If anything can go right it will! Yeah right!

“Grandpa, are you being psychotic”? 'Do you mean am I being sarcastic sweetheart'? “Yes”.  Riddle: When does a double positive make a negative? Answer: When you are being psychotic. :)  Of course when you are being sarcastic, you mean the exact opposite of what you are actually saying. But It only works if the person you are speaking to knows you mean the exact opposite of what you are saying. So when I say “If any thing can go right, it will”. I am of course provoking you to think of Muphy's law “If anything can go wrong it will”.  It is not an absolute rule but it seems to happen too often to be coincidence.  There is something perverse about the universe. One thing going wrong spoils everything. One thing going right does not even begin to make up for it.

Or if you do ten things right and one thing wrong, what will people remember? Or have you ever noticed that good habits are easy to get into and hard to get out of. On the other hand, bad habits are easy to get into,  and hard the get out of. The fly in the ointment, spoils the ointment, but the beauty in the dungheap spoils the beauty.  Corruption is infectious, but  purity is soon lost.  It seems that the dice is loaded in favour of the negative.  Have you ever had the thought “everything is against me”?

Success is hard work, the default is disaster.  Paul in his letter to the Roman Church talks about our struggles. “The good things I want to do, I do not do, but the bad things I do not want to do these are the very things I do (Chapter 7)”. An alcoholic friend of mine told me one time, “there are a lot of things in the Bible that I don't understand, but I understand that one!”  Not only is everything against me, I am even against myself. When I leave, I take my own worst enemy with me, or so it seems.  Most of us don't even like ourselves very much. Many times the one who puts me down the most is me!  Yes there is something perverse about the World, and I am part of the problem.

How does one account for all of this?  The Bible explanation is that there are three things operating in this reality.  The first is that we have a inherited a sin nature from our ancestors. We sin because we are sinners, rather than being a sinner because I have sinned (see “The S word – Who says its wrong?” - coming post).  What the Bible is teaching is that it is our nature to go wrong.  The default drive is downhill. And it is this way from birth. Nobody has to teach a child to throw temper tantrums, but he needs training (a lot of it) to be nice. Secondly, as already mentioned in an earlier post, the earth is actually cursed for our sake (see  'Is mankind kind, or cruel?'). It is logically impossible to have a world with consequence and without pain, its like trying to construct a square circle.  Thirdly we are told that we have a powerful and influential invisible enemy who is committed to our destruction (see future post 'You believe in the Devil? Give me a break!'). 

What hope do we have if things are stacked against us in this way? Again the Bible, while it knows and understands us, always has the solution. At the  end of the chapter quoted above Paul cries out “Oh wretched man that I am who will deliver me from this body of death?”  He gives the solution immediately. “I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord”.  And right on the heels of this we learn,  when we receive Him as Lord, that “There is now therefore no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus”.  So the first part of this very good news for those who will receive it, is that we are delivered from Penalty of sin (eternal separation from God and hence from all that is good Romans 6:23). Paul goes on to show us the path to be delivered from the Power of sin, and ultimately from its Presence.  At the end of Chapter 8 Paul asks “If God be for us who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son will He not freely give us all things?”

Why would anyone not want this? You have to wonder if this is not part of our  perversity. The Scripture tells us though that the wisdom of the Cross is foolishness to those who are perishing (see future post  'How can a God of love send anyone to hell?').