The Christ Centred Cosmic Civilisation

Episode 92 - Sin, Power, and the Dangers of Moral Zeal

• Paul

Share episode

Send us a text

This episode dives deep into the cosmic implications of sin and righteousness, exploring how humanity's historical desire to define good and evil apart from Christ has led to significant moral confusion and consequences. We uncover the dangers of moral zeal and its capacity to breed destruction, all while emphasizing the vital need for a divine perspective on morality.

• Defining sin not just as law-breaking, but as a breach of relationship with God 
• The foundational implications of Genesis on our understanding of good and evil 
• How human righteousness can lead to disastrous moral conclusions 
• The role that power dynamics play in shaping modern morality 
• The grave warnings given by Christ regarding the nature of sin and its consequences 

To learn more, explore the cosmic authority and the nature of sin within the broader context of our lives today.


The theme music is "Wager with Angels" by Nathan Moore

Speaker 1:

Well, welcome to the Christ-Centered Cosmic Civilization, and this is a kind of bonus episode that I ended the last episode just touching on the problem of being able to take sin seriously if we are not centered on Christ and his kingdom, and I didn't want to leave that. I wanted to actually tease that out a little bit more before we move on, because we're next going to have an exploration of St Augustine and his family and we're going to get the Global Church History Project to help us with that. But just before we leave, this perspective of the cosmic kingdom and how revolutionary it is cosmic kingdom and how revolutionary it is this issue of sin, sin and evil and what is good and evil. And this takes us right back to Genesis, chapters two and three really, where we were warned our original ancestor, adam, and all of us are derivative from him. Each one of us is. You know, the original Adam is split into two parts to make Eve, so Eve is entirely from Adam. And then they join together and produce children, and each child is, of course, produced from a bit of Adam and a bit of Eve, and so it doesn't take as long to realize we are all literally fragments of that original Adam. So we have this total solidarity in that original Adam and in that sense we can say we were warned in Eden not to attempt to grasp this knowledge of good and evil for ourselves.

Speaker 1:

We already knew what good and evil was. As God created, as the Father created all things through the Son by the power of the Spirit, as the father created all things through the son by the power of the spirit, he would judge it and say now this is good, this is good, this is very good, and what was bad was not loving him, not trusting him. So good and evil were already defined the way he saw it. But we did in fact take that knowledge to ourselves and in a way we thought and as Satan, or the serpent, the great dragon, joined with us and we formed this alliance to say and we form this alliance to say no, let us take the place of God. And of course we were already made in the image of God, we were already like God. And yet Satan helped us to think and say no. But we want to be like God in our own way, on our own terms, defining morality for ourselves. We can be moral, we can be serious about good and evil alone, without him, we can make those decisions ourselves. Okay, we did that, and the Bible charts the catastrophe of that.

Speaker 1:

And sometimes our self-knowledge of good and evil leads us to wallow in the most debauched and grotesque evil. But other times, like with the Pharisees, the same alienation from God manifests itself in a righteous zeal, a zeal to be righteous, and that is just as dangerous and horrific. And in some ways Jesus recoils from that form of human evil more than those that are wallowing in evil with the tax collectors and the prostitutes and the overt sinners, the wrecks of humanity, that when we wallow in overt, grotesque evil, it's as if that isn't as terrible as that is and that upsets us more. But it doesn't seem to upset the living God as much as the form of evil that manifests as a zeal for morality, a zeal for righteousness. It's those who manifested their alienation from him through a zeal for righteousness. They were the ones who killed him, killed the living God, killed the author of life, knowing that he was the author of life, knowing who he was. They heard him. He answered the question are you the Christ, are you the son of God? And he goes yes, I am, and you're going to see me coming at the end as the fulfillment of all history in the cosmos. And then so they heard him say they kind of knew it to be true because they'd seen him raise the dead, raise lazarus to life and everything. They knew it to be true and they killed him anyway it. How did they do that? They did it because they were full of a of a zeal for a form of righteousness. They were morally charged up to do quote the right thing, the right thing. They believed they were doing the right thing and therefore could do anything. The most terrible evil it is possible to get to do is to kill God, and they did it out of moral zeal. Now then, let's back from that slightly, because the problem with sin is as we've sometimes explored in this podcast.

Speaker 1:

Sin is defined in several ways in the Bible, but it's defined as obviously disobeying what the Lord has explicitly commanded, and that's law-breaking. But sin is also defined in the Bible in terms of falling short of what we are supposed to be. We were designed to share the life of God, to be the bride of Christ forever and ever. We're designed to live the life of God, and when we do not live the life of God, even if it's not an explicit breaking of an explicit law. We fail to be what we are designed to be. We fail to use our eyes and mouth and hands and feet and body for what it was intended to be used for. We fall short of the glory of God. All of this is what sin is.

