Humanity has gone bad and — like all things gone bad — it cannot make itself good again — not anymore than a dead person can bring himself back to life.

Because of all the bad stuff we’ve done we’ve all caught this terminal disease called sin. Symptoms of this disease include turning your back on God, doing exactly what he’s asked you not to do and ruining his perfect plan for your life and the world. Untreated, of course, you will surely Die.

It’s not a pretty picture.

Because of who he is and how he is, God can’t just turn off his holiness or his sense of justice. Our bad condition and his moral purity prevent us from being compatible. We can’t get close to God anymore.

Except for this one thing — this crazy little thing called love.

If that doesn’t fry your brain — at least a little — you may not be totally understanding what it all means.

God loves us with a crazy kind of love. I don’t mean “crazy” like “mentally deranged” or even “foolish”. I mean “crazy” as in “appearing absurdly out of place” and “extremely enthusiastic”.

God’s love for us is absurd — it doesn’t make any sense. Look at us. It’s not like we’ve done anything to make ourselves more lovely or lovable. If anything, we deserve to be unloved because of what we’ve done. Take your nature vs. nurture arguments elsewhere and talk to your therapist about how your parents are responsible for all your bad choices — I’m not buying it. You’ve done wrong. I’ve done wrong. And we all knew we were doing wrong when we did it.

And still God loves us. And because he loves us with such a crazy love, he provides a cure for our disease. It’s crazy expensive, but God’s crazy love drove him to pay our bill himself. Perhaps the most famous words in the Bible put it this way: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).

It’s as if Jesus said, “I would rather die than live without you.”

That’s a crazy little thing called love.

I wrote this three years ago, but it seems appropriate to repost it today. It’s Anabel’s 10th Birthday. Time goes so quickly.

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August had been miserable in Columbia, Maryland. Hot and humid are even more difficult to deal with when you’re dirt poor and living in a 1,000 square foot apartment. September wasn’t much better. Indian summer stretched through the month, and our electric bill (from running the a/c) went through the roof. My wife was a trooper through her first pregnancy. Didn’t complain much until right at the end. Then she decided, “I’ve made it this far. From now on I’m getting what I want.” It was 90 degrees outside and about 60 in our apartment. There could have been a thunderstorm in our doorway!

Making the month especially…interesting: my mother had come out for the birth of her first grandchild. She was helping…sort of.

My father juggled his schedule so he could fly out the day after Jill’s due date. He spent an entire week twiddling his thumbs, reading all my books and jumping every time Jill sneezed. Eventually, she started hiding in the back bedroom. She just got tired of being stared at. Then he left disappointed — no baby.

One Sunday morning we were driving home after church, and my mother ordered me to stop at a produce stand. She bought peppers of every variety and turned them into the hottest salsa she’s ever made. Some old wives’ tale. We ate salsa until we cried. We went for walks. We did all the things grandmas say will make the baby come out.

No baby.

We blew past the due date. Then we lapped it. Finally, our doctor told us to schedule a time to come in and be induced. We were told to come in late at night. That way we could sleep while they were setting everything up, wake up the next morning (well-rested) and have us a baby.

So, after our Tuesday night Bible study we watched Emeril, packed our bags, waved goodbye to my mother, stopped at the grocery store for snacks and headed to the hospital. On the way there, Jill had indigestion or Braxton-Hicks contractions or something. The funny thing is, they were 14 minutes apart.

It wasn’t until we were sitting in the waiting room filling out forms that I realized she was in labor. There would be no sleep that night — or the next.

The best things in life make you wait for what seems like an eternity. You get all excited, mark the date on the calendar in red and then wait while the days crawl by. You go about your regular activities, but they don’t seem to have as much meaning.

In fact, as I look back, I don’t remember anything substantial happening — even though I was serving a church and continued my teaching schedule. I know I must have spent time studying and meeting with people. But I can’t remember any of that.

The only thing I remember was waking up every day wondering, “Will it be today?” I remember every time my cell phone went off during those 10 overdue days: “Is it time?”

Every day was filled with hope and expectation and disappointment and more hope. We knew it wouldn’t be long, and even though it was longer than we expected, we never lost hope. Not even after hours and hours of more nothing as we sat in the hospital waiting…and waiting…and waiting.

