The Evil Nature of Man

10They didn’t drive out the Canaanites who lived in Gezer; but the Canaanites dwell in the territory of Ephraim to this day, and have become servants to do forced labor.

Grapes picked straight from the vine are wonderfully fresh. But after a day or two they begin to wither, fruit flies gather, and they rot until no one could eat them. The grape loses what it once was and ends up as rubbish. In the same way, those who believe in God go bad once they are separated from Christ.

While we live by the Lord’s word, we give off a beautiful light that no words can describe, but if we drift away from Christ, that light will fade and give way to greed, anxiety, and darkness. Cut off from Christ, who is the vine, we lose our light little by little and turn into something ugly, swarming with worms such as greed and lust. Once greed has taken hold of someone, they never realize that they are changing or that their spirit is growing dark. If they knew they were heading into darkness, they would strive not to drift from Christ, and they would guard themselves so that Satan could not sear their conscience.

People go to church every week to worship, and because of that they believe they are God’s children and never doubt their salvation. This is because they mistake their own zeal for faith. They look at the surface rather than the substance and are deceived by a false faith of their own making. What is striking is this: one person comes to church hoping for plenty of blessing in this world and for heaven besides; another depends on God in this world and longs to live with him in the world to come. Yet the two behave in exactly the same way. Both serve, both are faithful, and both appear to love God, so only God would be able to discern their hearts. We must therefore offer God an honest faith, the kind he approves.

No one gets it right from the start. As you learn the word and keep striving, again and again, you can grow into a faith that God would receive as a pleasing aroma. If you put God first, then not only your worship but your offerings, your service, and your whole life will become a faith that God approves. Whatever situation we meet, we need a heart ready to pray. We must read and learn the word and make every effort to draw near to God. Only then can our lives change.

In other words, a faith that does not change one’s life is an immature faith. If we do not grow in faith, we will come to see salvation entirely from our own side rather than from God’s word, and we will think we are the masters of our own lives. A faith like that cannot be clothed in God’s grace. In the end it drifts from God and cannot help but sink into a pitiful life veiled in darkness, like rotting grapes swarming with fruit flies.

Israel too became corrupt once they forgot the commands God had given them at the beginning and lost their gratitude and their fear of him. To lead his people into Canaan, God called Abraham and established Isaac and Jacob in faith. He chose Joseph and brought him to Egypt. He waited a long time, made Jacob’s family into a nation, and helped Moses lead the people out of Egypt.

Until he brought them into Canaan, God showed them event after event to help Israel be born again, yet in the end they betrayed him. People who are quick to forget gratitude will cast God out of their hearts with something close to cruelty the moment the world tempts them, even when he has helped them experience miracles and astonishing grace. That is why we must keep giving thanks for how God has helped us and how he has led us to live a life full of light.

God wanted Israel to conquer the land for themselves with a mature faith. As he divided the land still to be conquered among the tribes, he also promised to help them if only they would make up their minds in faith. But Israel threw away all the love they had received from God. Like fruit that falls from the tree, loses its life, and rots, Israel began to be absorbed into the Canaanites. God knows that people look to him more when they are being put through the fire than when life is easy, and so he has no choice but to allow suffering and refining trials as a way of saving them. There are times he permits hardship and refining because his love is greater than his desire to rebuke and judge. Because of this, we must always be watchful and keep a faith that gives thanks in all things.

I hope you will not easily forget the grace of God. When we live by faith, God becomes a strong fence around us, and the world cannot attack his people. The reason we must never take the world’s hand in the first place is that the world does not easily release anyone who tries to leave it. Sin never lets go of a hand it has once grasped, so breaking free of it costs the pain of a hard decision and a price to match.

When you stand where the road divides, only by resolutely throwing off every sinful habit and every form of sin and holding on to God can you resist the temptations of the world and of Satan. Satan is relentless, so if you look back like Lot’s wife, you may be caught in the net of sin. May you walk toward the light that God shines on your way.

Matthew 7:13-14

13“Enter in by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and many are those who enter in by it. 14How narrow is the gate, and restricted is the way that leads to life! Few are those who find it.

