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The prince of darkness is a gentleman.
-William Shakespeare, King Lear (Edgar at III, iv)
A friend of mine was telling me tonight about her aunt who is in town visiting from California this week. Her aunt has a friend out there in the Golden State who knew a lady who was going about her business at her local high-end modern-day fruit stand—one of those organic shrines I’m guessing. The market has a penchant for these big over-sized bins of fresh cilantro. Not realizing the hidden danger that lurked in the piles of green, the lady went ahead and dug down to get her share only to draw her hand back up in surprise as she was pinched by something—so she thought. She suddenly felt queasy, excused herself, and went out to her vehicle. Her husband became concerned ten minutes later when she didn’t return and went out to check on her only to find her—dead. She had been bitten by an Arizona Black Rattlesnake without even knowing it.
It got the writer in me thinking, as is the case twenty-three hours a day. Religion is both respectable and poisonous. It’s venom can go undetected, is fast working and kills it’s victim quickly. And the strange thing is how much so religion is able to grab hold of our hearts without our even realizing it’s happening. What I find fascinating if not alarming is that we are all not only susceptible to it—we are prone to it.
We’re drawn to religion much like the waves are drawn to the shore. It is both naive and foolish to pretend we aren’t.
Keep a cool head. Stay alert. The Devil is poised to pounce, and would like nothing better than to catch you napping. (1 Peter 5:8, The Message Bible)
Being bitten by the terrible killer snake himself can happen to any one of us—it’s only a matter of time when we become lazy in remaining solely dependant upon the grace of Christ which is the sure and proven antidote in opposing the forces of religion upon our own hearts.
Elizabeth Browning was on to something when she said The devil’s most devilish when respectable. We just miss him all wrapped up in the cloak of religion—that’s all I am saying.
And then she understood the devilish cunning of the enemies’ plan. By mixing a little truth with it they had made their lie far stronger.
-C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle
Deadly snakes don’t do much discriminating in terms of their victims and our enemy isn’t about to cut us a break just because we’re not much in the mood to run into him today.
Religion is sneaky. It’s covert and cunning. It doesn’t raise it’s ugly head and humbly announce Here I am. Religion is always saying things like hath God said—twisting, perverting, and eventually getting us to settle for something akin to a nasty artificial sweetner in the place of the real freedom that life in Jesus entails. It’s as old as sin and goes back to the very beginning with the first cave-man on record—Adam.
The serpent was clever, more clever than any wild animal God had made. He spoke to the Woman: ‘Do I understand that God told you not to eat from any tree in the garden?’
The Woman said to the serpent, ‘Not at all. We can eat from the trees in the garden. It’s only about the tree in the middle of the garden that God said, ‘Don’t eat from it; don’t even touch it or you’ll die.’
The serpent told the Woman, ‘You won’t die. God knows that the moment you eat from that tree, you’ll see what’s really going on. You’ll be just like God, knowing everything, ranging all the way from good to evil.’ (Genesis 3:1-5, The Message Bible)
Truth is—we are afraid that our biggest fears will be realized in embracing freedom—so we reluctantly hang on to religion. Ditching the law and order (control and manipulation) that religion represents and the supposed protection that religion seems to offer is a very frightening proposition. In many ways we see religion as safe, when in fact in it’s rawest form religion is our enemy’s most seductive poison. It can look so good. After all—it’s sin that looks so bad. Drinking, killing, and cussing—these are no-brainers for us who are mature to identify. But we can’t see past the end of our own noses when it comes to envy, gossip, jealousy, hate, pride, or lust of every flavor—these look delectably tasty to the indiscriminate eye. And when we do see the offense to God in these minute lapses in judgement, we pass them off as if they were the smallest of small infractions or worse yet we just don’t see them at all.
The serpent’s fruit is always carefully packaged and presented, making it almost impossible for us to discern. It should come as no surprise that Satan carefully construes many of his most harmful lies in the form of harmless religion and in a light that fails to show any signs of being worm-ridden and rotten to the core—just like the first fruit he picked to begin with.
He won’t stop at anything to rob our freedom.
There are some who have no understanding to hear the truth of freedom and insist upon their goodness as means for salvation. These people you must resist, do the very opposite, and offend them boldly lest by their impious views they drag many with them into error. For the sake of liberty of the faith do other things which they regarded as the greatest of sins… use your freedom constantly and consistently in the sight of and despite the tyrants and stubborn so that they may learn that they are impious, that their law and works are of no avail for righteousness, and that they had no right to set them up.
