The term God uses to describe people who trust him implicitly is righteous. They may not be perfect or obey him perfectly but their absolute trust in him is enough to earn them that appellation. So what does God call those who do not trust him implicitly? How does he regard them?
Impossible
Abraham, the man of God and father of all who trust in the Most High God was described as righteous by his Creator because of his trust. The term righteous is not a relative one. The designation was not based on a comparison between him and his peers. It was not the balance of his good deeds against his bad ones. God who sees into a person’s heart called him righteous because of a quality he had in him. He was pleasing to God because of his trust in God. On the contrary, an anonymous Jewish Christian writer who authored the book of Hebrews, one of the books of the New testament in the Bible tells us this:
And without faith it is impossible to please him (God), for whoever would draw near to God must first believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him. (Hebrews 11:6)
And the apostle Paul, a man who was vehemently opposed to the good news of Jesus Christ and was subsequently changed by an encounter with the same Jesus, tells us this in his letter to believers in Rome:
For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s laws; indeed it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God. (Romans 8:7,8)
When a book such as the bible, calls something impossible, I think it bears noting.
The bible contains numerous accounts of events we would consider impossible, recorded by eyewitnesses who insisted that they really happened. People were healed of lifelong illnesses with a word or touch, the dead were raised, water turned to wine and a storm stilled at a command from a man. When a book like the bible calls something impossible, I think it bears noting. Why is this the one thing that is needed to please God? It seems so arbitrary. What about all those really good people out there who have no religion? Are we to believe that generosity, kindness, altruism, bravery, honor, integrity and all the other qualities we would consider commendable are meaningless to God if a person does not first trust him? Surely the writers of the scriptures must have meant something that we have misunderstood.
Show Me the Money
Money is interesting to me because of its influence on society. Consider the amount of time and energy we spend laboring to earn colored pieces of paper with numbers written on them. We then turn around and spend the rest of our time and energy exchanging it for stuff. The thing is, not any colored piece of paper will do. None of us will accept any old piece of paper with one million dollars written on it as payment for work done, no matter how pretty the writing and the paper. Money has value because a legitimate government prints it, standardizes its value and backs it up with its authority. A hundred dollar bill is accepted as payment for goods and services worth a hundred dollars, because it bears all the marks of a legitimate hundred dollar bill as determined by the US government. People get in trouble trying to pass off replicas of real money as the real thing no matter how closely they resemble the real thing. Clearly the features that give the money it’s legitimacy and value are derived from the issuing authority. If humans are created beings who derive our essence and value from our creator, and if the creator is the absolute authority in the universe, then it stands to reason that he determines what is valuable and accepted as currency in our interaction with him. He gets to say what is real and what is counterfeit. Therefore when we are told it is impossible to please God without faith, I think the writers of the bible mean that to God a person without faith is like a bad banknote or like a knockoff of a masterpiece. Something essential is missing and no amount of good deeds can obscure that fact. No matter how closely it resembles the original, the treasury knows their notes, the artist knows his work and they can tell the fake from the real thing. They will not be pleased with anything but the original.
How did we get here?
Whenever a fake is discovered the most pressing question is where did it come from? How did it come into being, who is the forger? So the obvious question is where did people without faith in God come from? Was there a time when all people had faith in God?
The bible tells the story of the origin of the human race. God made a first couple and placed them in a garden in an undisclosed location. This couple was well supplied and cared for by their maker and lived in relation with him in perfect harmony. They were the originals. They trusted God completely and he was pleased with them. They had unrestricted access to everything in the garden except one tree, whose fruit they were forbidden to eat. They were warned that consuming the fruit of that tree would lead to death. In the course of time they got it into their heads that the fruit of the tree was really not that dangerous and that there was a potential benefit to eating it. They had been told by a being who was neither God nor sent by God, that the fruit of this tree granted one the ability to become like their Creator. That is the equivalent of a hundred dollar bill being told that by jumping into a vat of ink, it could become the US treasury and thereby determine its own value. They believed the lie that God is not good and is not trustworthy. They believed it was both possible and desirable to become completely independent of God and self determining. They believed that something better than God could be obtained by taking what was forbidden. They trusted the false one instead of God, and ate the fruit. Needless to say things did not go as expected. The Creator came to them and, being the Creator, immediately noticed that they had been corrupted. The trust they had for him, which had been the basis of their relationship had been shattered by their rebellion. They now had a fundamental flaw. God could no longer be pleased with them so long as that flaw existed. So he sent them out from his presence. That is the origin of the human race as we know it. We all carry this fatal flaw. Instead of depending on our maker for our value, our sense of what is right and good, our sustenance and our satisfaction, we depend on the things he has made, completely ignoring him. We are counterfeits, corrupted copies of that original, trying to pass ourselves off as the real thing and demanding that God accept our self imposed value.