Satan’s aim is to hurl souls into darkness by any means at all, using the power of the world and using people. He does this because he thinks the torment of souls fallen into darkness is his revenge on God. Every person is born a child of Satan, but when Christ overcame death, the people Satan had worked as slaves were taken from him by Jesus. Then he used sin to build a broad road and tempted people without ceasing, so that, drunk on sin, they would not take the narrow way. So only by overcoming the temptations of the world and of Satan through faith can we enter heaven.

Those of us who serve God in faith have given up the broad and easy road of the world. Going against our own nature, we have chosen the narrow and restricted way and walk it by faith, and our life is a lonely one for it. Many travel the broad road without a moment’s conflict, yet we deliberately choose the narrow one. That in itself is hardship, but we must keep going without wavering until we meet the Lord at the end of that road.

The broad road and the narrow road both lie within our own hearts. That is why the narrow road is one no one can walk except in the spirit of dying daily. Christ himself said that the way of salvation is narrow and restricted and that few find it. It is as hard and demanding as that. Only when we walk it knowing that the narrow road leads to heaven can we endure. The world’s road that leads to destruction is broad, and many walk it together, so people do not sense how serious it is. With so many going this way, they think, what could possibly go wrong? But that road ends in eternal death, and we must never take it.

Joshua 15:63

63As for the Jebusites, the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the children of Judah couldn’t drive them out; but the Jebusites live with the children of Judah at Jerusalem to this day.

God had planned that once Israel conquered Canaan, he would bring their hardships to an end and give them a life of peace. He meant to be Israel’s king, to guard his people so that they lived in blessing, and to make them a strong nation. But when Israel saw how prosperously the Canaanites lived, they began to think that the grace they had received and enjoyed from God until then was a meager thing. Their hearts captured by the world, the Israelites abandoned God, gave in to their greed for the world and its temptations, and began to build castles of sand.

Once greed had taken root, they chose whatever way of life was most comfortable for them and stopped obeying God’s commands. Moses had commanded Israel that when God helped them conquer Canaan, they were to destroy its people utterly, make no covenant with them, show them no mercy, and not intermarry with them.

In Joshua 15:63 the children of Judah fail to drive out the Canaanites living in Jerusalem and live alongside them instead. Here we can see that the faith of the tribe of Judah had gone bad and that they were not obeying God’s command. God had helped them in every battle up to that point, yet Judah did not drive out the Jebusites but lived with them. They simply had no will to drive out a people who lived in such plenty.

If we have no will to live by faith, then however much God helps us, even he can help no further. For only those who cry out to him, begging for help and vowing to live by faith, can receive God’s absolute help. The children of Judah had seen the faith of Caleb and Othniel, who, ready to perish if they must, pleaded to be given this hill country. Yet once they had conquered much land and grown comfortable, driving out the people of Jerusalem no longer seemed to matter much to them.

They had land enough to live on without troubling to drive out the Jebusites, and so, though God had commanded them to drive out all the Canaanites, they did not obey. Israel’s decline shows not only in Judah but also in the faith of the descendants of Joseph.

Joshua 16:10

10They didn’t drive out the Canaanites who lived in Gezer; but the Canaanites dwell in the territory of Ephraim to this day, and have become servants to do forced labor.

While the children of Judah lived side by side with the people of Jerusalem, the children of Ephraim and Manasseh put the Canaanites to forced labor. They used the Canaanites as slaves and took tribute from them. It was not weakness that kept them from driving the Canaanites out. They chose not to, because they wanted to use them to live in greater comfort.

God did not command them to drive out all the Canaanites because he was unaware that keeping them as slaves made life easier. The people of Hebron were entirely different from those who, like the Gibeonites, surrendered to God and resolved to live as his people. The Canaanites did not know God at all, and if Israel came to terms with them, Israel would never be able to destroy the idols they served. So God told them to make no compromise of any kind but to drive them out. Because sin always spreads, Israel would end up settling for a convenient middle ground with no line drawn, and would fall to the Canaanites’ temptations. Through Moses on the plains of Moab, God had told them not to compromise with the Canaanites but to destroy their idols and drive them out. Yet when Israel saw the abundance the Canaanites enjoyed, they plunged headlong into sin.

Had Israel obeyed God’s command, Canaan would have become entirely theirs, and the abundant grain and fruit of the land would have been their reward for obeying the word. But because they did not obey, all that bounty, which would rightly have been theirs, became sin instead. If Israel had obeyed the word, driven out the Canaanites, and enjoyed the riches of the land as the fruit of obedience, they would have grown far stronger than they now were.

