| Man's basic problem
Introduction
By revelation we mean to open the eyes of the believer in such a way that he or she sees God in a new way: more holy, powerful, exalted than previously. But we also see ourselves as we are before such a holy God: less worthy, more deceived, less trustworthy, often more corrupt then we previously realized. Revelation also often gives us greater insight into our fellow man. We see him in a more compassionate light than ever before and worthy of our attention, help and love.
Are their marital problems? Parental problems? Lack of confidence? Abuse--physical, sexual? Depression? Drugs? The list could go on and on. Those problems are compounded by bitterness and hatred: fallout in families so that brothers aren't speaking to sisters, children aren't speaking to parents (by children I do not mean fifteen year old children but thirty-five year old children!). Tremendous problems! Overwhelming problems.
Most of these problems come down to problems in relationships. Look at your list. How many of the things you have written down are caused by failing to relate properly to one another? Some relational problems are obvious such as divorce, or child abuse. But other problems such as drug or alcohol addiction often are an indirect result of problems in relationships, often those whose roots extend back to childhood.
It's important for us to get a handle on the importance of relationships from God’s point of view. For God, relationship is everything!
Turn to Genesis, the book of origins. It's good to get back to the origins; for if one is to understand how to be involved in transforming man, one has to understand who is man?. Why is he here? What is his problem?
One of the major reasons secular counselors are not able to bring complete healing is because they don't know who man is. But Jesus does! He was the perfect man! And He lived the perfect life. And Jesus came to undo the deeds of the devil, and much of his deeds involves destroying souls by destroying the relational venue in which those souls exist. Much (not all) "mental illness" is simply the natural outcome of these "deeds of the devil".
In order to understand who is man we must understand why he was created. Turn to Genesis 1:26. "So God said, `let us make man in our own image and likeness, and let him rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the sky, the cattle, over all the earth, over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.' So God created man in his own image. In the image of God He created him; male and female He created them."
Here is a general discussion about God's creating man. Note specifically that God created man as a communal being. "Let us make man in our own image..." God is a triune being, fully complete in himself, a being existing as Father, Son and Spirit. God is a communal being and he created man as a communal being. "Male and female He created them". Man is thus a relational being by nature. The fall has corrupted that nature, but man was created for communion.
Look over in Genesis 2:18: "The Lord God said, `it is not good for man to be alone; I will make a helper suitable for him.'" Before God made this helper, who did Adam commune with?
With God! God communes with him in Genesis 2:15-17. But God goes on to say in 2:18, "this isn't quite the full picture I had in mind, I will make a helper for him." (loose translation).
So God created the other animals and brought them to Adam, but none of these were suitable helpers. So, in verse 21, "God caused a deep sleep to fall on the man, and he slept. He took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that place. The Lord God fashioned into a woman the rib He had taken out of man, and brought her to the man. The man said, 'this is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman, for she was taken out of man.' For this cause a man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh."
Here we see several things about the nature of man. One is that man was created a communal being. That is, man was created in such a way that his soul wanted to have contact with other like beings. He was first created to have communion with God ("let us make man in our own image"). He was created to desire to commune with God because he was created in some ways like that Creator (for example his ability to communicate in speech). The fact that God said "let us make man in our own image" shows that God is a communal being as well. He exists in communion with Himself. One of the characteristics of man is that first of all, man was created plurally: male and female--man was incomplete when by himself alone. Secondly, man was communal; able to commune with God and able to commune with one another. So man is born with a basic need to commune. Man was not created to be an isolated individual.
In many cultures other than the Western one, people cannot comprehend the individuality of the West. For instance, if one was to go to Japan as a teacher and tell a class, "The first one to get the right answer gets a prize," the whole class would wait until everybody in the class had the answer before anyone would volunteer the answer. The success of the group is more important than the success of the individual. How can that be?
The West, since the Renaissance, has been strongly influenced by Greek independent thought: the individual is the most important unit. Charles Colson has written an excellent book, Against The Night, which is about living in the post-Christian age. He exhorts us to prepare for the next great dark ages which are already upon the western the world. Who are the "new barbarians" who usher in the new dark ages? Radical individualists who care for nothing besides themselves. They feel the only way they can ever be fulfilled is by focusing on the self. And so they focus on themselves, to the exclusion of everything and everyone else.
Francis Schaeffer once said that Western man's problem is that he tries to figure out the whole by focusing on the parts. He feels that if he can just get down to the smallest part--himself, then he can understand the whole and thus become like God. The reality is that he winds up ultimately being fragmented. When all one has is the pieces of the puzzle and has rejected the master picture which directs him to understand the placement of each of the pieces, what else could one end up with but a mess of disjointed pieces? This is the state western man finds himself at the beginning of the third millennium. He has tried to become like God without God. And the result is inner fragmentation as well as fragmentation in his world of relationships.