Speaker 1:

It's a massive thing and that when we are disconnected from him, we can define sin in almost any way. And we notice that very strongly in the modern world, because the idea that sin is what? The definition of good and evil, of good and evil, um, you know, when we are thinking in a christian way, we know that the definition of good and evil is not ours, it is belongs to the divine emperor. That, no, the father, through christ, in the power of the spirit, uh, is the, it tells us and it defines what is good and evil. But once we are disconnected from that, and whether we, however we are, whatever mentality we have, once we are disconnected from that the divine emperor and his kingdom sin really becomes a matter of opinion. Sin really becomes a matter of opinion. So it doesn't matter whether we kind of are consciously, explicitly lawless and we sort of deliberately and consciously and willingly embrace what is evil according to Christ, or we may be filled with a zeal for our own moral righteousness. Either way, our view of good and evil has no substance to it. So someisee may seem to be much more moral than the uh, the tax collector and sinner person in the gospels. But but they're not. But both are are utterly detached from true God and evil. Neither is as good in any sense. They're both absolutely lost.

Speaker 1:

So sin, it becomes a kind of matter of opinion and politics in the modern world, and by politics it's almost like just policies. So sin is a matter of policies in a modern, atheistic world, and it's the assertion of one person's view over another. And this is something that the postmodernist philosophers were very good at kind of calling this out to say well, you know why should one person's view be dominant over someone else's view? Like if there is no right or wrong in truth, if there is nothing, if there is no meaning, then the people with power get to assert their opinion of right and wrong over others, but there's no substance to it. And so in a kind of postmodern world, everything becomes about money and power. Everything is about money and power, and you see it with politicians that they are desperate for money and power rather than principle, like in an older age where Christianity and the Christian worldview was very dominant and powerful, it was possible to act with true principle because the idea was there really is good and evil. There really is good and evil, and it doesn't depend at all on who's in charge, who has the levers of power.

Speaker 1:

But once that has been dissolved in the acids of modernity and we're in this postmodern world where that's gone what politicians are about is money and power, because they know if they have enough money then they can get the power to assert their own view of good and evil. And then they become very righteous about it because they're like I know, I'm right in my opinion of right, good and evil, good and evil. So it's okay for me to pursue the acquisition of money and power with a kind of zeal and and a brutality almost, because the goal of it is is that then I can impose my, that, what I know to be true, true morality that I can see or that we can see in our political perspective, and then society will be better, because our opinion of right and wrong is better than others, and that's the way it works. Or even let's scale it down just to the family level. How do you bring children up just to the family level? How do you bring children up?

Speaker 1:

In the Bible we're told to bring children up in the fear of the Lord, the knowledge and fear of the Lord, so that it's always that the child is not being told to conform to the opinions of their parents. The parent's job is to make sure the child is being conformed to Christ and to have a proper fear of, of the living God and to and are to pass on to the children true righteousness, true good and evil from the cosmic emperor who acts, you know, on behalf of the Father, in the power of the Spirit. But once that is dissolved in with the acids of modernity and we're in a post-modern thing, parents don't know how to bring children up. There's an incredibly, a kind of disorientation and a real sense of they don't don't know what they're doing.

Speaker 1:

And, um, I listen often to the language that parents use when they're trying to discipline their children. And in the supermarket or something, why shouldn't the child steal things off the shelf? Why should they behave respectfully? Why shouldn't they do this, that or the other? And the way the parents say it is very interesting. I mean just from saying things like Daddy doesn't like that, so please don't do it. There's different variations of that, where, effectively, the parent is saying to the child I don't like you doing that, that's why you shouldn't do it. Now, that is the most feeble form of morality possible, isn't it? It's the parent just exercising sheer power to say I don't like that and therefore you must conform to my desires. And you think. Well, you can see why that doesn't have much substance. A child in a way that it might do to a degree. But ultimately, what's the basis of that? Because the child then will say well, there will come a point in life when I can assert what I like and force others to do what I like. At the moment, I guess I have to fall in line with the mere desires of my parent, but there will come a point where I can assert my own desires over others.

Speaker 1:

It's actually bringing the child up to be evil if that is the basis of the morality they're being brought up in. Sometimes it's merely carrot and stick Don't do that, because otherwise you will suffer pain or punishment. Do do this and you will be rewarded. And again, that in itself is no basis at all for morality, because what is the good and evil that is attached to the punishment and reward? You could punish things that actually are good and you could reward things that are actually evil from the perspective of Christ. To merely try to disciple behavior on the basis of punishments and rewards, that can lead to extreme evil, where people are effectively indoctrinated by rewards and punishments to actually do what is the opposite of Christ's way and that in fact does happen.

