And the Lord was pleased with the aroma of the sacrifice and said to himself, “I will never again curse the ground because of the human race, even though everything they think or imagine is bent toward evil from childhood. I will never again destroy all living things.
Genesis 8:21 (NLT)
Jesus said, “no one is good but God alone,” (Mark 10:18). How easy it is to deceive ourselves into thinking we are good. We may say of someone, “He is a good man,” or “she is a good woman.” As Christians, I think we understand that when we say this, we don’t mean that the person is sinless but generally morally good. But such is not the case among many who do not know Christ. Many people see themselves as essentially sinless. They know they are not perfect but they think their good deeds outweigh their bad ones and they count that as sinless.
God is not deceived about the nature of man. The Apostle John said of Jesus on one occasion, “He Himself knew what was in man,” (John 2:25). How does that square with the common assessment often made that most people are good? One day when a man ran up to Jesus and called Him, “good teacher,” Jesus responded: “Why do you call me good? No one is good – except God alone,” (Mark 10:17-18). We are impressed with the faith and righteousness of Noah, and yet, one of the first things Noah did after leaving the ark was to plant a vineyard and get, out of his mind, drunk, presenting a stumbling block for his own sons that proved devastating, (Gen. 9:20ff).
So, we think to ourselves, “well, at least I try to be good and my sins are forgiven.” The truth is that even though our sins are forgiven and we do our best to do the works of righteousness, we still have in us the old sin nature. We still live with the effects of having eaten from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We are to treat it as dead, or in other words that we are dead to sin and alive to Christ. But this does not prevent the old sin nature from rising from the dead and influencing us to sin. Witness the Apostle Paul’s testimony of frustration in Romans 7.
The essence of sin is the exalting of ourselves over God, or regarding what is good, thinking that we know what is good and how to do it without God telling us. We are so prone to think of ourselves first and foremost over anything God might have to say that we, almost automatically, think, say, and do, things with no consideration of what God has to say about it. In other words, quite often, even our good deeds are what the Apostle Paul called, “rubbish.”
What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith.
Philippians 3:8–9 (NIV84)
God will allow us to receive reward here on earth for good deeds done, but the only thing that counts as treasure laid up in heaven is a life lived by faith out of the pure motivation of love for God above all else first, and then our fellow man, as we love ourselves. This is one of the distinctions between the wisdom of God and the wisdom of the world. What great grace God has extended to us, even yet while knowing full well that, “everything they think or imagine is bent toward evil from childhood.”
My Prayer For You Today
that you will not live by the discernment of good and evil as achieved from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but from the mind and heart of our God according to His wisdom and grace in our lives. Love Him first, and then your neighbor as yourself.