Why We Were Made

Romans 7:21-25

August 19, 2018 • Mount Pleasant UMC

It is said the there are two sides to every story. At least two sides. There is “her side” and “his side.” There is the official report and the story that is told. There is what your child tells you and what you know to be true! (No, “someone” didn’t break the lamp and the dog did not eat your homework!) There are places in the Bible where we see this to be true, too. For instance, when it came to the resurrection of Jesus, there was the report of the disciples and the official stance of the religious establishment (cf. Matthew 28:11-15). Last week, we talked about how there are two creation stories in Genesis. One tells the story in the form of an epic poem and the other tells it in the way it was probably shared around campfires. There are two sides to every story, and very often the truth is somewhere in the middle.

So last Sunday we began telling the story, the bigger story that is our story as people of faith, people seeking to follow Jesus. Part of our struggle in the world as it is today is we don’t know our own story or what difference it makes, or how it differs from the world’s story, so we just adopt the world’s story and try to make it our own, try to make it compatible with the Christian story. We need to re-learn our story, a story which can basically be summed up in four words: creation, fall, redemption, restoration. So last week we began by looking at the story of creation and what that means for us. Creation calls us to wonder, to worship, to living in awe of the God who created it all, and I hope you got some moments this past week to just say, “Wow!” Today, then, we’re going to move to a much more difficult part of the story, but a vital one. Theologically, it’s called “the Fall,” but it might be better called, “That time when humanity really messed things up.”

The actual story of the Fall is written in Genesis 3, and it involves the first man and the first woman, Adam and Eve are their names, and a talking snake. It involves a fruit (probably not an apple, more likely a pomegranate) and a bite and a twisting of what God told them. It’s a story that is fairly well-known, so much so that even beyond its actual historicity, it has become an archetypal story for what happens when we reject God’s instruction. Here’s how it goes: Adam and Eve were placed in paradise and were given one rule: don’t eat from this particular tree. And, like all children given only one restriction, you know what happens next. The serpent comes along, twists God’s instruction, and invites Eve to take a bite. He tells her it will be good for her. By the way, Eve twists God’s instruction, too. But since the fruit looks good, she decides it will be okay, just this once, to do what she was told not to do. And she invites Adam to come along with her. No sooner does the echo of the bite’s crunch fade than they knew they had done the wrong thing. They had made the wrong choice. And humanity was forever altered because of the choice made in that garden on that day. The thing we call “sin” had entered the picture and has led us to the world we know now.

So, we have to ask the question: what is sin? Not that long ago, most people knew what that word meant, but not anymore. Many things that were once considered “sin” we have turned around and made permissible, even legal, to the point where a lot of people believe this to be an outdated word, an ancient concept that has no relevance in the world today. “Sin” has been replaced with “preference,” and any sort of standard by which we can judge right or wrong has been, by and large, thrown out the proverbial window. By the dictionary, “sin” is “an immoral act considered to be a transgression against divine law.” That’s a mouthful! In the New Testament, the word is hamartia, which means “missing the mark.” It’s a term rooted in archery, where you’re aiming at a target but you miss it. Your intention and your action are at odds, which is exactly the situation Paul is describing in that passage we read from Romans this morning, a passage we will get to in a moment. Missing the mark. But to miss the mark, there has to be a mark you’re aiming at. In other words, there has to be a standard by which our actions are measured. In Biblical faith, that standard is God. God, the creator (as we talked about last week) is the one who determines what is sin and what is not. We don’t get to make that determination, nor does the government, nor does any politician or any religious leader for that matter. The definition of sin is determined by God, not by what is legal, or what society thinks is right.