This book is written for a western audience. Therefore, one of the major things this book will deal with is some of the fundamental flaws in Western thought which are anti-Biblical. Every culture, due to the fact that culture is a composite of the norms of people who make up that culture, has aspects which carry with it the image of God. But every culture also has aspects which have been perverted and are anti-God. An example of one of these in our present culture is the whole "self" movement. Too many Christians have been duped into accepting the major problem with man as being his or her "self-esteem". Others have written more extensively on this subject (see Jay Adams, Self-Esteem, Self-worth) so I will not go into that here.
But we will focus in the fact that improving our self esteem will NOT solve man's problems. Man was created a communal being. Therefore, working out his problems in isolation (self focused) will, in fact work contrary to who man was created to be and likely will lead to greater fragmentation.
Who was man created to be in communion with? As we have said, man was created to be in communion with both God and other human beings. There is a two-dimensionality to man's need for communion. There is a need and a desire for both communion with the infinite as well as the finite. C.S. Lewis said one of the things which led him to God was the fact that deep in his heart--and the heart of all men--there is a sense of the eternal, a desire to know more, to reach out, to go beyond the limits of the self. The individual is not enough to meet the needs of man. Therefore there is a desire to look up. Ever since man was first created religion has been a part of his culture. Only recently has man has tried to stamp out religion through atheistic communism. And it just doesn't work, because it is contrary to the way man was created.
In the same way, trying to ignore others, or using other people to fulfill one's selfish needs (the western materialistic capitalism) also works contrary to the way man was created. Capitalism ends up in existential nihilism; something I believe the west is rushing toward at break neck speed and is pretty clear in the youth of today involved in killing rampages. They are "without hope and without God in this world". Ephesians 2:12.
Man was created for communion with God and his fellow man. Jesus said that one could reduce all the commandments to simply two: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and might, and love your neighbor as yourself" Mt. 22:37-40.
Man gets it wrong on how to reach out to God. Let's think for a second: how did the Pharisees feel that they could get to God? Through the Law! The Law was seen as a means to righteousness. It had nothing to do with relationship, or with a love relationship with a heavenly Father. How did Jesus view the Pharisees in their attempts to reach God? They had missed the whole mark! "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You tithe mint and dill and cumin and neglect the weightier provisions of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness." (Matthew 23,23)
And what do justice and mercy have to do with? Love! Relationship! This the Pharisees could care less for! For them, keeping the Law meant achieving a righteous standing with God. To these Jesus says "You blind guides, who strain out a gnat and swallow a camel". He goes on to say they are full of "self-indulgence."
And guess what? Many Christians today are in danger of falling into the same error! For them, they have the New Testament law, and are arguing about whether we ought dance, drink wine or smoke cigarettes, or debate over the end times, never asking how these relate to the law of love!
Everything that rises out of the teachings of Jesus is motivated by love. "A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another." (John 13:34). John summarizes Jesus teaching this way: " ... not writing to you a new commandment, but the one which we have had from the beginning, that we love one another." (2 John 5, Cf. I John 2:7,9; 3:11,23; 4:21). We can hear Jesus saying, "Listen, you need to learn how to love; therefore, do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Much of Jesus' teaching was practically how to love my brother and sister. Jesus exhortation is the same for us today: we as the church need to learn how to love!
Sitting down with a teenager and telling him not to sleep with his girlfriend because God said so won't do it today. It's a stupid reason, if you think about it. God said so. But why did he say so? All His laws flow out of the understanding of love. When I sit down with my sixteen-year-old son, I need to explain to him how loving a woman means protecting her and guarding her sexually until they are both ready for marriage.
Because by guarding her sexuality I am guarding her very soul--not to mention my own! (Eph. 4:17ff, I Cor. 6:18). The command is because it fulfills the law of love. It is also very painful and callouses the heart to engage in sex outside of marriage (Cf. Eph. 4:17-19).
But explaining sexual purity in this way is a lot more complicated than saying "God said so". But it will protect the child from becoming a Pharisee who thinks "If I do this I'm all set." God is not so pleased with our outward activity; He looks on the heart.
1 Corinthians 3:10,12 says "...let each man be careful how he builds... gold, silver and precious stone, wood, hay, stubble, each man's work will become evident; for the day will show it, because it is to be revealed with fire, and the fire itself will test the quality of each man's work". What determines what type of material we are building with? In the context you have to read all the way to 4:5, where we find that the day of judgment will expose the hidden motives of a man's heart." A lot of Christians do all the right things for all the wrong reasons. When they get to Heaven, all those right things will go up in smoke except those good things done out of a good heart (3:15).
Grasp the urgency! Those who are saved must learn how to be motivated by love. We must work through the issues of what it means to love both God and our neighbor. We need to understand the New Testament life that Christ has given to us; a new life, which is fundamentally a life of love.
If we, as members of God's family, are going to engage in the ministry of transformation whereby broken, wounded men and women are recreated in the image of God, with the product of this ministry being communities of His kingdom in the present world which reflect His love, then we need to keep at the center of our theology that man was created for this very purpose: to commune with his creator and his fellow man. Man is by nature a communal being--created to love! Back |
