THE GREATEST TRAGEDY EVER

SETTING THE STAGE FOR THE TRAGEDY
One of the real joys of living is being able to enjoy beauty - to walk through exquisitly decorated homes, roam in lush forests, visit with thoughtful and talented people, taste a carefully prepared meal. What a treat!
Those experiences also have their flip-side: seeing beauty laid waste -A marvelous victorian farm house sitting empty and crumbling away; A charred forest where a person's careless match was once disgarded; A former Athletic hero in a nursing home, crippled by arthritis.
This sort of beauty destroyed leaves us with a sad feeling of deep regret - sometimes a nostalgic feeling, whistfully wanting the former times to be back.
Know it? Ever experienced it in your life?

I say this because we are involved in precicely such a contrast, facing:
- on the one hand what might have been, so good and so glorious
AND
- on the other hand what really is, not so good, far from glorious.
We face the human condition: what we human beings were meant to be when the hand of God first formed us.....
and what we are finally left with.

It's not the most pleasant of topics, but it is fundamental; it is something that somewhere along the line needs discussing. For we are confronted with it everyday in our lives. And unless we make sure we understand it well,
unless we do that,
we are going to be handicapped, hindered in making the most of our lives.

Knowing where we come from in the past, and knowing where we are at in the present - these two things are the critical components that will determine where we go in the future.Our past as prologue to our future. Let's read together:

THE TIME BEFORE THE TRAGEDY
How were we, once upon a time? When God said, "let us make man..." what did He envision? What did His fingers mould from the dust of the earth?
The bible tells us that God created a being of wonderful splendour - a good being, one that reflected Himself.
"Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground." (Gen 1.26).
We were made to be, somehow, a mirror of God, reflecting Him, like Him - carrying some of His traits.... In His image.
Made in the image of God - hear what the Bible says:"Let us make man in our image.... and let them rule...."Part of being something like God is to rule. God rules over all things as Maker. He lays upon us the incredible responsibility to rule as His stewards, His caretakers. Caretakers of the critters; caretakers of the creational resources - the minerals, water, air, forests.... all of it. Caretakers of each other.It's what we do, and part of what makes us like Him.

Being in the image of God also affects relationship.
As people made like the Father and given the role of doing the work of the Father we are also people made to be in relationship with the Father. We are made as his children, princes and princesses in the Heavenly Royal family. Quoting the Catechism teacher: "God created man in His own image... so that he might truly know God his creator, love Him with all his heart, and live with Him in eternal happiness for His praise and glory." (Q/A 6).

THE TRAGEDY UNFOLDS
But now stop. And ask - "How's it all panning out? What's it look like?"Living in relationship with God as our Father? Think about it -- how do most people that you know make use of God's name?
Live in relationship with God as Father? Most people are far too busy to even begin to think about or acknowledge any kind of relationship with Him.
Live in a way that gives deliberate expression to our mandate as Creational, in-His-Image stewards? Carefully caring for this world in which we live, HIS world? You know the answer to that one.
In the image of God?
Best thing we can say of the human race is that the image is deeply marred; it is damaged, stained and deeply cracked. Oh, it is not completely gone. It is still there, but only as a dim and blurry reflection of the originally wondrous splendour.
And that is the tragedy, a tragedy in which we all live every day.

THE TRAGEDY EXPLAINED
So, what happened?? Explanations of how the misery started are legion:-Communism's theory is that evil really began when the right of possessing private property was developed. In communal ownership restoration of the human condition can be found.
-Some radical naturalists suggest that the root evil of humanity is technology. -Eternal optomists suggest that evil is merely an outer symptom of a lack of knowledge. As we move ever up the ladder of scientific discovery and social knowledge, and as that knowledge can be spread around the globe, so we will mature, develop and improve as a society.
The Bible's explanation is simple: it comes from our first parents, through the rebellion of Adam and Eve when they stubbornly and deliberately disobeyed God. Let's read about that together:

....sin entered the world through one man and death through sin....
The judgement followed one sin and brought condemnation... made sinners....
Something happened when Adam and Eve, the first parents of the entire human race, first sinned, first actively disobeyed God. Somehow they openned the door to a poison that flooded onto the earthly stage infecting everyone and everything, ever since. Somehow a spirit of rebellion infected Adam & Eve and warped their spirits. This distortion has been handed down, generation to generation. We have it today.

EXTENT OF THE TRAGEDY
How extensive is this tragedy? So extensive that every single person, from the moment of birth is infected with the spirit of rebellion against God.
It is an infection that goes far deeper than the outer surface of our lives. It goes far beyond the wrongful acts that we carry out, or the words we say, or the thoughts we entertain.

Sometimes we say, "I've sinned. Oh, how that makes me a sinner." Not so. It's not so that I've sinned and therefore I am a sinner. Rather, it is:
I'm a sinner, and therefore I've sinned.
The thoughts, words and deeds that come out from us are but the fruit of what is laying within us - namely a human nature infected by sin.