And this is exactly the struggle in which we find ourselves in this cultural moment. It’s the tension we often feel as followers of Jesus. Often we find ourselves caught between what the world says is right and what God says is right. Sometimes we find ourselves in the midst of a moral dilemma of what is legal and what is right. And there are times when we think, “If I do this, no one will find out, I can get away with it.” But it’s not right to do it. That’s the struggle that faced King David in the Old Testament. Do you remember the story, from 2 Samuel 11? We don’t have time to get too deep into the story, but basically it goes like this: David should have been off with his troops on the front lines of the war with the Ammonites, but instead he is home, walking on the roof of the palace when he sees a neighbor’s wife bathing. He likes what he sees, so he calls her to the palace, sleeps with her, then sends her home. No one has to know, except the servants who won’t say anything. David thinks he got away with it, until the woman, Bathsheba, tells him she is pregnant. Then David, through a lot of maneuvering, has Bethsheba’s husband killed, marries her and once again thinks, “No one will ever know.” That chapter, though, ends on this ominous note: “But the thing David had done displeased the Lord” (2 Samuel 11:27). God knew, and even though most kings in the area around David would have thought nothing of what he did, it was wrong in the eyes of God. It may have even been legal in that culture, but it was not right. It was sin.

That brings us to our passage for this morning, as Paul describes the struggle we all face, the struggle we can all too easily recognize. Contrary to the way this is often read, Paul is not specifically talking about himself here. Or let me say that differently: he’s not just talking about himself. When he says “I” he’s using a rhetorical device called “speech in character,” which means he’s basically writing a monologue that can apply to most everyone. He’s not just writing about his experience here; he’s really writing about the experience we all face (Smith, The Magnificent Story, pg. 77). And what is that experience? It’s the struggle we all face with the law, the rules. The Hebrew faith that Paul grew up in is full of laws, The Law as it was called, all the rules that it took for one to be a good Hebrew, a good child of God. As a young man, a child in a good, strict Jewish home, Paul would have been taught to love the law, the Torah. You can picture him as a young man reading and studying the Torah, memorizing the psalms and saying along with the psalmist, “I love your law, O God” (cf. Psalm 119:97). In fact, I can picture him joyfully singing the words of the longest psalm in the Bible, Psalm 119, which is a lengthy celebration of the law. Paul would have learned early on how to shape his life by the law, how to make it his way of life, his very breath. That is exactly what good Hebrew children were supposed to do (cf. Wright, Paul for Everyone: Romans, Part One, pg. 131), and Paul tells the Philippians he was a model Jew. He says he was “ circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for righteousness based on the law, faultless” (Philippians 3:5-6). In other words, he says, I loved the law. I was determined to follow every detail of it.

But here’s the problem with that kind of life: it always falls apart. It’s not the fault of the law itself; Paul is clear in this passage that the law is good. God has not given us bad instructions; everything God has told us is good. The fault lies within us. As Jesus himself said in the Garden of Gethsemane on that night before his crucifixion: “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak” (Matthew 26:41). In this passage, Paul is acknowledging what we know to be true: the law is good, but there is something in us that prevents us from following it. One part of us knows that the law is good, but another part of us rebels against it constantly. Two sides to the story, right? Here’s how Paul puts it: “I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing” (7:19). Paul is realizing what has been true since Genesis 3: the law cannot save us. If knowing the right thing to do was enough, life would be easy (Barclay 100). But knowing is not enough. In fact, as Tom Wright puts it, the closer you hug the law to yourself, the more you realize how much of a sinner you are (Wright 131).

Paul wasn’t alone in his observations. Even secular writers of his day knew this to be true about human nature. Seneca talked about how men hate their sins and love them at the same time; he called it “our helplessness in necessary things.” Another Roman writer put it this way: “I see the better things, and I approve them, but I follow the worse.” The Jewish rabbis said that in every person there were two natures. They called them the yetser hatov (the good inclination) and the yetser hara (the evil inclination). It was their belief that God put both of these natures inside of us to make us choose (Barclay, The Letter to the Romans, pg. 98). Paul, the Romans and the Jews all knew this to be true through their own lenses, through their experience. The law can only identify sin; it cannot prevent sin (Smith 77), which is why Paul describes himself as a prisoner of war. In verse 23, he calls himself a “prisoner of the law of sin.” There’s a war going on between right and wrong, and Paul is caught right in the middle of it, along with all of us. Our souls are caught in the struggle. You can hear the desperation in Paul’s cry, “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?” (7:24).