If Adam had obeyed the word and not eaten from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he would have enjoyed still greater blessing in the garden of Eden. Eden was rightly his. Yet because of the sin of disobedience, of eating that fruit, all creation fell under the curse with him. Israel is the same. Every land they conquered was theirs, a blessing meant for them to enjoy, yet they defied the word and brought hardship on themselves.

Why does it matter so much that you are born again? Your abilities, your knowledge, and your wealth are certainly your own, and you live by them. But whether you wish it or not, life requires you to choose one of two, God or Satan. Even if you say you believe in neither and call yourself a person of no faith, in the end not believing in God is choosing Satan. We are not wise enough to refuse Satan, so if we are to keep from sin, the true wisdom and understanding is to obey God’s word without condition. Only then can we live safely within the fence of God’s protection.

If Israel had driven out the Canaanites and served God alone as king, they would have known the life of heaven. But they preferred what their eyes could see, and the price was a long life of misery, robbed of their freedom. When hardship comes, life becomes painful, but because people pray to be freed from their troubles, hardship can also become a chance to take hold of God.

The pleasures of the world are within arm’s reach, which makes them anything but easy to give up of our own accord. When we indulge in pleasure out of habit, the body responds before any will to leave sin can act, and with sin repeated over and over, fear will fade away. Those who gain wealth and power never have to bow to anyone. Instead, everyone bows to them, and they look with satisfaction at themselves rising higher.

So Israel, grown proud, abandoned God, who had granted them all of it, in order to hold on to the world’s pleasures and riches, which are nothing but illusion. It is of people like this that the Bible says it is harder for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. Once the human heart grows rich in the world, its hope of heaven grows poor. As a result, longing for God disappears, the fear of God goes with it, and such people end up living to exalt their own righteousness.

We are born into this world so that our souls may be saved. So whether we have much or little, we must be faithful with what we have. Only when this understanding of salvation is firmly settled in us can we stand firm in faith whatever we own, and pour out our very lives in service.

However grand a castle you build on the sand, it collapses when the sea washes over it. If you see that the power and pleasure the world offers are castles of sand that will vanish without a trace, you may come to grasp how precious salvation is. Only when you build your faith on God’s word and on the sacrifice of Christ can you discern a different gospel through the Holy Spirit and judge the false teachers who teach it.

A different gospel is God’s word mixed with human thinking. It takes out the sacrifice of Christ, puts in its place people’s craving to be king, and wraps it up attractively, so our own wisdom cannot easily see through it. Only when you set the word at the center of your heart and judge by it will you escape being deceived by a different gospel, by evil spirits, and by the wicked. Because the heart itself grows dark once the visible world blinds the eyes, let us never be deceived by a false gospel or by evil spirits.

The tribes of Judah and Ephraim, being God’s people, needed to be born again, but they were not, nor were they reconciled to God in Christ. As a result, they defied the word, married Canaanites, had children with them, and worshiped the idols those nations served.

You are saints born again in Christ as a new creation. If you live by God’s word, as befits a new creation, God will fill your life without holding back. If you are reconciled to God within the fence of love that Christ has built, and give yourselves so that other souls too may be reconciled to him, blessing can come to you naturally. Blessing is God’s to give, so if you live by faith, you will rise, without even noticing it, to a place of honor and respect.

Though Moses had told them all of this again and again, Israel went their own way and brought God’s wrath upon themselves. They betrayed the God who had led them from Egypt to Canaan with so many miracles, and in the end they became servants to the powerful nations of the world and to the Canaanites. God had led them this far to make them masters of the land of Canaan, yet they could not enjoy that blessing. As he watched them, God must have grieved deeply.

In his love for you, God has caused you to hear his word, helped you toward a life of abundance, and led you this far. If only you put into practice the word you have heard, he will make you taste the joy of heaven on this earth and give you a life with nothing to be ashamed of. God has set before you the blessing and the curse. Whether you take hold of the curse or the blessing is entirely yours to decide. Whether you will live for God or for the world, he will be waiting for your decision. May you live by faith and receive still greater blessing from God.

May you receive every blessing God has prepared and enjoy the life of heaven here on earth. I bless you in the name of Jesus Christ.