-Martin Luther
Some of you must to be shaking your heads and saying by now—Come on Ken, there has to be some rules, you are giving people the idea that they can live any way they choose and still be a Christian.
I have said nothing of the sort. I will concede—the gospel of grace is abused—but we don’t pull the medicine off the shelves just because some would use it recklessly. What I have said is that we want rules instead of relationship. We like religion over Jesus. We’ll take self-serving outward religious fashion shows over inward and uncomfortable revivals. It’s much more difficult to be genuine than it is to be religious. And it’s much more advantageous when it comes to our fragile and attention-starved egos to follow a man-made code than to follow the Son of the Living God. Let’s face it—we want people to pat us on the back when it comes to our being so religious, so giving, or even so Christlike—we’ll trade the freedom that’s ours for an ata-boy not even thinking a split second about what we are giving up to get the small worthless token.
11-12 The obvious impossibility of carrying out such a moral program should make it plain that no one can sustain a relationship with God that way. The person who lives in right relationship with God does it by embracing what God arranges for him. Doing things for God is the opposite of entering into what God does for you. Habakkuk had it right: “The person who believes God, is set right by God—and that’s the real life.” Rule-keeping does not naturally evolve into living by faith, but only perpetuates itself in more and more rule-keeping, a fact observed in Scripture: “The one who does these things [rule-keeping] continues to live by them.”
13a Christ redeemed us from that self-defeating, cursed life by absorbing it completely into himself. (Galatians 3:11-13a, The Message Bible)
God understands something that we just can’t seem to get through our thick skulls: A heart set free doesn’t need rules any longer. If you want the unadulterated-unfiltered-cold-hard truth—our hearts never needed rules to begin with. Our hearts were plenty lost without any help. Rules or no rules, we were wretched without Jesus.
You see, a heart set free wants to follow Jesus—it doesn’t need seventy-five rules about how to do anything. Rules got us no where before Jesus and I can’t understand what on earth makes us think they will post-Jesus. Seriously—it’s like learning where to get a spectacular gourmet meal and then returning to the place we were paying the same money to get a maggot covered plate of slop—as if we never found the new restaurant. Maddening behavior really.
What possesses us to return to rules and religion when we have Jesus?
…my faithful request and admonition is that you join our company and associate with us, who are real, great and hard-boiled sinners. You must not, by no means, make Christ to seem paltry and trifling to us, as though He could be our helper only when we want to be rid of imaginary, nominal and childish sins. No! No! That would not be good for us. He must rather be a Savior and Redeemer from real, great, grievous and damnable transgressions and iniquities, yea, and from the very greatest and most shocking sins; to be brief, from all sins added together in a grand total… Dr. Staupitz [Luther's mentor] comforted me on a certain occasion when I was in the same hospital and suffering the same affliction as you, by addressing me thus; Aha! you want to be a painted [meaning having a good external appearance] sinner, and accordingly, expect to have in Christ a painted savior. You will have to get used to the belief that Christ is a real Savior and you a real sinner. For God is neither jesting nor dealing in imaginary affairs, but He was greatly and most assuredly in earnest when He sent His own Son into the world and sacrificed Him for our sakes.
-Martin Luther, (in a letter to his dear contemporary George Spalatin after learning of counsel Spalatin had given someone which proved to be sinful advice—which Spalatin was then heart-broken over).
The above account reminds me of a story former Presidential (Nixon) aide Chuck Colson shares (who now heads Prison Fellowship—which reaches inmates and their families across the globe in 112 countries with the Gospel of Jesus Christ). Colson re-counts of a man approaching him after he had finished up a speech. The man was considerably offended by Colson’s portrait of each of us as sinners as Colson tells it and decided he’d take Colson to task. Colson heard the man out and responded, “I have more in common with Adolf Hitler than Jesus.”
We need pardon no less than Hitler needed it.
King David understood this—he prayed to the Lord after his adultery covered up by a carefully executed murder:
1 Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions. 2 Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin!
3For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me. (Psalm 51:1-3, ESV)
If God forgives any of our sins he forgives the worst of them. Jesus wasn’t given up as the peace child on account of our trivial or minor offenses—no—it was for our real offenses. Trivial sin is our idea—each and every sin is serious and grave business with God. If you took your smallest infraction it would have been quite enough to require the payment of God’s very own Son.
In other words—there are no misdemeanors with God—only felonies.
Is the prayer of your heart as David’s was?
Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin!
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