”...[anyone different teaching and not agreeing to healthy words] he is proud, understanding nothing, but rather being sick about debates and disputes, out of which are coming to be envy, strife, blasphemies, suspicions, evils...”
-Sick. Sick people. They didn’t take their medicine today. They are off their meds, in fact - not getting their recommended daily allowance of the healthy healing Words of Scripture - and that can’t be good. Nope - vital signs are down, things are actually trending down, trending away from godliness. Pride. Lack of understanding. And then we have all forms of interpersonal conflict. This is where it all begins. The fountainhead of man’s inhumanity to man, of our pervasive inability to simply get along. To be a good neighbor. It’s not about State Farm not being there - it is God’s Word not being there and being embraced in a humble teachable heart. Pride. Me-first, me-better. Uh-gly. As ugly as it gets, way more than skin deep, ugliness towards my neighbor flowing out of my nasty ugly heart.
-And pride would thus be not only the first symptom but also the first cause. It is the consummate act of pride to question what God said - an illness as old as the Garden, yea older than that. Did God really say ________? The willingness, the brazen instinct to question what God has said, the readiness to take the wide and oft-traveled highway away from what God has said is the essence of pride, and we see it in the serpent in the earliest pages of Scripture. The whole creation thing had barely gotten off the ground, and here he comes, all proud and haughty, the prince of the power of the air, cast down to earth on account of his pride, more than ready to ensnare and enslave the masses of would-be image-bearers into thumbing their collective noses at the loving God Who fashioned them to bear His glorious image forever. Questioning God’s Word. Did God really say that? And pride now induces them to even question the truth of that creation account. Did God really make all that? Did God really make me? No strings on me...!, we insist, as we stumble down the path of ignorance. Understanding nothing, Paul says. Professing to be wise, they became fools (Romans 1.22). Sick, broken, hurting people.
-And it is in the garden where we see this heart-sickness begin to infect our relationships. Not only are we hiding from God and His scrutinying gaze, the searing heat of His Truth, but we are hurling at one another. Passing on our hurt. Instead of peace and harmony and love, we have debates and disputes, envy and strife, blasphemies and abusive language in place of healthy life-giving words, suspicions (we find it oh-so-hard to trust one another). And evils. All kinds of nasty evils. The exact opposite of godliness. Sick people. Friends, we were made for so much more. We were never made for this. But wait - (sadly) there’s more... :(
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