How Do You See Others?
I once saw a comic strip in which a father with a concerned look on his face is reviewing his son’s report card. The boy, sensing the father’s displeasure asked, “What do you think the problem is, Dad, heredity or environment?” The young man’s deft, humorous, and obvious blame-shift nevertheless highlights a truth about our behavior namely, that it is influenced by both nature and nurture – who we are by virtue of birth/upbringing, personality/experience, psychology/sociology. Therefore, if we’re to see others clearly, we must look at not only what they’ve done, but what’s been done to them.
The ‘Fall’ and Its Effects
When humanity chose to sin through our representatives in Eden the consequences were immediate, ongoing, and extensive:
The vertical effect of sin. — The Bible teaches that the first and most profound outcome of the Fall was a severing of humanity’s relationship with God. When Adam sinned, he instinctively knew that he was guilty before His Maker and unworthy of His fellowship, and therefore he hid from the Lord (Genesis 3:8-10). From that day forward it is ‘natural’ for people to hide from God.
The horizontal effect of sin. — The Fall not only destroyed our relationship with God, it also broke our harmony with one another. Both of our first parents blamed the other for their calamity and each became capable of victimizing and susceptible to victimization (Genesis 3:11-13). From that day forward it is ‘natural’ for marriages to fail, and all relationships are potentially hostile.
The environmental effect. — The physical world has also suffered from the Fall so that disasters and illnesses, none of which were part of God’s original creation, are now our normal experience (Genesis 3:16-19). From this day forward sickness, disease, and death became ‘natural’.
The World, The Flesh, The Devil
Since the Fall we are all shaped by these three influences:
Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them. For everything in the world [including] the lust of the flesh … comes not from the Father but from the world. … the whole world is under the control of the evil one. (1 John 2:15-16; 5:19)
To see others clearly, we must look at not only what they’ve done, but what’s been done to them.
In the words of the late Biblical counselor David Powlison:
All three of these motivations conspire to move us to sin. The “flesh” is our inertial self-centeredness, the wants, hopes, fears, expectations, “needs” that crowd our hearts. The “world” is all that invites, models, reinforces, and conditions us into such inertia, teaching us lies. The … Devil [exercises] behavior-determining lordship, standing as ruler over his kingdom of flesh and world. (The Journal of Biblical Counseling, Volume 13, Number 2, Winter 1995)
The Same, But Different
What this means is that we all have a common nature, a sin nature, the “flesh”. However, the way in which we manifest our internal nature is influenced by external factors. We all sin, but we sin differently, depending in large part on what we’ve experienced and had modeled before us. It doesn’t explain sin away, but it explains the way we sin.
One indication of our broken relationships is our tendency to censure others for the way they sin to make ourselves feel better about our own. But the truth is, we share the demerit of our sin nature, and can claim no merit for our nurture. If we were blessed with a favorable family or social environment, we have no right to judge those who weren’t. If we were born with advantages, we should thank the God Who gave them, without denigrating those who never had them.
“You Didn’t Build That, Jonah”
The prophet Jonah was given numerous spiritual advantages, and yet when the God to Whom he claimed to be devoted commissioned him to Nineveh, he went in the opposite direction. Why? Because he feared that God would be merciful to people that Jonah despised. When God did so, Jonah complained:
To Jonah this seemed very wrong, and he became angry. He prayed to the LORD, “Isn’t this what I said, LORD, when I was still at home? That is what I tried to forestall by fleeing to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity. Now, LORD, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live.” (Jonah 4:1-3)
In response the Lord prepared an object lesson on grace, which requires that God have the prerogative to give and take away. He provided Jonah a plant to shade him from the heat, only to remove it the following day, eliciting Jonah’s anger (again):
God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about the plant?” “It is,” he said. “And I’m so angry I wish I were dead.” But the LORD said, “You have been concerned about this plant, though you did not tend it or make it grow … Should I not have concern for the great city of Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people …?” (Jonah 4:9-11)
Underlying Jonah’s anger at God’s mercy was his misplaced belief that he deserved God’s grace (an oxymoron, since grace is, by definition, undeserved) and others do not. Jonah had somehow attributed his own worthiness to his gifts and deemed those outside his community to be unworthy of the same favor.
Seeing Through Jesus’s Eyes
When our Lord walked the earth He of course had the same merciful heart that He had toward Nineveh hundreds of years before. The Bible says,
“When [Jesus] saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” (Matthew 9:36)
The apostle Paul understood that he was the undeserving recipient of God’s amazing grace:
“Who makes you different from anyone else? What do you have that you did not receive? And if you did receive it, why do you boast as though you did not?” (1 Corinthians 4:7)
“I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am.” (1 Corinthians 15:10)
May the Lord grant us the humility to respond to our blessings with “But for the grace of God I am what I am”, and others’ struggles with “But for the grace of God so go I.”
Ken Brown is the pastor of Community Bible Church in Trenton, MI. We republish his article by permission.
Photo by Anika Huizinga on Unsplash