 GENESIS HALL OF SHAME
I have been reading through the book of Genesis in my devotions lately. I am up to chapter twenty and I have seen something that caused me to pause and think. We all believe as Christians that man is basically sinful, but I never noticed how far and how quickly man departed from God's ideal. Let me give you some of the lowlights. - Adam disobeys God and plunges the world into sin
- Cain murders Able
- The world becomes so wicked God must destroy it and start over
- Noah, the one righteous man God finds, gets off the ark and gets so drunk he passes out
- Men once again becomes a Godless society and God must confuse their language at the Tower of Babel
- Abraham the father of faith lies to Pharaoh about his wife Sarah and claims she is his sister
- Abraham gets his maid pregnant in an attempt to have an heir
- The cities of Sodom and Gomorrah become so evil God must wipe them off the map
- Lot offers his daughters to a crowd of men who want to rape his male guests
- Lot's daughters get him drunk and become pregnant by their own father
- Abraham once again lies about Sarah in an attempt to save himself
And this is just the first twenty chapters! THERE IS HOPE! I wish I could tell you that man got better, but I can't. That is why Jesus came; to provide salvation for the lost and to provide victory for the believers who struggle with their old sin nature. Listen to Paul's words in his letter to the Romans: 7:21 I find then the law, that, to me who would do good, evil is present. 7:22 For I delight in the law of God after the inward man: 7:23 but I see a different law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity under the law of sin which is in my members. 7:24 Wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me out of the body of this death? 7:25 I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then I of myself with the mind, indeed, serve the law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin. Jesus Christ is the only one who can make us free from the tyranny of sin. All my efforts will fall short without the power of the indwelling Christ to overcome sin. The hymn writer nailed it when he wrote these words: O to grace how great a debtor
Daily I’m constrained to be!
Let Thy goodness, like a fetter,
Bind my wandering heart to Thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
Prone to leave the God I love;
Here’s my heart, O take and seal it,
Seal it for Thy courts above. |
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