We are counterfeits, corrupted copies of that original, trying to pass ourselves off as the real thing and demanding that God accept our self imposed value.
Myths
I will be the first to admit that that story sounds like something made up to get kids to do what their parents tell them. Except, the story has a ring of truth to it we cannot ignore. The history of the human race seems to corroborate the myth. On one hand are our strident demands for goodness and our pitiful attempts to obtain it. We intuitively recognize that there is an ideal outside ourselves by which all things are judged. When we call a thing good or evil we admit that there are things that ought to be and others that ought not to be. We demand that those with whom we interact act in ways that are good and strongly object when they do not. We appeal to an authority outside ourselves with our demands for fair play even if we will not call him God or treat him like a person. Meanwhil we violate the very code of conduct we demand others observe with us and make excuses as to why our behavior is not so bad. We easily see how abjectly others fail at being what we consider good or decent. Those are the times when we recognize that something is not right and again we intuitively understand that an authority outside of ourselves agrees with our assessment that something is wrong. While rejecting God, we long for his law and demand that our fellow man live by those laws, even while we ourselves fail to do so. We may not recognize it in ourselves but it sure is easy to spot that others are fake banknotes. We may have long forgotten what the original human looked like who pleased God. We may have come to believe that what we are is all there ever has been. And yet we somehow know that we are not what we ought to be. Ultimately, if there is no God and no original human who pleased God, then we are like children playing shop with play money. It is fun while it lasts but at the end of the day it does not matter how much of it you accumulate, it amounts to nothing. If, on the other hand, there is a God, and if we are corrupted copies of something real and pure, then it does matter what we do. Then our demands for justice and fair play, our cries for mercy and compassion, our guilt and shame, our hopes of forgiveness and our striving for excellence are all straining towards something real.
Sinner
The word "sinner" immediately brings to mind thoughts of that group of people who every reasonable person would condemn as evil. Murderers, thieves, child molesters, despots, drug dealers and the like. Applied to anyone else the word sounds judgmental and harsh. Most of us, while not perfect, do not think we are bad enough to be placed in that category. The thing is, the word sinner, just like the word righteous, is an absolute term that refers to a person’s state rather than to any series of acts he/she has committed. A person is not a sinner because the tally of their evil deeds is greater than their good ones or that they are worse than most other people. What about the countless good people who do not commit any of the abominable things that we would consider sin? What about the person who by all accounts has never wronged another person in their lives. Just as there are very good counterfeits, imitations so good that only a very discerning eye can recognize its flaws, and poor ones that do not require any expertise to pick out, likewise there are people who are so obviously flawed that any lay person can pick them out as sinners. Then there are the people like ourselves we call good. Those are the ones whose flaws and blemishes are so cleverly hidden that only a close inspection by someone who knows what to look for will reveal them. The thing is, no matter how closely they mimic the original, as long as they are missing that essential something, they will be found out sooner or later. A sinner is simply a person who does not trust God implicitly, a person who does not have faith in the Creator of the universe. This lack of trust in God causes people to commit acts that are contrary to God’s laws and therefore sinful but those acts are only a by-product of their condition. A sinner is a person who is inclined to rebellion against God and who rebels against him because of a defect in their nature making them unable to trust God.
The transformation from being a sinner to being a righteous one is not one of the things the bible considers impossible. This is the Good News.
By this definition wouldn’t that mean that the vast majority of humans would be considered sinners? No, it means all humans who have ever lived including our original parents have been sinners. All people, the entire human race with no exception, is described by this word. Thankfully the designation of sinner does not need to mark a final verdict. Abraham, the friend of God, was born a sinner but at some point in his life became known as a righteous man. When a person recognizes that someone else sets the standard for what is good, and that he/she falls short of the expected standard, the journey to restoration becomes a distinct possibility. God the Creator, who formed man from the elements of the earth, is able to take something that is essentially dead and bring it back to life again. The transformation from being a sinner to being a righteous one is not one of the things the bible considers impossible. This is the Good News.
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