During my sermon last week I made reference to the passage in Ephesians 4:17-19 where Christians are told very strongly that their way of life must no longer be like that of the non-Christian world around them: “You must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, with a continual lust for more.”
The comment was (rightly) made after the Service that such a drastic description of non-Christians does not square with our experience. Most of us will know family members, friends, business associates, etc., who live very upright moral lives, although they are avowedly not Christian and may even follow another religion. I know some whose lives are more “Christian” than many committed churchgoers.
How, then, do we understand the passage above? Is the non-Christian world really that bad, or is this just the warped view of a fundamentalist fanatic? How do we view our non-Christian friends and relate to their world?
In trying to grapple with this question there are several points that need to be made: 1. The above description is a generalization. It relates to a whole system of thinking and behaviour, rather than describing every individual. In our Western culture, especially, there are those whose moral values and ways of thought have been shaped by centuries of Christian tradition, even though they themselves do not believe. But, where Judeo-Christian values are not present, or are being discarded, the above description holds true, and we are seeing more and more of this in our younger generation. (e.g. TV shows like MTV and Big Brother)
2. The above description is consistent with the rest of Scripture. Both the Old and New Testaments are clear that the ways of the world are detestable to God and must be rejected by God’s people. (e.g. Lev 18:3, 20:23; Jer 10:2; Col 3:5-9; 1John 2:15-17) There is no support in the Bible for the view that is very common today, that all humans are essentially good and just need to be properly taught. The Bible is consistently pessimistic about human nature that has not been redeemed by Christ.
3. The fundamental issue before God is not a question of behaviour, but the condition of the heart. And again, the Bible is absolutely clear that the human heart is corrupt. Jeremiah declares: “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure.” (17:9) The Teacher in Ecclesiastes says: “The hearts of men, moreover, are full of evil and there is madness in their hearts while they live.” (Eccl 9:3) Jesus himself said: “From within, out of men’s hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly.” (Mark 7:21,22) That is why God’s New Covenant promise, fulfilled in Jesus, is: “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you.” (Ezek 36:26)
4. We must remember that Jesus’ harshest criticism was not directed at the ‘sinners’ around him, but at the good living, religious, teachers of the law and Pharisees. He said they were like: “whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men’s bones and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.” (Matt 23:27,28) In my forty years of experience in the ministry I have found that it is the “good” people who are the hardest to reach with the gospel. In fact, Jesus said: “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” (Mark 2:17)
Although, as I have said before, one of the strong commitments of the Alliance Church is to evangelism, our enthusiasm can be dimmed if we judge that our lovely unbelieving friends are really all right. Just as a doctor may diagnose terminal cancer when on the surface very little appears to be wrong, we need to take seriously the Bible’s diagnosis of the human condition. Although our lovely unbelieving friends may seem very far from the condition described in our original passage, the state of their heart without Christ is terminal. They are, as Ephesians 2:1&12 states: “Dead in [their] transgressions and sins … Without hope and without God in the world”. Only Christ can bring them life.