Speaker 1:

Also, I've noticed that in debates were the idea that the only real right and wrong is what is lawful or unlawful according to the government. So when a person has done in public life, I often see that a person has done something that certainly, from the perspective of Christ, is a terrible evil, and yet in the public debate around it, people would literally say things like he hasn't done anything illegal, so that the idea of good and evil is then attached entirely to what the government has decreed to be lawful or unlawful. So if they have not committed a crime that the police can arrest them for, or even that there isn't enough evidence to arrest them or there isn't enough evidence by which they could be prosecuted in a court of law, the idea is, well, that's the end of the matter. If they haven't done anything illegal, they must be considered innocent, unless they are proved guilty in a court of law. So therefore, don't think of them as a bad person. You can't think of them as a bad person. I've even had people say that you can't think of that person as a bad person because they haven't been prosecuted in a court of law, like the police, haven't gathered the evidence. The court, the law courts, have not found them guilty of anything, so therefore they are innocent. You're like wow, imagine that, so that the only form of good and evil effectively becomes what the police and the legal system are able to enforce.

Speaker 1:

And again people will say things like don't try to impose your views on others. And that's considered almost like a primal evil to try to impose your views on others. Because of course, there's this feeling there is no actual good and evil, it is only one person's opinion over another. And so you can get the most extraordinary moralities advocated explicitly or implicitly in social media, where you know, greed is good, profit is pure, ambition is adored, fame is fruitful, or maybe I mean those are kind of grossly obvious things to turn dangerous behaviors and desires into virtues, and that happens all the time on social media in one way or another. But let's just examine how it happens in our social and political life, in public life, where we work ourselves up with the morality of a political ideology, with the morality of a political ideology.

Speaker 1:

So and this again, the reason we're thinking about this is that we're seeing how the kingdoms of the earth function when they are alienated from the divine empire, the kingdom of heaven. That when, in earlier times times, there were times when, like a christian king or a christian queen or a christian emperor or something, very consciously and explicitly was aware that they were answerable to christ, the king, the divine emperor, and even if they failed badly in what they were doing, in managing the earthly empire, earthly kingdom, they knew which were true power, authority, goodness, morality flows from, from the third heaven, the throne of the Father, on which Christ sits at his right hand with the power of the Spirit. They knew that, and so they would judge their own actions in relation to the kingdom of Christ, and so they knew themselves to have done wrong, even when they did do wrong and could be called to account by other people and people could challenge them to say you've done this that falls short of Christ's kingdom and that carried weight. That carried weight, that sort of a comment. But in our situation today that doesn't carry weight with people because politicians don't believe the authority or the source of wisdom and truth and goodness. They don't believe that comes from Christ, they believe it comes from the people below them, and so the idea of calling them to account on the basis of Christ has very little substance at all. Count on the basis of Christ has very little substance at all.

Speaker 1:

And what happens is is that the morality of the public square and politics is set by public opinion, and it's a morality that's of human origin and therefore is very dangerous. So maybe our governing good, the morality that we believe society should be run by, maybe it's something like freedom. Freedom is sacred and so everything is coordinated. The right and wrong of public life is coordinated by the concept of freedom. That's a very common one today, that people see freedom as having a sort of sacred absoluteness about it and therefore we must be free to. And then what comes next depends largely on what kind of political background or ideology is empowering us. But we might say freedom is sacred. Therefore, we must be free to possess and use guns, or we must be free to express sexual intimacy however we desire, or we must be free to express whatever ideas we want, no matter how hateful or offensive to others they are. Whatever, whatever. So freedom can be a human good. That, in inverted commas, we may have a morality of freedom and out of that we pursue agendas for earthly kingdoms.

Speaker 1:

Or maybe our sacred good, or maybe our sacred good humanly derived, is something like equality or fairness. I remember there was a political party in Britain and the concept was fairness. That was one of the. This is going back maybe 20 years, maybe not 20, 15 years, but I remember the thing was things should be fair, fairness, equality. And again, what does that mean? What does equality mean? And is that a biblical virtue? And if it is, how does it function? It doesn't matter.

