Table of Contents
As you have been working through the amazing design of the soul, studying the impact that Adam’s and Eve’s failure has had on the soul, then you can probably guess what happens when you combine a being made in the image of God with a soul that hates God’s truth. The mixture is a perfect blend of deception and false satisfaction. When the soul both wants to feel righteous like God, but at it’s core lives at war with God, the result is salvation by self.
Any truths that expose the soul to Biblical world-view reality are suppressed by lies. The soul is corrupted and sinful beyond repair. Any behaviors that clearly testify to the actual motives of the soul are reinterpreted by a false set of judicial measurements.
Instead of a desire to please God, the soul wants instead to please men. God will never condone the stained soul to grant it the honor of participating in God’s presence because God is Holy. Thus sinful souls seek the approval of men instead. This rewards the soul with a false sense of approval, affirming a feedback cycle of self-satisfaction.
All this mumbo-jumbo of crazy sounding paragraphs is to say, the only true righteousness in the universe comes from the uncorrupted God who made it all and remains the only source of Good anywhere. The corrupted soul also hungers for God’s righteousness, but will never find it. Instead, souls try to impress others to get praise from men.
Ways The Soul Tries to Save Itself
The ways that a soul tries to save itself are infinite in number, limited only by God’s gift of creativity to us. Even so, we can fit most into common categories. Let’s begin with the two primary categories: Those ways which don’t involve some sort of “activism”, and those that do.
Non-Activism Self-Justification
Finger-Pointing or Blame-Shifting
I remember watching one of those cheap super-hero movies that came out many years ago where the evil master-mind strapped an innocent bystander with a belt of explosives, triggered to detonate when a remote spring-loaded switch was released. The super-villain taunted the hero to dare to kill him knowing that upon death, the spring would release and blow up a city block. The hero saved the day, but the point here is that the innocent bystander wasn’t responsible for the evil plan or the resulting mayhem had the bomb gone off. Had the bomb exploded, nobody would have blamed the innocent bystander. He truly was a victim.
Victim mentality is at the heart of self-righteousness. If it wasn’t my fault, then I’m not guilty. Thus for every failure, it is important for corrupted souls to find someone to blame.
Read the chapter on “What Went Wrong?” to see this technique in action. Immediately upon disobeying God, eating the fruit they were banned from eating, Adam blamed Eve for his evil behavior. And likewise, Eve blamed the serpent whom God had made to share the Garden with them.
Souls can’t help themselves. Every soul knows it’s own guilt and understands the consequences of sinful behavior, but instead of coming clean before God, taking responsibility for casual mistakes and blatant murders, souls will deflect and play the victim card. Many of you might remember the hilarious comedian Flip Wilson. One of the comedy skits he was famous for was when he dressed up as a woman and when held accountable for a flaw, retorted, “The devil made me do it!”
God made this world and left it in a perfect condition. The disastrous current state of our souls is our fault.
Interestingly enough, the Jewish sacrificial system, where an innocent animal’s life was taken in exchange for human guilt, was a system of “blame-shifting” purposefully designed by God as a picture of the future plan God had in mind when he created the moral universe. For centuries, Jewish religious practices, those insane miscarriages of justice, where an innocent animal took the blame for the guilty, were established to be a parable of Jesus Christ, the sinless, innocent Lamb of God, voluntarily giving His precious life for those whose guilt would spell eternal doom in hell, separated from the Holiness of God.
During the Jewish annual observation of Yom Kippur, the sins of the people were confessed to God while hands were placed on a yearling goat. Then the goat was let go outside the camp, symbolizing the goat, running far, far away, taking the sins of the people with it (see Leviticus 16). This is where we get the term “scapegoat”– that desire of a soul to find someone else to take the blame.
Grading on the Curve
Another technique souls use to justify themselves is to compare themselves to others, judging their behavior against a class of clearly evil examples. Everyone has stolen things. But when challenged about what motivated them to steal, most folks will immediately point out that what they stole wasn’t even close to what Jesse James, the infamous bank robber stole. They will bring up examples like Al Capone, or “El Chapo”, making the point that their thievery isn’t even in the same class as others who actually deserve the punishment they received for robbery.
Major thieves will then point out that, “at least I never murdered someone!” Somehow there is built into every sinful soul a spectrum of sinful behaviors with corresponding degrees of justifiable punishments. Since their behavior was near the better end of the scale, therefor their crimes should be overlooked. Murderers will likewise make reference to serial killers as the baseline, who in turn will want to be weighed in the scale with genocidal megalomaniacs so they, comparatively speaking, will appear to be pure as driven snow.
Understanding the motives behind why we sin the way we sin can require a complex and murky investigation, but once found guilty, the call is quite black-and-white. One act of thievery make us a thief. All attempts to see this in any other light are a refusal to value God’s perspective, a denial of God’s righteous character.