We’ll come back to that question in a moment, but I want to sit with Paul in the struggle for a moment. Sometimes we want to hurry past the battlefield and try to ignore what happened there. Several years ago, we visited the battlefield at Gettysburg, and the kids were little and it was a rainy day, so we took the driving tour rather quickly. But at one point, I just needed to get out and observe the field. There’s not much there, of course; the battle was over long ago. But I needed a moment to not hurry past and to remember what had gone on in the struggle here. We need to do that from time to time, to do as Paul does here in Romans and sit in the midst of the struggle, to ask the big question: who can rescue me? We need to wrestle with the why: why do we have this struggle? The Bible says this struggle comes because of what happened in that Garden at the beginning of time. Genesis 1 tells us what God’s plan was when he created men and women: “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness…” (1:26). Then we turn the page to Genesis 3, the story we’ve been talking about, and we read about the sin, the Fall, the brokenness that came into the world. We sort of skip over God’s pronouncement on creation, found in Genesis 1:31: “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.” Very good. Creation, including humanity, was very good. Here’s the part we miss in the story: the Fall did not change that truth. God’s creation is still very good. Humanity was created to be very good. We tend to focus on the bad part. We talk about how bad we are because we sin. But God’s story begins with original goodness, that we were created to reflect the image and likeness of God.

Something new I learned this week is in the word Genesis uses for “let us make.” The Hebrew word there means, literally, “to crumble off.” The image I get there is of a large rock (which God is often described as in the Bible) and a small piece of it crumbles off. It came from the rock, but it’s separate and distinct now. It bears the image and likeness of the rock, but it’s on its own now. Every analogy breaks down when it comes to God, of course, but part of me wonders if this might be where the phrase “a chip off the old block” comes from. Is that idea rooted in Genesis? Are we a “chip off” God’s block? Am I? Are you?

Anyway, Genesis uses two words there that we often treat as interchangeable: image and likeness. To be sure, they are related, but there are shades of meaning there we rush past in our hurry to get to the bad parts of the story. This is where we come back again to the “two sides to every story” idea. Image and likeness are two sides of our story. Similar, but they are different words in the original text. “Image” has to do with being like someone or something, resembling the original. Twins often share the same image. Married couples, too—they say the longer you are married, the more you look like each other. In terms of us being made in the image of God, this doesn’t mean we physically look like God. It means we share his goodness, and that cannot be damaged or destroyed by our sin. Nothing Adam and Eve did destroyed the image of God in which they were made. Nothing you or I do destroys the image of God that is within us. We were made in God’s image and we cannot remove that. You are sacred and valuable and worth everything. You were made in God’s image.

You were also made in God’s likeness, and to some extent this is a parallel thought, like the Hebrew poetry we talked about last week. But the word in the original text has a slightly different meaning. Often, in the Old Testament, it’s used to describe idols, those physical representations of the other gods that our God prohibits. Those images were supposed to be the way the people could physically see their gods, and the reason Hebrew and Christian faith forbids such likenesses is because we are supposed to be that. We are supposed to be the way others see God—not through our physical representation but through our actions, deeds, words. It’s the idea Paul is getting at when he tells us we are Christ’s ambassadors (cf. 2 Corinthians 5:20); we represent Jesus. Others see him through us. And this is what we damage through our sin. When we rebel against God’s best plan for us, when we mess up, when we stumble and fall, those actions separate us from God and from each other. Sin is not what we were designed for, and it always results in broken relationships, broken people, and broken spirits. It prevents others from seeing God’s goodness in us. Genesis 3 teaches us that the pursuit of sin is not why we were made, because when we seek sin, we fail to reflect who God is (cf. Smith 75-76). There are, it seems, increasing numbers of news stories about well-known pastors or high-profile Christians who have made mistakes, either recently or in the past, and have been caught. And while their actions always break my heart, what hurts even more is when fellow Christians tear them down, ridicule them, and make judgments about them or their salvation. I know myself well enough to say, “There but for the grace of God go I.”

