Born to Win Podcast - with Ronald L. Dart

I was doing one of my periodic pilgrimages through the Psalms this week, and I came across a plaintive cry from King David. It got into my mind and I can’t get it out. Here’s what he said: If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do? I was struck by a footnote on the word foundations. It remarked that, figuratively, the word was talking about the moral and political support of a society. And, in a lot of ways, that feels like where we are in our own society today. The foundations—the moral and political support of our society are being destroyed.

The question of what the righteous can do, then, is not merely a helpless complaint made while throwing hands in the air. It is an honest question: What can we do? And, when you put it that way, there is much that the righteous can do—more than you might have thought. But, for starters, you’ve really got to realize what it is that you’re up against. One thing that stands in opposition are the people the Psalmist calls the Wicked.

Who are these people? In Psalm 11, they are as characterized as cowards who shoot arrows at us from the darkness, afraid to fight in the light of day. This theme of the Wicked is common in the psalms. In fact, the psalm just before, Psalm 10, outlines exactly the character of this person. This is not one of the beautiful Psalms; it is downright disturbing. When the Bible speaks of the Wicked, it is speaking of a singular evil. This is not merely a misguided person. This is not an ordinary sinner, like most of us. This is evil personified.

Who is Satan, the devil? What is he? Where does he come from? Well, most people identify him with the Lucifer of the Bible who is mentioned in the 14th chapter of Isaiah. It says:

How are you fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How are you cut down to the ground, who did weaken the nations! For you have said in your heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the farthest sides of the north: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High. Yet you shall be brought down to sheol, to the sides of the pit.

Before we can understand this interpretation, we have to understand where angels come from in the first place—and why they even exist. We’ll find a fascinating discourse on the subject in the beginning of the Epistle to the Hebrews.

Is there a spirit world? I think you could ask a thousand people at random, and by far the majority would say yes, there is a spirit world. But when you start asking for details about that world, you will find a lot of opinion, a lot of unprovable stories, and very little hard data. And most people seem to be afraid of the spirit world. They don’t think of it in terms of religion, but of demons, ghosts, and the presence of great evil. The presence of evil in the world is a fact. but the origin of that evil is not at all clear.

There is a spirit world. It is like another dimension, parallel to our own. There are times and circumstances that seem to allow interaction between these worlds, but that interaction is not unlimited or at will For the most part, humans cannot access that world, and the inhabitants of that world cannot routinely access the physical world.

There is an incredible amount of mythology surrounding it, much of it entirely untrue, much of it may be generated by Lucifer himself. Misdirection has always been a powerful tool. A lot of misunderstanding comes from the misapprehension of the word “evil.” As used in the Bible, it means adverse, adversity, opposition. There is wickedness in the world that is not spiritual, but human evil. It is tempting to blame all evil in the world on Satan, but that does not seem to be the case.

I realize that the Old Testament law poses some really sticky problems. There is a law back there that regulates the conditions under which a man can sell his daughter. What do you do about laws like that? And there is another law that requires us to wear a blue tassel on our clothes. Does modern man have to do that?

Almost everyone agrees that Christians don’t have to do that, but the reasons why they believe that are widely varied and sometimes colorful. And usually, they are wrong.

We get some help with this question from an often-misunderstood passage out of Paul’s letter to the faithful in Colossae.

How does a strange new religious idea get started? Does someone wake up in the morning and say to himself, I think I’ll start a heresy today? Do little boys say, When I grow up, I want to be a heretic?

No, I suspect it is a little more subtle than that. But it certainly is persistent. You can give man an absolutely perfect religion, a true faith, and he can’t stand it. He will have to improve it somehow.

The church at Colossae is not mentioned in the Book of Acts, and it appears that Paul had never been there. But some really screwy ideas had turned up in Colossae, and I have no doubt that Paul was getting weary of the parade of heresies by the time he wrote his letter to the Colossians.

There is a difference between religion and faith. That may be a little hard to explain, but I think it is fair to say that a lot of people have a religion who have very little in the way of faith. Their religion is more a matter of ideas, arguments, positions, creeds, dogmas, and the like than it is about the heart. Churches can easily become the religious equivalent of political parties. They may be conservative or they may be liberal, and theological discussions can involve as much spin as any political discussion. Churches’ creeds can be just as political as any party platform, and heretics are merely people who are out to change the platform.

In fact, political parties are disturbingly like religions and churches are disturbingly like political parties. But faith—real faith—has to be something entirely different from that. For one thing, the first prerequisite of real faith is honesty, and honesty is not possible without her sister, humility. When you think about it, unrelenting honesty leads naturally to humility. These twin sisters are conspicuous by their absence from most religious discourse. It is a lot like politics—without humility and honesty, you don’t get faith; you get religion.

Unfortunately, most of what you encounter in this world is religion rather than faith. It is a creed, a dogma, a set of doctrines carefully crafted to explain God and the Bible. The problem is that every dogmatic position has its inconsistencies and contradictions which have to be maintained, and they are too often maintained at the cost of simple honesty. It is, after all, a lot like politics. When I thought about this, my thoughts went to a marvelous statement by one of the Old Testament prophets. He said this:

He has showed you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?

I have given this a lot of thought, and I have finally figured out what’s wrong with Christianity. It’s people. There is not a thing wrong with the Christian faith. After all, what could be better than a religion brought in person by the Son of God?

And think of all the wonderful teachings of Jesus, of love for God and neighbor, of gentleness and kindness and goodness. The problem with this is that Jesus left this marvelous religion in the hands of people, and that’s where things tend to go wrong.

We might like to think that Christians in the first century were better people than we are, but it just isn’t so. Nor are we any better than they were. In Philippians 2, we find Paul addressing some of these same problems.

All of us have special people in our lives. These are people who give us great happiness—people who we love to be with. People we can talk to anytime and into the small hours of the night.

Even pastors of churches who have been through many cities have people who are very special to them and who they long to see again. Think about that. What is it that makes people special to one another? I am not talking about romantic love. We all understand that. What is it that makes the deep friendship?

There was a relationship like this between Paul and the saints at Philippi, a Greek city many miles north of Corinth. There has to be a reason for this kind of special relationship. It doesn’t happen everywhere and all the time. What was different about Philippi?

What does it mean to follow God? Paul called on the Ephesian Christians to: Be ye therefore followers of God, as dear children.

This is a high calling. As a child will imitate the mother or the father, so we are to imitate God. But how can we do this? God is in heaven and we are on earth.

In Ephesians 5, Paul provides us with a starting point—the imitation of Christ—and more.

Funny things happen to us whenever we try to organize ourselves. I guess it is just in the way we are made. Even cows do it. When they start back from the field at milking time they follow a regular path, and I’m told they line up in order. And chickens must do it do, otherwise where does the expression pecking order come from?

And so it is with churches. We all have our pecking order, but sometimes the whole thing gets out of hand. We say we love order, and we put together hierarchies with pecking orders from archbishop to bishop to priest to minister to deacon.

There is even an effort to find these hierarchies in the Bible—or rather to name them after biblical terms. The fourth chapter of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians is a case in point.