Scales of Justice
So many think of justice as a balance scale where one side is for the good we do and the other side is for the bad we do. Where this idea comes from is still a mystery. Nobody asks a cold-blooded murderer how many old ladies they walked across the street to offset the punishment they deserve for their homicide. The two actions aren’t related. Everyone should be helping old ladies cross busy streets.
Even if you are good every day of your life, but on one occasion of weakness, slip and allow your soul to act out in a sinful way. That one act isn’t the single, uncharacteristic, exception that should be thrown out of consideration. That one act is always judged alone, apart from all other events.
Accidental vs. Intentional
Motive is a factor in understanding sin and guilt. The data is probably out there somewhere, but it would come as no surprise that all drunk drivers involved in fatal accidents didn’t intentionally kill anyone. The death they caused wasn’t “premeditated”. The crash wasn’t planned and the tragic outcome wasn’t motivated by an ill will or malice. However, negligence is a danger to our world. Any failure to anticipate the risk that foolish behavior can cause to others is a crime. So many times the first response to an accident is, “I didn’t know that would happen!” or perhaps the more vanilla, “It was just an accident!”
There truly are cases when all precautions are correctly accounted for, with contingencies to avoid injury or harm, yet still people get hurt. These probably are “true” accidents. Apart from these real accidents, the public requires accountability and so does God.
Redefining Terms
When all other deflections fail, a soul will descend to the process of defining terms or sometimes known as “splitting hairs”. This is the case with Bill Clinton’s testimony before congress regarding Monica Lewinski, where he would only answer a question if the definition of the term “sexual relationship” could be bent in a way loosely enough for him to deny it. For all other definitions a denial would be perjury, but once it was clear that he was using his own fabricated definition, the denial was truthful.
Jesus had a one-on-one interaction with a lawyer (not a member of the American Bar Association, but a person expert in the Law of Moses) where this redefinition of terms was attempted.
25 One day an expert in the law stood up to test Him. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
Luke 10:25-29
26 “What is written in the Law?” Jesus replied. “How do you read it?”
27 He answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’ and ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ ”
28 “You have answered correctly,” Jesus said. “Do this and you will live.”
29 But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
Here is a case where ironically this lawyer is standing in front of the only being able to justify any sinful soul in the universe, yet he attempts to “justify” himself… in this case by redefining the term “neighbor”. If you continue reading the passage, you’ll hear Jesus tell the story of the Good Samaritan. “Neighbor” is defined by God Himself in the picture of self-less compassion.
Redefining God
This method of justification is as old as time– If the standard for the true God is moral perfection and my behavior falls short, then it is time to redefine God in terms where moral perfection is forgiven by God’s immeasurable love. In the face of certain culpability for our character flaws, souls will appeal to God’s incredible Love with comments like, “If God is so Loving, then He wouldn’t possibly send me to hell.” God is certainly a God of Love, but these self-justifiers ignore God’s sense of Justice and Holiness.
If someone assaulted, tortured and finally killed a person of your immediate family, it wouldn’t matter how loving the judge was. The job of a judge is to render justice. If a loving judge acquitted a confirmed terrorist out a sense of love, how would the victims of the terrorist feel about love if the terrorist were set free without punishment? Even a child can see through this injustice.
God has born the most vicious insult imaginable from His very own creation. God has patiently offered second chances to countless millions who have instead devalued His Grace and ignored His Mercy. God did come up with a plan, motivated by Love, to save everyone from the sin that separates every soul from its creator– Jesus, God’s only begotten and beloved Son, voluntarily allowed His precious innocent life to be poured out for all the guilty sinners of the world. He substituted Himself for us and was executed for our crimes. All God asks is that we acknowledge the beauty of this plan, revere Jesus Christ for His heroism, and follow and obey the only being in the history of the world to defeat death. Turning from our self-driven way of life to a life guided by Jesus is the only way to be saved, lovingly, from the punishment we deserve.
Activitism-Based Self-Justification
Rewarded By Men
During Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapters five through seven, Jesus spent several paragraphs condemning those who sought rewards from men by practicing their activism so that they could be seen by men. In Matthew chapter 6, Jesus begins by defining Activism-Based Self-Justification in verse 1:
Be careful not to perform your righteous acts before men to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.
Matthew 6:1
The wisdom of this advice is deep insight into our souls. We want to fill the emptiness in our souls caused by sin with good deeds that will catch the attention of God. It is true that nothing we can do will impress God to the point where He will be compelled to reward us with eternal life, but the desire of the soul is still there. So, if you want to impress God, impress Him with righteous acts performed without a human audience. God will always be an audience to everything we do, whether alone or in public. But good deeds done in public, where they can be seen by people, will result in a reward from people alone– which is not much of a reward. Jesus continues in chapter 6 with some explicit examples:
2 So when you give to the needy, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by men. Truly I tell you, they already have their full reward. 3 But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, 4 so that your giving may be in secret. And your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.