You could compare this to the way a mushroom grows. Above the ground we see the fleshy fruit - we say, "Hey, a mushroom." But that's not really the essence of the mushroom. It is but the surfacy fruit. The real thing is the mycelium, the large web-like growth under the surface of the earth. It sends it snake-like fingers out in many directions, and here and there it pushes up a fruit - what we see as the mushroom.

The fruit is a certain size, lives a while and then dies. The mycelium under the ground continues to live, and is much larger. One was found some years ago in West Michigan that was absolutely enormous - dozens of miles in diameter, one plant! Mushroom fruits growing up out of the ground some 50 miles from each other were picked by a scientist doing DNA research and he discovered that they were from the same plant! They had precicely the same DNA code. And all over the place that one mycelium was pushing up fruits that we would look at as unconnected, individual mushroom.

So it is with the infection of sin. It sends its web-like fingers throughout our entire being. There isn't a single part of our lives that isn't tinged in some way. Then here and there it pops up a fruit. Sometimes large fruit, sometimes small, sometimes in a clump, sometimes issolated cases. Sometimes close together, and sometimes far apart. But all the result of the same mycelium of sin, snaking its way into the deepest corners of our lives.
And we ALL have it!

The day that Adam and Eve sinned, it was as though a genetic defect was introduced into the Human Race. From the moment of conception, instead of a perfect human being developing, there now grows a human being, and within that tiny person are already the beginning strands of that fungal root, that mycelium of sin. And it is a root that, left to itself, will enslave us and draw us further and further away from God, deeper and deeper into a lifestyle of rebellion, a lifestyle removed from His will and plan .

THE ROAD TO RESCUE
Praise God that's not the end of the story."For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God's grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many!" - Romans 5.15"For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God's abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ." - Romans 5.17

HOW MUCH MORE!!!
When the mycelium of a mushroom grows to cover a great section of West Michigan there isn't a great deal anyone can do. It's there, and we have to grin and bear it. Period.

Praise God it's not so for the mycelium, the underground web-like growth, of sin within our lives. There is salvation through Jesus Christ. There is forgiveness for the ugly fruits which expose themselves.
But even more than that!! HOW MUCH MORE than that!

There is the working of the Spirit of Christ within our lives that offers cleansing from that sin.
See, there's two ways we can move after we come to realize the extent of that mycelium which has invaded the entire human race, distorting it away from that beautiful imaging of God which it was originally intended to be.
One is a defeatism - "Oh, woe is me. I am such a sinner. I am forgiven, but barely. I'll never amount to much. Depravity is consuming me."
The other is a hopeful realism.
Scripture commands the latter.

Hopeful realism. This attitude begins when we open our hearts to the Holy Spirit, honestly admitting to Him that we have indeed been infected with this growth of sin.
Then it requires an admittance on our part that we are powerless to uproot it. Back to the mushroom. Forget about that big one in West Michigan and just think about a wee little one in my back yard. I could rip away the sod and try to remove the fingers of the fungus. But it'll never work. I'll never get it all. It'll just grow back with a vengance in short order.

So too with sin.
No matter how hard we rip and tug at our lives we can never pull the roots of sinfulness out. We'll still be caught up in our self-centred, God-avoiding lifestyle. We'll still be consumed by things of this world, things the Bible calls "fleshly living" while missing out on the true experience of the things of true Spiritual living, living under the control of the Spirit of God.

That's a hard thing to swallow - especially for those of us who are self-motivated, successful entrepeneurial kinds of people. We are used to cutting our own way through the forest of life. We are used to directing our own futures. Failures don't come too often. Many of us are immigrants, or children of immigrants. A good life has been established from difficult beginnings in this land. We saw a vision of possibility, went for it, and got it!

We've had the control. But here that all changes. Who has the control? The one who has won salvation for us. Christ controls the powers over death and life - eternal life and life here on earth. And through his Holy Spirit, but only through that Spirit, can that power begin to manifest itself within our lives.

The Spirit has to work - cutting, digging, sifting, rooting out all the threads of sin that have worked their way so deep into our lives.
And as he begins to work, and as we respond through giving up to him those areas that he exposes to us as being wrongful, through putting away areas of sin - letting go of resentments, putting away wrongful fascinations, restoring proper priorities, whatever it might be....
- "crucifying the flesh" is the Bible's term for that - as we respond to that we will grow in holiness, and begin to reflect a little more clearly the image which God meant us to have at the beginning of time.

Will it ever reach perfection, where the Spirit will head to heaven and say, "No more mushroom fruits of sin are going to show up in that person, Father. I got it all out!" - will that happen?
Not while we're here on earth.
That will have to wait for the day when we are transformed to glory - either at our death or at the second coming of Christ, whichever comes first.
But there is progress! The tragedy does not remain tragic. There is hope!

For God, not our sinful nature, has the final word!