She ran out of water in there. Lingered and swam and rolled over until there was nothing left in there but her. And she still wouldn’t come out.The doctor told us it would be soon. They lied. Jill struggled and suffered and waited too long for the really good pain stuff. I tried my best to keep her distracted, playing Yo-Yo Ma cello music softly in the background, reminding Jill to breathe and cracking inappropriate jokes at appropriate times.

We laughed a lot and kept the doctors generally confused.

But that baby wouldn’t budge.

Then, after what seemed like an eternity, everyone got in a big hurry. Her heartbeat was growing faint. The doctor looked scared, and I readied myself for the possibility that I might not get to see her after all.

I was asked to sign some forms. The doctors were trying to explain to me how any surgery is dangerous, and you never know what’s going to happen and they’ve done this a million times but there’s always a chance…. That’s when it dawned on me. Through the sleepless fog came the idea: I arrived at this hospital expecting to leave with one new member of my family; I might actually leave with one fewer.

Suddenly we were whisked upstairs into an operating room. I had scrubs on, and they were cutting Jill wide open — going in after our little girl who will forever be remembered by the scar she made on her way out. She still prefers to do things in her own sweet time.

I remember holding her for the first time. I didn’t have words. Sometimes I still don’t. She had that big ridge on her head from where she was stuck. Bobby McFerrin’s song “Common Threads” was playing in my head. For some reason I sang to her: “Jesus loves me.” That’s probably the most primal song I know — the simplest tune, most basic memory lodged deep down in my brain. At the bottom of everything else I’ve ever learned, when I had nothing else, I had: “Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so. Little ones to Him belong. They are weak but He is strong.”

I introduced her to her mother. Jill said, “I think I’m going to throw up.” I said, “Turn your head the other way so you don’t throw up on our new baby.” The doctor said, “Hey, John, you wanna see your wife’s ovaries?”

I’ve seen parts of Jill she hasn’t seen.

It all seems like a far away memory of a dream now. Everything was slow and fast all at the same time. We had no idea what we were in for. You blink, and she’s seven. Going to school. Riding her bike. Having a slumber party. And you know: we’re more than halfway to being a teenager now.

It still goes slow and fast at the same time. And I find myself begging God to slow down time so I can catch up. But it’s no use. Time moves at its own steady and relentless pace. And we stride towards the inevitable day when we will launch Anabel out into the wide world.

There’s a part of me that gets excited about that idea.

There’s another part of me that’s just glad that for today she’s still only seven.

If you’ve been tracking with the blog here, you’ll know that I’ve been talking a lot about what’s wrong with the human race. In a word, the problem is sin, and sin is everywhere. It’s in us and around us. It comes out of us at an alarming rate. It’s inescapable and undeniable.

Sin is a problem, and it creates more problems.

One of the primary problems is the way we handle the aftermath of sin. See, we tend to think the remedy for sin is the opposite of sin. We’ve done something bad; let’s do something good. It kind of evens things out that way.

So, what was the bad thing we did? What was our sin? Did we tell a lie? Okay, tell the truth now. Clear your conscience. Come clean. That makes up for it, right? Did we steal something? Give something away. Practice the virtue of generosity for a while. That balances the scales, doesn’t it?

Well…um…no. It doesn’t quite work that way.

What if I kill someone? Do I have to go find a dead person to re-animate? If I hit someone, and then I let someone hit me back…that just hurts us both. You don’t have to play this scenario out for very long before you realize it’s a fool’s errand to try and undo the bad things by papering over them with good things.

The real problem is deeper than our behavior. We haven’t just done bad things. In some strange way, we’ve become bad. We’ve gone bad, and when something’s gone bad it can’t be made good again. Think about milk that’s past its expiration date by a month or so. You can’t put good milk in with the bad and mix it up, expecting positive results. You don’t take old, rotten meat and figure that if you add enough Montreal Steak Seasoning it’ll be alright.

You don’t try to make bad milk good. You go get new milk. You don’t try to make bad steak good. You go get new steak.

The opposite of bad isn’t always “good”. Sometimes the opposite of bad is “new”.

But once I’ve gone bad, how do I make myself new so I can be good again? Can I ever find myself good and new again?

The sad truth about this whole “sin” thing is that we’ve all got it. We’ve all sinned because we’re sinners, and we’re all sinners because we’ve sinned. It’s a vicious cycle.