Speaker 1:

So the concept is equality, and out of that, when it's humanly defined, we might want to impose various social programs to forcibly redistribute money. We might say it is unfair that some people have a lot more money than others. Therefore, to bring about equality, we need to take it from those who've got lots and give it to those that don't have it. Maybe that, or it's not so much the money as power that needs to be equalized, and some people, because they might say having a hierarchical society where some people have more authority in society than others. That's wrong, so we need to flatten out society and pull down and destroy those who have greater authority or greater status in society. Or we might want to fight for well, either equality of opportunity or equality of outcome, of outcome and this huge debate over which version of equality is desirable or is the right one.

Speaker 1:

But either way, it all comes from the concept of that equality is important, equality of opportunity or equality of outcome and then we pursue that as our good, or maybe our sacred good, the thing that we think this is the moral center that will help us to shape our kingdoms. It might just be the notion of the nation, the kingdom that we are part of on earth, the nation, and therefore we want to get rid of those people and those people or those ideas or those lifestyles that don't fit in with our idea of the nation. So if we say no, no, the nation is our sacred good, is our ultimate good, and therefore we need to protect that from evil. So let's get rid of what doesn't fit with our idea of the nation. And we might say well, we need to get rid of people who are of the wrong ethnicity or the wrong ideology. And so how might we do that? Well, if we think that the danger to the nation is people who think the wrong way, who have dangerous ideas, hateful ideas, harmful ideas. So how do you fix that? Well, you might say, well, we need to get control of the schools and make sure children are indoctrinated with the right ideas, to make sure the nation only has right thinking people, that's. And then we. And then for people, for those that are out older, we make sure that wrong thinking is policed and punished, maybe. So that's one way of saying look, the nation has to be kept pure, and we'll do that by controlling the schools and controlling the way people think and express themselves. Or we maybe want to say no. It's say no, it's not so much that it's the people themselves that are the problem, so we want to shut our borders to those who have a different culture, a different religion, a different skin color, whatever it is. We'll say that's how we're going to keep the nation strong and pure and safe and good.

Speaker 1:

Now, all of those kinds of earthly morality can lead people to become very self-righteous and very morally fired up. But, as the Bible warns us, human anger never can produce the righteousness of God. James 1, 20,. Human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires Our own kingdom. Moralities can seem so morally righteous, but they never produce the life of God's kingdom. And we are never so dangerous as when we are fired up by our own moralities to make things better. When we are campaigning for our moral campaigns, death and misery are never far away. Let me repeat that when we are campaigning for our own moral campaigns and it's our morality that's sourced from human thinking, human passion, human ideologies when we campaign for those things, no matter how good we are, no matter how good we think we are, no matter how righteous we think we are, when we are campaigning for our moral campaigns, death and misery are never far away.

Speaker 1:

And if the kingdoms of earth are the only kingdoms that we care about, then whoever is in charge, whoever has the money and the power, makes the morality. They are morality makers, the people in charge, because if we do not have Christ as the true source of good and evil, it will be whoever has the most power on earth, and no matter how good they think they are. It is disastrous and dangerous. So, yeah, in Genesis 3, we gain the knowledge of how to make up our own good and evil. But this is the knowledge that ruins us and, far from becoming like the divine emperor, we end up being like the devil.

Speaker 1:

But if there is a much, much, much greater kingdom, an eternal kingdom of the heavens, then the only concern should be what is the morality of the divine emperor, who created us and rules over all? What does he know about good and evil? And that is the context for understanding the difference of opinion. That is what it is on earth in many ways, and we might say well, some opinions seem a lot better than others. Yeah, whatever, sure, but that is, in a way, all it can be. If we are cut off from the divine emperor, it is only really a matter of opinion.

Speaker 1:

But once we are set in the context of the divine empire, the kingdom of the heavens, the source, the eternal God, father, son, holy Spirit, then sin is very serious, because it's a violation of the rule of the divine emperor, it's a betrayal of him, it's, uh yeah, betrayal, it's treason, it's law-breaking, it's um a violation of who he is. And his police force is very serious. His police, like our police forces, are always well, they're only a modern kind of phenomenon police in that sense. You know, when you go, you don't have to go back, you only like 200 years and police don't function at all in the way that they do now. Now they're a very kind of political and malleable thing. But when we come to the divine emperor, his police force is very serious. Hundreds of millions of angels, the army of the heavens, and the final punishment for sin, for rebellion, for treason against him is exile from the empire. Exile from the empire, that's the price, the cost of sin and that's the seriousness of it.

Speaker 1:

Exile Exile into what or where? Well, in the Bible it's hell, into the outer darkness, the endless and bottomless abyss where there really is no foundation to stand on. In this meditation, in this episode, we've been feeling what it is when there is no foundation to stand on, if we've cut ourselves off from Christ. There is no foundation for our morality, for our righteousness, for our good and evil. It's just a bottomless abyss. There's just a constant sinking down into darkness and chaos. And that is how the exile, to be exiled from his empire, forever eternal exile, is to be put into this outer darkness, which is an endless and bottomless abyss. There is never any foundation to stand on, no light to see, just the endless attempt to make sense of and escape from who we are and what we have become, and escape from who we are and what we have become.

