put it, our best conscience is not so much to leave sin undone as it is to keep it unknown.

God, however, won’t let us keep it unknown. He permits us to do the most embarrassing things at the most inopportune times—crass, unprincipled acts that shame us to tears. “God does not leave us until he has broken our hearts and our bones” (the Shepherd of Hermes).

But to remind us of our, and Adam’s curse
And that to be restored, our sickness must get worse.
~T. S. Eliot

We must get worse, it seems, before we can get better. We must experience the depths of our depravity and see the miserable stuff of which we’re made.

“No man is really any good,” says G. K. Chesterton’s detective, Father Brown, “until he knows how bad he is; till he’s realized exactly how much right he has to all this snobbery, and sneering, and talking about ‘criminals’ as if they were apes in a forest ten thousand miles away; till he’s got rid of all the dirty self-deception of talking about low types and deficient skulls; till he’s squeezed out of his soul the last drop of the oil of the Pharisees; till his only hope is somehow or other to have captured one criminal, and kept him safe and sane under his own hat.”

Sin is an atrocity. We have to realize how monstrous and scandalous it is and how desperately we need God’s forgiveness. We cannot appreciate the magnitude of His acceptance until we comprehend the measure of our sins. We understand and hunger for His grace only at the point of deep and depressing failure.

David knew God’s ways. Never has anyone been so ruthlessly revealed. You know the story about how he fell for Uriah’s pretty, young wife, Bathsheba. One brief spell of passionate indulgence and David was plunged into ruin. Judah’s illustrious ruler, the sweet singer of Israel, became David, the seducer, the adulterer—then a monstrous liar, a murderer, and then a mass murderer, utterly pitiless and unmoved by his horrifying evil. There’s no end to sin once we begin.

Moral collapse is seldom a blowout. It’s more like a slow leak, the result of a thousand small indulgences, the consequences of which are not immediately apparent. We are seduced by sin’s attraction and led on by subtle degrees. We transition into failure:

Vice is a monster of so frightful mien
As, to be hated, needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.
~Alexander Pope

The attraction becomes fantasy. (Fictional sin seems exciting while fictional good seems dull. That’s the fundamental deception of our fantasies.) Fantasy softens us, and our convictions erode. We’re then in a frame of mind to listen to our passions and having listened we have no will to resist.

Then comes the yielding and with the yielding the rationalizations. We have to justify our behavior to ourselves and to others. Everything but our own wrongdoing becomes our reason. All our actions must be explained and made to look good.

But our hearts know. There are moments when our wills soften and we long to set things right. If we do not then listen to our hearts there is a metallic hardening and then corruption. Our wrongdoing mutates, altering its form and quality, evolving into dark narcissism and horrifying cruelty: We don’t care who gets hurt as long as we get what we want.

And ultimately there is disclosure. Sooner or later we face the horrible experience of being found out. At first we vehemently deny any wrongdoing. Then we dissemble. (People in trouble always lie.) But inevitably our dishonor is shouted from the housetops. There’s no place to hide from the shame. We experience the force of inexorable law: Sin, no matter what we do, will not prosper.

Eventually the consequences catch up to us and we have to face the facts, or, like David, we have to face someone who digs up the facts. Nathan, an old and trusted friend, trapped the shepherd-king with a story about a rich man who seized another man’s pet lamb to serve to a “traveling stranger,” Nathan’s metaphor for David’s transient passion (2 Samuel 12:1–4).

David, weary of warding off his conscience, flamed out his verdict on the man and his terrible deed: “As surely as the Lord lives, the man who did this deserves to die! He must pay for that lamb four times over, because he did such a thing and had no pity” (12:5). Sheep-stealing was not a capital offense in Israel. According to Israelite law a thief was only required to make fourfold restitution to the victim (Exodus 22:1). David was overreacting, expending on another the stern judgment he should have applied to himself.

“You are the man!” Nathan said, pointing his finger at David. “This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: ‘I anointed you king over Israel, and I delivered you from the hand of Saul. I gave your master’s house to you, and your master’s wives into your arms. I gave you the house of Israel and Judah. And if all this had been too little I would have given you more. Why did you despise the word of the Lord by doing what is evil in his eyes?” (2 Samuel 12:7–9).

Brought face-to-face with his corruption, David buried his face in his hands. “I have sinned against the Lord,” was his only reply. No excuses, no justification, no extenuating circumstances, no special pleading. And Nathan said, “The Lord has taken away your sin. You are not going to die” (12:13).

God lets us fall not to shame us, but to assure us that though we are guilty, vile, and helpless we are deeply loved by God. God’s love in the face of our wickedness is what awakens us to humility and contrition.

Taken from Psalm 23: The Song of a Passionate Heart, ©1994 by David Roper. Used by permission of Discovery House Publishers, Box 3566 Grand Rapids, MI 49501. All rights reserved.