And, to make matters worse, this “sin” thing is fatal. The Bible says it plainly, “The wages of sin is death” (Romans 3:23). You sin, you die. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.

Put these two paragraphs together and you understand why everybody dies. No one is surprised by it (though we are still more than a little squeamish about it). Death has become an established fact of life.

I have two Facebook friends who have both died recently, and it’s rather strange to visit their homepage and click through photographs of them, to read old status updates. Their walls have become sort of memorial pages. I don’t feel right about “unfriending” them. Clearly, their spouses don’t feel right about deleting their account.

Death, though it is ubiquitous enough, gives us all a collective case of the heebie-jeebies.

Ah, but I once had a professor who has helped me frame this conversation in a wonderful way. He said that since there are two parts of each of us (a physical part and a non-physical, or spiritual, part), there are also two kinds of death (a physical death and a spiritual death) and two kinds of life (physical life and spiritual life).

To distinguish between these two different kinds of life and death, he suggested that physical life and death should have lower-case letters. Spiritual Life and Death, however, should be capitalized.

Now, if you merely have life (and not Life), when you die, then you really Die. But if you experience Life while you have life then, though you will certainly die, you will never really Die.

By the same token, it’s possible to experience Death while you still have life. If that’s your situation, you can go through your whole life without ever really Living.

Got it?

See, there are lots of bad things we can say about sin, but the worst may be that it puts us all at risk. Because of the presence of sin in our lives, we’re all poised to experience Death with a capital “D”.

That rhymes with “T”, and that stands for “Trouble”.

It could also stand for “turmoil” or “torture” or a whole host of other words we normally associate with “hell”. We’ll talk more about hell later, but for today I want to know how to escape this capital “D” death. If I realize that all I’ve got is life, but my life is shrouded in Death, well, how do I get Life to conquer my Death?

I love The Simpsons. I know lots of people don’t like the show. They think it’s overly crass and has added to the coursening of our culture, and they may have a point. But I love the show for its social commentary, for the way the writers can find precisely what’s wrong with popular culture and exploit it. Despite the fact that it is an animated comedy show, it’s smart in its own way.

Bart is known for his catchphrases — especially “Don’t have a cow, man!” and “Eat my shorts!”.

I remember when t-shirts first appeared with Bart’s picture and those slogans. It became a marketing boon for the fledgling Fox Network. And the writing staff saw this as an opportunity for some self-referential mockery in season five’s episode “Bart Gets Famous”. Bart gets a job working for Krusty the Klown. Krusty wants him to appear in a sketch. Bart’s supposed to say one line: “I am waiting for a bus.” Then Krusty will throw pies at him for about five minutes.

Krusty does not specialize in highbrow comedy.

But something goes wrong. Bart walks in, starts to say his line, and bumps a piece of scenery — unleashing a chain reaction of destruction, culminating in the collapse of the entire set. Bart looks around in a panic and utters the words, “I didn’t do it!” The audience laughs and claps and a catchphrase is born.

Now, all of that is an introduction to what I want to talk about today.

Adam and Eve rebelled against God, opening the door for sin and death to wreak havoc among the human race. The apostle Paul said it this way, “Sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned” (Romans 5:12).

But that doesn’t seem fair, does it? It sounds like I’m being unfairly condemned for something that happened thousands of years ago — long before I was born. I wasn’t even there.

Well, I could probably make that case better if it weren’t for the impressive amount of destruction I’ve caused myself. I have quite a collection of personal sins, which I will not take the time to list for you here. You’ll just have to trust me.

And I bet you’ve got quite a collection yourself. The apostle Paul also said, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23).

We’re all stained with sin — not just because we’re all descended from Adam and Eve — but because of our own rebellion and disobedience. I can point back to the Garden of Eden and protest “I didn’t do it!” all I want. But everyone knows I’ve done my share. And so have you. Anyone who says otherwise is just adding to their guilt (cf. 1 John 1:8, 10).

Here’s why I’m spending so much time on this: Until you admit that you’re guilty, you’ll never know the predicament you’re in. And if you don’t understand the bad news, you’ll never really grasp the good news that forgiveness and restoration are possible.

Question: Why do you think people are so reluctant to just come out and say, “I was wrong”?

Christianity has as a fundamental tenet the idea that God is a good God who, after creating everything, stepped back and said, “That’s all good. In fact, that’s all very good.”