Speaker 1:

And so I want to end with just reading a little bit from Matthew Henry, who is commenting on Mark, chapter 9, verses 41 to 50. And that's where Jesus has that extremely intense warning about that final fate If we allow sin, if we stand against the followers of Christ, christ and his followers, those who trust in him, are not on part of Christ and his church. Basically, we are destined for the most terrible destination. It's when Jesus says if anyone causes one of these little ones, those who believe in me, to stumble, it would be better for them if a large millstone were hung around their neck and they were thrown into the sea. And then he's got this warning about how radically serious we have to be about sin. If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go into hell where the fire never goes out, same if your foot offends you, if your eye causes you to stumble. And then verse 48, he actually asserts is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell, were the worms that eat them do not die and the fire is not quenched? Horrendous. And in fact, in some manuscripts, and the perhaps ones that I'm more confident of, he repeats those words three times. He repeats them in Mark 9.44 and Mark 9.46 and Mark 9.48.

Speaker 1:

And the quotations from Isaiah 66, verse 24, about being thrown out into this exile, where the worm does not die and the fire is not quenched. Now then, with that in mind, I want to end with this quotation from Matthew Henry, commenting upon that the seriousness of sin. And it's hugely difficult for us who are so used to the postmodern world, living in a world where it is kind of like a bottomless abyss, where there is mere human opinion and so sin isn't taken seriously. Then we step into this circle of Christ, the divine emperor, and realize that he takes sin extremely seriously and it is viewed with eternal weight, and for us it's a difference of opinion. For him it's a matter of eternal separation and the punishment of hell. So this is what Matthew Henry writes. Our saviour often pressed our duty upon us from the consideration of the torments of hell which we run ourselves into if we continue in sin.

Speaker 1:

With what an emphasis of terror are those words repeated three times here, where the worm dies not and the fire is not quenched. The words are quoted from Isaiah 66, verse 24. First point the reflections and reproaches of the sinner's own conscience are the worm that dies, not own conscience are the worm that dies not. So the conscience of the sinner, the internal agony will never end in that outer darkness of exile. And that will cleave to the damned soul as the worms do to the dead body and prey upon it and never leave it till it is quite devoured.

Speaker 1:

And then Proverbs 5, verse 12 and 23. Son remember, son remember. Those words will set this worm gnawing, and how terrible will it bite that word. How have I hated instruction. The soul that is food to this worm dies not, and the worm is bread in it and one with it, and therefore neither does it die. So the idea there is that human beings, the reason we live or exist forever is not because there's something intrinsic about the human soul that means that it simply does exist forever, but it's because of what we are created to be. We are created in the divine image to live forever. And if we merely exist forever, there's that way in which our soul is just forever, gnawing away at this angst, the deep angst within us of our conscience, the regret that we hated instruction, that we didn't listen to what was wise.

Speaker 1:

And then Matthew Henry goes on. Damned sinners will be to eternity accusing, condemning, accusing and condemning themselves with their own follies, even though they are now in love with their follies, and that will at last bite like a serpent and sting like an adder. That's powerful, isn't it To just spend all eternity accusing and condemning one another, or even accusing and condemning one another, or even accusing and condemning yourself and yet loving the very evils that you are condemning yourself for? That's the image there. And then one final comment from Matthew Henry. He says the wrath of God fastening upon a guilty and polluted conscience. He says the wrath of God fastening upon a guilty and polluted conscience, that is the fire that is not quenched, for it is the wrath of the living God, the eternal God, into whose hands it is a fearful thing to fall In hell. There are no operations of the spirit of grace upon the souls of the damned sinners, and therefore there is nothing to alter the situation, which must remain forever. There is no application of the merit of Christ to them, and therefore there is nothing to appease or quench the violence of the fire.

Speaker 1:

Well, those are intense words, words that we don't really use, and it's a way of thinking that's very, very rare in the modern world to be taking sin that seriously and to just meditate on the words of the divine emperor himself. And you think, why does Christ speak like this, more than anybody else, in Scripture, to people inside and outside church life? Why does he speak like that so much? Because he, he, he knows the reality of it more than anybody and it does not wish, it is not his will, that any should perish. And the way that we now think of right and wrong in such small terms and fight over right and wrong as opinion or politics and things like that, rather than having this absolute fear and trembling before our divine emperor.