Insightful Musings on the Scriptures

by

Raymond P. Sparre
Northwest University class of '67

Greetings, dear ones.

It’s been an interesting day…including the weather. Here we are this far into Spring, and the mountain is reporting some of the best ski conditions of the year. If night skiing was still on, I might be tempted.

I hear Dandy outside my door. He has a dog tag on his collar that works kind of like a cow bell. I wonder if he’s wanting to tell me that he found his ball. He does that sometimes. Before I came in here I was chiding him to go find one. I just checked. Nope—no ball. He just looks at me and pleads, “Please have mercy on the dog! Can’t you do one of your tricks and produce a ball?”

Have a great evening if you can. Blessings.

Love, Dad/Ray.

In questing for a sound worldview, here is a question that must be addressed: IS MAN BASICALLY GOOD AT HEART LEVEL, BASICALLY EVIL, OR ALL OF THE ABOVE? Is he naturally good and accidentally does bad? Is he naturally bad and accidentally does good? Or are all men simply a confusing mixture as products of their individual background of moral training and environment?—kind of like Pavlov’s dog? We have all around us demonstrations of man’s ability to perform with heroic charity, creativity, and nobility side-by-side with perverse demonstrations of his cruel barbaric depravity. I judge that man is a hard-to-figure-out mixture—with the positive accounts showing signs of the divine “imago dei” imprint on his nature, while the ugly accounts show the results of an unrestrained NATURAL SIN NATURE.

Is there any evidence at all of human goodness is this reading surrounding Jesus’ condemnation and torture leading up to His crucifixion? Apart from Jesus Himself, it seems that the closest anyone comes to performing righteously is Pilate—the very one that dropped the gavel for His execution—who really did not like the whole rotten idea of murdering an innocent man. Even Jesus’ own disciples were far less than exemplary. Look at big tough Peter cowering and caving before the charge of a servant girl. Where is their courageous nobility now?

My little bald head reasons this way: Without embracing the premise of the Gospel, which Jesus was here and now fulfilling (i.e., EVERY HUMAN PERSON IS A SINNER IN NEED OF A SAVIOR, and YOU MUST BE BORN AGAIN), the entire matter concerning man’s nature is an endless confusing contradiction. I think this is a great place to quote that clarifying axiom which says, JESUS DID NOT COME TO MAKE BAD PEOPLE GOOD, BUT TO MAKE DEAD PEOPLE LIVE—people who were “dead in trespasses and sins” (Ephesians 2:1), but “whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16).

If I’m understanding this correctly, putting on a wonderful demonstration of “imago dei” is not enough. What shall that demonstration profit a man if he is not BORN OF THE SPIRIT? (John 3)