Needless to say, no one would look at the state of the world now and declare it “very good”. Just a cursory glance at Headline News reveals a mixed up, messed up world. Sure, there’s still good in the world, but it’s mixed up with all sorts of bad, too. War. Poverty. Disease. Deception. Anyone willing to say that’s all very good?

But that begs a question. If it all began so well, how have we ended up in the mess we’re in?

The answer to that question comes in the third chapter of the Bible — Genesis 3. As far as we know, God’s original plan contained only one rule: Don’t eat from this one tree. If you eat from that one tree (the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil), you’ll die. That’s it. Not 10 Commandments. Not 631 laws. Just one thing: Don’t eat from this one tree.

Avoid that one thing, and you get to live forever, explore every square inch of a magnificent garden, play with all the animals and hang out with God himself.

Easy, right?

Well, the trouble got started with a trash-talking serpent called The Devil. Strange as it seems, The Devil, apparently, hung out in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve disguised as a snake. One day he said something along the lines of, “What’s up with all these rules? God’s got you guys on a pretty short leash. He’s probably hiding something. I wouldn’t trust him if I were you.”

That was enough to plant doubt in Eve’s mind. She sidled up to the tree and took a good long look at the fruit. It looked pretty good to her. And she wondered what she might gain from eating it. Before she knew what she was doing, the fruit was in her hand and in her mouth and she was giving some to her husband (who was standing right there going along with the whole thing).

That was the beginning of the end. Using the free will God had given them, they chose to disobey him, and — in the process — the opened the door for sin and death to enter the world.

God’s plan was for people to live forever, but that was for sinless humans. The plan had to be scrapped now.

There is good news in this, though. There’s mercy and grace even in Genesis 3. See, God could have killed them immediately. He could have wiped them off the face of the earth and started over completely. But he didn’t. Instead of punishing them like that, God did something unpredictable. God made a promise.

Beginning all the way back in Genesis 3 — before sin and death and their consequences had even taken hold — we see the end God has in mind.

God is holy. We covered that, right? But he wants a relationship with us, and that’s impossible because we’re all, like, sinful and junk.

Sorry, I spent a lot of time listening to my daughters talk to their friends this weekend.

Now, God created us with the ability to choose, and that’s kind of a double-edged sword. Sure, we can choose God, but we can also choose not-God. Still, that’s the only way this “freedom of choice” thing works.

But God (and those are probably my two favorite words in the English language — when used one after the other like that) was not content to just leave us to eenie-meenie-miney-moe our decisions. He really wants a relationship with us — so much so that he offers us incentives. He stacks the deck in his favor.

Hey, he’s God; he gets to do that.

For example, he created a plan for humans that would meet our every need and bring joy, fulfillment, meaning, purpose, peace and satisfaction beyond our wildest dreams. When you read about his plan in places like Genesis 1-2 or Isaiah 60 or Revelation 21-22, it can sound a little bit like a fairy tale. Lush gardens, trees filled with every kind of fruit imaginable, a beautiful, flowing river keeps everything growing, animals and people living together in peace and harmony.

It’s like a camping trip in a farmer’s market next to a wild animal refuge. With air conditioning. And no mosquitoes.

On top of that, you’ve got God himself dropping in for visits (in Genesis 3:8) and eventually deciding he likes it so much he wants to stay (in Revelation 21:3). Not some angel. Not a bush with God’s voice booming out of it. God. Himself. Spending quality time with each of us.

And, you know, if God is the author of everything good and perfect and groovy…then wherever he is, he brings all that stuff with him. Happiness. Contentment. Joy. Laughter. Peace. Satisfaction. Banana cream pie. Steak au poivre.

Choose him, and you get all the other stuff thrown in the bargain. That’s heaven.

Choose not-him — after he’s gone to all these great lengths to stack the deck in his favor — and what do you end up with? That’s hell.

Sadly, I fear this post may offend some of my readers. The words “free will” have become dirty words to many of my Calvinist friends. Historically, no one questioned a human’s ability to make real and consequential choices until Augustine developed a deterministic concept of God late in his life (c. 417-430). Church fathers Tertullian, Novatian of Rome, Cyril of Jerusalem, Gregory of Nyssa may not have agreed on everything, but they were unanimous in their support of our ability and responsibility to choose wisely when it comes to accepting God’s offer of forgiveness and mercy. In fact, the last three made tremendous arguments that this was an indispensable part of what it means to have been created “in the image of God”.