You see, this is not just Adam and Eve’s story. This is our story as well. Just watch the evening news and you’ll quickly see that the world, though more technologically sophisticated, has not actually changed all that much since Eden. We’ve become more bold and blatant about our rebellion against God, but as Solomon observed, there really is nothing new under the sun (cf. Ecclesiastes 1:9). And while we can point to specific actions as bad, as sinful, as harmful, sin at its core isn’t about bad behavior. The Fall, at its heart, wasn’t about eating the fruit. Sin is sin because it mars the likeness of God in us. It prevents others from seeing Christ in us. Sin is about failing to reflect who God is, because reflecting him is why we were made. That’s what Paul meant when he said, “We are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Ephesians 2:10). What Paul says there is that we are God’s masterpiece; the word literally refers to a “poem.” We are a masterpiece that God made to reflect his life into the world, and we do good works not to earn God’s attention or to somehow work our way into heaven. We do good works as a response of gratitude to God, to help bring the world back to its original state of “very good.” We are God’s masterpiece, called to participate with him in re-creating the world back toward its “masterpiece” state. This is the witness of Scripture (cf. Smith 76).

The Fall is not the end of the story—thanks be to God! Paul knows this. When he laments his inability to do the good he wants to do (and remember, he’s really telling the story of all of us there), he cries out, “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?” (7:24). If the chapter were to stop there, all would seem hopeless. All would, in fact, be hopeless. If the story stopped there, we should all just go home and do whatever we want. But, thanks be to God, the story doesn’t stop there, nor does Paul. In the next verse, he answers his own question: “Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (7:25). What hope is there? In a world that has seemingly surrendered to sin, what hope is there for things to become any different? There is no hope without Jesus, and that will lead us to the next part of the story, which we will begin to explore in detail next week. But that verse and that hope have motivated people throughout history to make a difference, to work toward the day we pray about, when God’s kingdom comes and God’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven (cf. Matthew 6:10).

One of my personal heroes is William Wilberforce, the British politician who, early on in his career, heard a call from God to accomplish two main purposes: the “reformation of manners” (cleaning up the morality in British society) and the abolition of the slave trade. Wilberforce worked tirelessly to convince the people of his day that slaves were not property but people, made in the image of God every bit as much as anyone else. There were posters and other propaganda picturing a slave with the words, “Am I not a man and a brother?” Wilberforce, part of whose life was told in the film Amazing Grace a few years ago, was not popular. The slave trade in that time was deeply integrated into British economics and society. But spurred on by his friendship with pastors John Newton (a former slave trader) and John Wesley, Wilberforce continued the fight throughout his life. The movie tells of his struggle to end one part of the slave trade, but most of his life was spent introducing bills to abolish slavery only to have the bill voted down year after year. The next year, he would come back again with the same goal, and it wasn’t until three days before his death in 1833 that Parliament voted to abolish slavery throughout the entire British Empire. Wilberforce died shortly after hearing the news, almost as if that was exactly the good work he was created to do. In every moment, though, he was spurred on by his Christian faith. His faith was so important to him that, early on in his life, he questioned whether he should continue in politics or become a pastor. But through prayer and the advice of friends he was encouraged he could make an impact on his culture by being a Christian in politics—and of course he did, so much so that we’re still talking about him almost 300 years later. Wilberforce’s life asks me what call God has placed on my life that I am willing to give everything for.

