#63
Psalm 123 (NKJV)Unto You I lift up my eyes,O You who dwell in the heavens.Behold, as the eyes of servants look to the hand of their masters,As the eyes of a maid to the hand of her mistress,So our eye... View MorePsalm 123 (NKJV)Unto You I lift up my eyes,O You who dwell in the heavens.Behold, as the eyes of servants look to the hand of their masters,As the eyes of a maid to the hand of her mistress,So our eyes look to the Lord our God,Until He has mercy on us.Have mercy on us, O Lord, have mercy on us!For we are exceedingly filled with contempt.Our soul is exceedingly filledWith the scorn of those who are at ease,With the contempt of the proud.Galatians 5:16-17 (DP Bible)Walk in the Spirit and do not indulge the instincts of your flesh. The flesh sets its desire against the Spirit, and the Spirit sets its desire against the flesh. Therefore, you cannot follow the desires of your lower nature, because it is contrary to the Spirit. Those under the Law follow the flesh, even though they try to fight it; but those under the Spirit will not follow the flesh.Notes on the ScriptureInternalizing the Struggle Between Good and Evil (Galatians #63)When we left off the other day, we had begun to talk about the conflict between good and evil as they struggle for our thoughts, our minds, and the ownership of our souls. Under the Law, the Israelites sought to change their actions to conform to an external set of laws, the laws of God. (This included sacrifices made in atonement for wrong conduct.) But the very nature of this struggle changed in character when the Holy Spirit indwelled us.Before fleshing out the difference, let’s examine an interesting side-effect of the Bible. While they do not realize it, naive atheists and agnostics who are “good” people, who wants to “do the right thing,” are inadvertently living under a second-hand version the Law of Moses. Their society took its values from the Bible and they have unconsciously adopted, as their own, a watered-down moral code based upon it.They do not grasp the fundamental nature of Jesus Christ and thus treat Him as a legalist rather than a savior. Their naiveté as to the source of their personal values is astonishing. Do they think that people just adopt moral values out of innate goodness? Consider the difference between the West and China or Japan when it comes to taking human life, or slavery. For that matter, look at the difference between the Jews at the time of Christ and the Romans and Greeks. The idea that taking human life or holding another as a slave might be immoral in and of itself was nonsense to the Romans.This is not to diminish the huge hypocrisy one finds, continually, in the Judeo-Christian world. The church itself became gradually and terribly corrupt after Constantine co-opted Christianity in the 4th century. But the outcry against the hypocrisy is proof that the morality exists. Consider how much louder the outrage is, today, against Hitler's murder of six million Jews, or chattel slavery in the U.S. before 1865; and then compare these to the mild reaction against Stalin or Mao, who each murdered at least fifty million people, or Japanese enslavement of Koreans in the mid 20th century.Jacob Wrestling Angel|RembrandtBut, to get back to the main point of today's Scripture, Christianity changed the very character of the struggle between good and evil within an individual. We do not struggle between our own will and the rules God has given us. The good now lies within us, a holy spirit at war with our natural sinfulness. Our struggle is between two internal desires, those of the Spirit within us and those of our flesh, rather than between our natural desires and conformance to an external code, which we will be punished for transgressing.It is a very hard distinction to see, in practical terms, until we grasp the sign that one is living in the Spirit, rather than living by the Law: A mature Christian tries to do good, but does not feel guilty when he fails. He feels remorse; but guilt is an emotion of the flesh. As we come to know Christ better and better, we are more and more driven by love rather than guilt: Love of God and love of our fellow human being. In psychological terms, our growth in faith is characterized by a complete, 100% internalization of morality. A sin committed in secret and a sin discovered and published to the world are not different to us.This ties into the notion of being reborn in Christ. We might say that when we accept Christ, our reborn self is an infant. And like a human infant, a spiritual infant grows in size, strength, and knowledge as he or she matures.
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