So, it is with some trepidation but no apologies that I move forward from yesterday’s post on God’s holiness to discuss the dilemma presented to humans. As I said yesterday, God is holy, and we’re not. God’s holiness prevents him from having a relationship with anything not perfectly holy (that would be each one of us and all of us collectively). This, in turn, hinders the flow of generosity and kindness he wants to bestow upon us and threatens to subject us to his eventual wrath.

If that’s the case, why didn’t God remove the potential for sin in the original design of the first humans? Why not just take sin out of the mix from the start so there wouldn’t be anything to worry about?

Well, he could have done that. One of the advantages to being the Creator is that you get to choose what features end up in the final product. He could have created us so that we all break out into the theme song from “Gilligan’s Island” every hour on the hour if he’d wanted to. He didn’t, and thank him he didn’t!

He could have programmed us so that we had no choice but to do whatever he said without thinking, but he didn’t. God’s a person (I got in trouble for saying that once in a church in northern California, but it’s true), and — as a person — he wants to be in a personal relationship with the persons he personally creates. A personal relationship is not possible without options, without choice, without risking rejection.

The negative side to free will is obvious: Being free to choose embracing God and obeying him means also being free to choose to ignore God and disobey him. God is holy. We are not. And as much as we may want to point the finger at someone else — our parents, our teachers, Adam and Eve — we have no one to blame but ourselves.

But there’s an upside to free will, too. Isn’t there? What are the positives you can think of?

Everything about salvation, the Bible and Christianity begins with God. In fact, some writers have suggested that the real meat of the Bible is just the first four words; everything after that is merely commentary.

The goal of the Bible is not to get you to live a different life; the goal of the Bible is to reveal the character and nature of God — with the understanding that this God’s character and nature will inspire you and draw you into a different kind of life. That’s why, around here, we practice a theocentric hermeneutic. That’s a fancy way of saying that, when we read the Bible, our first thought isn’t how we should apply this verse to our own lives but what this verse teaches us about God. Only after we answer that are we in a position to apply the verse to our own lives by asking ourselves one simple question: How can I be more like him?

Well, this leads to a problem.

See, you can’t swing a stick in the Bible without hitting a verse that talks about how holy God is. It’s everywhere. In fact, some verses don’t just say, “God is holy,” they say, “God is holy, holy, holy.”

Holy times three. Holy cubed.

Now, when you begin trying to apply that verse to your life, you’re headed for some serious frustration — because we’re not holy. Holy isn’t within reach for us. It doesn’t come in degrees (“I’m just not feeling as holy as usual today”), and it’s not a vague sort of compliment (“You sure look holy today, God”).

God’s holiness means he can’t have anything to do with impurity. It’s not that God is religiously fussy or uptight — like he gets uncomfortable and has to leave the room when something sinful happens. It’s that God and sin are mutually exclusive — like light and dark. Where one exists, the other is absent.

God can’t have anything to do with impurity on account of his holiness. But we’re shot through with impurities — impure actions, thoughts, motives, you name it. So, you can see how this might be a problem, right?

Now, here’s where I think we often get off track in explaining what Christianity is and what Christians believe.

We understand that God is holy, but he’s not only holy. He’s other things, too. The characteristics of God we choose to focus on after his holiness lead us to present this need for salvation in a particular way.

For example, if we move from God’s holiness to God’s wrath (because God is holy, he gets angry at impurities), well, we’re likely to say that salvation is being spared from God’s wrath which will be poured upon people in hell.

If, however, we move from God’s holiness to God’s love (because God is holy, he longs to love us but cannot because we’ve separated ourselves from him), well, we’re likely to say that salvation is being saved from that separation, bringing us into a relationship where God can lavish his love upon us.

If we move from God’s holiness to God’s power, we’re likely to say that salvation is being saved from our own helplessness and empowered to live with a whole new operating system.

You can see how this has implications. God’s character is multifaceted. The characteristics we choose to focus on most will determine the way we present the need for salvation and its implications.

Question: Why do so many focus on his wrath but not his mercy? On the other hand, why do some folks tend to soft-sell his wrath? Which characteristic do you think should follow holiness?