Matthew 6:2-4
Giving to the needy is a form of activism that has been around for along time. Compassionate and caring hearts must share with others and meet needs. It’s only right. But if your giving to the needy is front-page news, your motives may be suspect. You might actually be greedy for the fame rather than the satisfaction of seeing the suffering of your fellow man diminished. Please give to the needy, but because God loves the needy, not because you love the attention.
Jesus highlights two other examples involving fasting and prayer. Both these good works can have their rewards nullified if the soul’s motive is misdirected– and be assured, soul’s can’t fulfill a pure motive without God’s Grace in Jesus.
Salvation By Status
So many of us know our failings like the back of our hands, however, we quickly ignore those dark parts of our soul by instead polishing our status symbols until they shine. Some people want the status of fame– being a household name, headline news or the viral twitter poster. Others are driven to wealth as proof of their worth in culture and society. After that first million pours in, they look for the next million. Still others want credentials, certifications of achievement, like abbreviations after their name, or a title of prominence like CEO, President or Pastor.
Insanely, some ride morally high above their own failings by appealing to their family name, historical lineage or social circle of acceptance.
The Apostle Paul condemned himself for once attempting to elevate himself this way. Here is his testimony from Philippians chapter 3:
4 … If anyone else thinks he has grounds for confidence in the flesh, I have more: 5 circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin; a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; 6 as to zeal, persecuting the church; as to righteousness under the law, faultless.
Philippians 3:4b-11
7 But whatever was an asset to me I count as loss for the sake of Christ. 8 More than that, I count all things as loss compared to the surpassing excellence of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ 9 and be found in Him, not having my own righteousness from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God on the basis of faith.
10 I want to know Christ and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to Him in His death, 11 and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.
Something seriously revolutionary converted Paul’s soul from being a hoarder of human status symbols to a beggar for true righteousness from Christ by faith.
Salvation By Works
True activism is an atonement on the altar to the soul through a sacrifice that seems to make amends for our failures. Those seeking justification by their good works are caught in the trap mentioned above regarding the confused scales of justice. If we for one minute believe that our good works can tip the scales to fill us with merit enough to impress God, then we are horribly deceived.
Again Paul push back hard against anyone thinking that an eternal salvation was possible down this path. Good works can’t earn the reward of eternal life. The opposite is true, once the gift of eternal life is received by faith, good works are the zealous outcome generated by grateful hearts redeemed by Christ. This is the point of Ephesians 2:8-10
8 For it is by grace you have been saved through faith, and this not from yourselves; it is the gift of God, 9 not by works, so that no one can boast. 10 For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance as our way of life.
Ephesians 2:8-10
Not only do our “good works” NOT save us, they weren’t even created, imagined or invented by us– we can in no way take any credit for them since these are good works that God prepared long ago for us to fulfill to His glory.
Salvation Is Beyond Reach
The true perspective that matches reality is that we as humans are broken souls more suited for a garbage dump than a throne room. The litany of actual human attributes found in Romans chapter 3 is, although embarrassing to admit, too truthful to deny.
10 As it is written: “There is no one righteous, not even one.
Romans 3:10-18
11 There is no one who understands, no one who seeks God.
12 All have turned away; they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.
13 Their throats are open graves; their tongues practice deceit. The venom of vipers is on their lips.
14 Their mouths are full of cursing and of bitterness.
15 Their feet are swift to shed blood;
16 ruin and misery lie in their wake,
17 and the way of peace they have not known.
18 There is no fear of God before their eyes.”
Although this sounds like one big long quote from the Old Testament, these individual verses have been compiled by Paul from several sources. As varied as they may be, they all echo the same truth: our souls are too messed up to redeem and beyond redemption or repair.
How then can God save us?
God’s plan is both simple and beyond understanding all at the same time.
We need righteousness– a righteousness that is compatible with God’s Holiness. This must be given to us, since we can’t earn it or ever deserve it.
And this righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.
Romans 3:22a
We can’t skirt God’s Justice– a payment must be made for the moral violation of God’s perfect character. The insult can’t be ignored.
For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God.
1 Peter 3:18a
He did this to demonstrate His righteousness at the present time, so as to be just and to justify the one who has faith in Jesus.
Romans 3:26
Our living souls now bear both a corruption and a curse which has caused a permanent change to the perfect creation we are. Death now reigns in our bodies and our lives are mortal, yet God lives eternally.
For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive an abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ!
Romans 5:17
Our relationship with God, once one of internal intimacy, has been severed. This relationship can’t be mended without Loving Grace through Forgiveness. This can’t be ours while we live in unrighteous, moral violation and death.
God was reconciling the world to Himself in Christ, not counting men’s trespasses against them.
2 Corinthians 5:19a
This the the glorious Gospel of True Righteousness:
However, to the one who does not work, but believes in Him who justifies the wicked, his faith is credited as righteousness.
Romans 4:5
For the gospel reveals the righteousness of God that comes by faith from start to finish, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.”
Romans 1:17
The harder we try to save ourselves and to justify our own style of righteousness, the less we live by faith, and thus will never attain to an eternal, living righteousness that can only come from God.