The Human Problem pt. 1: Don't Trust God

I was reading Counterfeit Gods by Tim Keller and I was reminded of a very familiar scene: Genesis 3 and the fall of Man.  It's a familiar passage from the Bible, one I've read countless times.  What stuck out to me, while reading Keller's book was the root of Adam and Eve's first sin: a lack of trust in God. I had never seen that before.  I had seen it as greed, as stupidity, as ignorance, and as selfishness but never as a lack of trust in God.  Turns out that all the things I had seen that first sin as were just symptoms of a much worse disease.

I've been thinking about this for a while now and I'm convinced that all sin is rooted in not trusting God.  Satan convinced Adam and Eve that God was hiding something from them, that he wasn't being truthful with them.  So if they wanted the truth they were going to have to take it for themselves because God wasn't trustworthy.  And so we've followed suit, trusting everything else but God.

This is what idolatry is, taking something that isn't God and putting your ultimate trust in it.  The first commandment is 'you shall not have any other God's before me' i.e. 'you shall not put your ultimate trust in anything or anyone besides me.'  The rest of the commandments fall under this one, you can't break them without breaking the first commandment.

Sin, in its twisted, complicated, web of deceit is rooted in nothing more than a lack of trust in God.  I hate to oversimplify this, because sin is twisted and it is complex and it does seek to trap you, but its root is one thing: not trusting God.

You can kill any plant by removing it from its roots.  The roots are what give the plant what it needs to live, to grow, to thrive.  The more satan feeds the root of our sin (a lack of trust in God) the more sin can live, grow, and thrive in our lives.  So the logical response is, if we want to rid ourselves of sin, to remove the root of the problem: get rid of our distrust in God.

And that my friends is much easier said than done.  Much easier.

We've become so used to living in sin that living any other way just seems weird.  We don't know how to handle living without it so we often revert back to it.  It's like trying to kick an addiction, we relapse.

God has been busy proving his trustworthiness since the beginning of time culminating in the death of his own son.  If we can't trust a God who would sacrifice his own son so we would finally realize how good he is, what does that say about how messed up we are?

God offers us freedom and we throw it back at him and I think I know why: we can't handle freedom.  We don't know what to do with it.

We'll discuss that in pt. 2.

[This is part 1 in a series on 'The Human Problem']