Much closer to home is my friend Champ Merrick. I was never Champ’s pastor, but I got to know him through the District when, in the wake of 9/11, Champ’s eyes were opened to all the people who were suffering around the world. He also became aware of the vast waste of hospital supplies in the area where he lived, and in the midst of that a God-inspired idea came to him. He started a religious non-profit called Children of Abraham in which he developed a partnership between the United Methodists, the local Catholic church and the area Islamic center to send unused medical supplies to areas of human need. Now, some may raise an eyebrow at the groups he partnered with, but in Champ’s mind, every child of God can use some help now and then, regardless of their faith. He was determined to take whatever help he could get to make a difference in the world. It was ironic that in the wake of a later terrorist attack, the Islamic center took up a collection and gave it to the United Methodists to distribute because, they said, they knew for sure the United Methodists would get the money to where it needed to go, and they couldn’t count on that with any other group. So bridges of goodwill were built because Champ listened to God’s call on his life. At last count, Children of Abraham had shipped over $40 million worth of medical supplies to 29 different countries around the world—and it’s all volunteer-driven. There are no paid staff members, not even Champ. His life continues to challenge me as to whether or not I get so hung up on the differences I have with someone else that I can’t hear God’s call to simply do good, work toward restoring the kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven. His story reminds me it’s possible to push back against the fall through simple acts of kindness and hope.

So, here’s the question these stories and these ideas put in front of us. What will you do this week, today even, to push back the Fall, to respond to God’s call on your life, to seek to restore the likeness of God in you and in our world? This is not about doing good works for good works’ sake. It’s not about looking good. It’s about living beyond this part of the story. Seeking to make a difference in the world is a way we acknowledge the Fall, to admit that the world is broken but that we’re not content to let it stay that way. God has called us to be hope in the name of Jesus Christ. So as a church we do that by collecting supplies for Operation Christmas Child, allowing children around the world to have a Christmas gift and to be told the good news about Jesus. There are simple things that Ginger invites us to bring in. It doesn’t cost us much but it makes a world of difference for a child we will probably never meet. As a church, we also make room for unique ministries that reach people no one else pays attention to or maybe people others are uncomfortable with. Grace Unlimited and Celebrate Recovery are just two such ways we live out our commitment to being hope. You know, I was telling someone the other day that other places I’ve served have had recovery programs, but this is the first place I’ve been where the recovery ministry is an integral part of the whole church, where folks in the recovery ministry actually worship at this church. That’s a good sign that we are being hope and pushing back the Fall.

And we send folks on mission trips into places where hope is desperately needed. Sometimes that hope comes in the form of hammer and nails or paint, and other times is comes in the form of an aptly spoken word or a gesture of kindness. A few weeks ago, when we were in St. Louis at Gateway180, there were times some of us didn’t feel all that useful. There were kids there who had so many challenges in their lives; homelessness seemed only one symptom of so many bigger things. For some of the kids, violence was their first response to anything that upset them even a little. And I know we wondered: what can we do, in the face of such evidence of the Fall? Then Jess, Ginger and Rob (our local leader) came up with the idea of putting on a Night to Shine-style party on Thursday evening for the residents. I wondered if anyone would come, but they did and they loved it. They soaked it in. We honestly didn’t do anything that spectacular except that for one evening there was a chance for them to just have fun, to put aside the struggles of life and be treated like a child of God. We cooperated with God and pushed back the Fall, even if just for an hour or two. I don’t know if it made a long-term difference in the lives of anyone there, but for that evening, it did. And maybe that’s all we can do. Maybe all we can do is an act of kindness in Jesus’ name that, for a moment, pushes back the Fall and points someone toward hope. We’re not God; we’re made in his likeness, but we’re not God. So we have to trust that he will take the work of our hands, however small, and use it for his greater purpose. Trust him and serve as his ambassador, his representative in the world. Remember, as Mother Teresa is reported to have said, “We can do no great things, only small things with great love.” Small things done with great love in Jesus’ name will push back the Fall and move our story forward. It’s why we were made. What will you do this week in his name? Let’s pray.