City Life Starter

Written by PJ Thomas

The Word

For I, the LORD, love justice; I hate robbery and wrongdoing. In my faithfulness I will reward my people and make an everlasting covenant with them.

Isaiah 61:8

21 So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. 22 For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; 23 but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. 24 What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?

Romans 7:21-24

For the trouble is that one part of you is on His side, and really agrees with his disapproval of human greed, trickery, and exploitation. You may want him to make an exception in your own case, to let you off this one time. But you know at bottom that unless the power behind the world really and unalterably detests that sort of behavior (ex: human greed, trickery, exploitation) he cannot be good. On the other hand, we know that if there does exist an absolute goodness, it must hate most of what we do. This is the terrible fix we are in.

C.S Lewis, Mere Christianity, Ch 5

Exegesis

Isaiah prophesied about God’s judgement and the restoration of God’s kingdom during the time of Israel’s exile. Many Israelites felt they were treated unjustly by the surrounding nations. In one sense, it must have been comforting for Isaiah to remind them that God was on the side of justice and hated wrong. In the Hebrew, the word for wrong is be‛ôlâh,  and it has several translations. One translation is the root of our word “evil.”

Paul recognizes that this same evil is “right there with” him. In other words, he recognized that the evil existed within him. The dilemma that Paul describes is the same one C.S. Lewis so aptly summarizes in Mere Christianity. We know what we ought to do, we do not do it, and the debt we owe for that is death.

Application

In Season 3, Episode  11 of the show “The Good Place”, the authors highlight, in a much more irreverent way, the futility of trying to obey the moral law on our own (BEWARE: SPOILER ALERT). In this episode there is a “point system” that subtracts points for bad acts and adds points for good acts. The shows characters find that no humans can actually accumulate enough good points because they are flawed, even when they intend to do good.  It seems the system is rigged. No one can get to the Good Place! Their solution is trying harder to be better people. Can you guess how that turns out? Are you trying harder to “be good” so that you can deserve the good place?

Prayer

Lord, turn my heart each day to the one who breaks my chains in the prison of sin, Jesus. He alone can break these chains, as I am powerless to break them by intention or acts. Help me to live in the reality of that sacrificial love, and the humility of my powerlessness and dependence on you. Help me to make your grace as real as the air I breathe.