Their throat is an open grave; they use their tongues to deceive. The venom of asps is under their lips. Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood; in their paths are ruin and misery, and the way of peace they have not known. There is no fear of God before their eyes. (Rm 3:14-18)
Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. (Rev 21:3)
Lord, we praise you for the depth of the change which you have wrought inside us.
Look at the news today. Wars, murders, corporate greed, celebrity scandals, politicians quarreling like alley cats. I could go on. Sometimes it seems as if the human race is nothing more than a pack of hyenas.
Of course, we have a knack for distancing ourselves from all that. After all, the news is out there. It’s about all those other evil people, but it’s certainly not about me. I’m just a normal guy or an average girl, and I don’t make the news.
No. You and I don’t make the news. But it is precisely normal guys who look at pornography and average girls who turn their backs on their roommates. It is people who never make the news who slander you before your coworkers, lie to get an estate, or abuse their wives. All these behaviors are people acting like hyenas. It thus seems that the main difference between the news and us is that the news shows our behavior on a macro level. You know. The whining and corruption in Congress is how many of us behave when we don’t get what we want. Or sometimes the news shows our behavior taken to an extreme. The bitterness of a gunman who kills school children is an extreme version of the same bitterness many people have for that person who cheated them. Or sometimes the news merely shows our behavior in someone famous. After all, that scandal between the politician and the other woman? That’s how Bill lost his marriage, and Bill is just a normal guy. There are a million Bills out there flirting with the same thing, but the consequences haven’t stung them yet; and when they do, those men will never make the news. It seems then as if there is a bit of hyena in all of us. In one sense, the news is just a mirror for the heart.
So what are we to do then with the human heart? If you listen to the broader world speak, you would get the impression that the main solution is for people to simply be good. Now I’m all for being good, but the crucial question we must ask is “how do you make people good?” It is precisely here that Christianity and all other religions and philosophies part company, for Christianity insists that the human heart is really, in one sense, subhuman — that is, it is not what God intended the human heart to be. We are much closer to hyenas than we are to the heart of God. This is not an issue of behavior but of essence. Our problem is not what we do but who we are.
Other religions and popular secular moral thought revolve around the idea that people ought to be better and that we ought to do what we can to help them improve. Different systems have different ideas about how to do this, but they agree on the fundamental issue that we ought to make people better.
Jesus, however, has a fundamentally different approach. He is not trying to make people better. He makes people new. Most moral systems try to reform us. From a Christian perspective, this is like reforming a hyena. No matter how “good” you make a hyena, it is still a hyena, and a “good” hyena sooner or later falls back to being a hyena. And no matter how pretty you dress up the human race — and contemporary culture works overtime to try and dress us up — underneath it all we are corrupt. Faith in Jesus does not make us a better version of the same species. It creates an entirely new species. In Jesus, the old “you” is dead, and you become a new human — the type of human God originally intended.
One large misunderstanding people have about following Jesus is that they turn it into morality. They think that a Christian is someone who is nice to his neighbor, remains a virgin until marriage, stays off drugs, or is responsible at work. In short, they believe that being a Christian is nothing more than being good. Therefore, to follow Jesus, one must be good, and any person who is good is just as much a follower of Jesus as the next.
A second misunderstanding people have about following Jesus is that they define Christianity purely in terms of doctrine or church affiliation. They think that a Christian is someone who merely adheres to a particular creed or who belongs to a particular organization. People who think that this is what it means to follow Jesus sometimes divorce morality from their definition. To them, a pedophile may be just as much a follower of Jesus as St. Peter was. They have a low standard for their definitions.
The reality is that doctrine, participation in a church community, and morality are all aspects of following Jesus, but none of these things is the real issue. One can have any one or all of them without having any real faith. If Christianity is a marriage to Jesus, faith is the point at which we say, “I do.” Faith is where you stand at the altar and pledge your life. It is also where you entrust yourself daily to the One who has pledged His life to you. By faith, we enter into a union with Christ. By faith we walk daily in that union.
When we enter this union, we change. Christ will not marry a hyena — even a good one. He insists on a completely different kind of being, and He creates that being in us. He does this through death and resurrection — not just His own but ours as well. A Christian is someone who has died with Christ and who has been raised anew to live a new life (Rm 6:1-11; Gal 2:20; Col 3:1-3). In Christ you are a new creature. The old “you” is gone; all things have become new (II Cor 5:17).
It is something like this. If we were a car and Jesus the mechanic, He decides not to tinker with the engine to make it more reliable. He says that the engine is beyond salvage, removes the whole thing, and replaces it with a new one. If we were a house, and Jesus the contractor, He decides not to remodel but to replace. He says that the whole house is condemned, razes it to the ground, replaces the foundation and begins to build a new structure. The Christian word for this is “conversion.” It means much more than “be good” or “accept some teachings.” It means what it says. We have converted. We used to be one type of being; we are now a new type.
Jesus speaks in terms of being born again (Jn 3). A new birth begins a new life that has a new spiritual DNA. We are a new creature (II Cor 5:17).
Therefore, when we enter into this union with Christ, we receive a new identity just as in many cultures a bride receives a new identity when she marries. Our life changes, and we are no longer what we were. Now we belong to Jesus.
This is why a follower of Jesus lives in a new way, but the new life is not a product of the old human straining and striving to achieve a moral end. The new life is a product of a new DNA, a new person, a new identity, a new you. God is more interested in who you are than in what you do. He knows that behavior follows identity. If you change a wolf into a sheep, you change the essence, but when you change the essence, you also change the behavior. The new behavior is the natural result of the new identity.
Thus, Christianity has a different focus from everything else. The woman who follows Jesus is not trying to be good. She is merely trusting in the work of Christ within her.
