Five fatal mistakes

A friend, who was a university lecturer in mathematics, told me this story . . .

Two students were sitting their final exams in maths. One young man was brilliant and the other was average. Not long into the exam the average student looked up and realised that he could see over the whizz-kid's shoulder and he started to craftily copy his answers. All was going well until they came to a question about which the brilliant young man scratched his head for a long time.

Eventually he wrote on his paper: 'I have read question 5, and I do not think the question makes sense.' The average student thought he had better use slightly different wording. But unfortunately what he chose to write was this: 'I do not think question 5 makes sense either.' And with that one word, he had blown it completely! His cheating was obvious. He was in deep trouble.

People can make big mistakes. Proverbs 14.12 tells us: 'There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death.' The Bible explains that there are mistakes which do not look like mistakes. They seem so right, but they lead to a lost eternity. Here are five very common ones.

Mistaken about ourselves

Jesus said, 'What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?' (Mark 8.36). Many people today deny that they have a spiritual side to their existence. It seems obvious to them that when we die, that is the end, we go into oblivion.

But that is a mistake. Death is not a full-stop, it is only a comma. Christ rose from the dead. One man I met was the husband of a woman who had come to Christ through the church. He invited me round and wanted me to explain the gospel to him. But as soon as he sat me down, he said, 'you do not have to explain to me that there is life after death, I already know that's true'. He went on to speak about his experience during surgery, a classic out-of-the-body scenario. His heart stopped. He hovered above his body looking down on the endeavours of the hospital staff as they eventually resuscitated him. Just back in February, BBC2 screened a documentary investigating such experiences entitled The Day I Died. In it, a number of medical researchers expressed the view that 'the mind' may well survive the death of the body.

Whatever credence we give to such experiences, the Bible's testimony is that life does not end at death. Because many people think that death is the end, they live for this world alone. That is a fatal error. Unfortunately there are some people who will only understand the reality and value of their soul when it is too late, for 'man is destined to die once, and after that to face judgement' (Hebrews 9.27).

Mistaken about our greatest problem

Fairly often we find people turning up at church looking for help. They may be people with drink or marriage problems, or homeless people. Often they are men and women with bad health. I hope that we Christians do our best to help them.

Their greatest problem is obvious to them. They have the idea that if they could just kick the booze, or patch up their marriage, then all would be well with them. In fact that is all they want from the church. 'If you could just put my life back in order please, I'll go away satisfied.' But their focus on these problems actually blinds them to their true problem.

In Mark 2.1-5, when the paralysed man was let down through the roof to Jesus, what was Jesus's response? It was to say: 'Son, your sins are forgiven.' Jesus did not do that as a wind-up for the disabled person. He did it to indicate that the spiritual problem of sin is of far greater consequence than even tragic physical disability. Jesus's remarks, that it is better to enter the kingdom of God maimed than with two hands to go into hell, point to the same conclusion.

Christ later healed the invalid. But sin, our inveterate breaking of God's holy law, is the greatest human problem because it damns us in the sight of God. Forgiveness of sin is the greatest human need. Commonly people think otherwise. But it is a fatal mistake.

Mistaken about God

Last autumn BBC Radio 4 ran an interesting series entitled 'Devout sceptics' where the presenter Bel Mooney talked with people who, though not religious, had more than a sneaking suspicion that God is there.

One of her interviews was with the theoretical physicist Paul Davies, the writer of many popular paperbacks. Dr. Davies said two striking things. First, he believes that atheistic science involves a great contradiction in that it seeks a cause-and-effect relationship for every phenomenon within the universe, but as soon as you ask where the fundamental scientific laws (gravity, etc.) come from, it insists that there is no explanation. Secondly, he finds that the abilities of the human mind to figure out the workings of the universe to be too extraordinary to have come about by chance. Such facts still drive people to the conclusion of a divine hand behind reality.

But God is more than an explanation or a concept. He is the most wonderful person, who through the Old Testament prophets foretold his own coming. In Jesus, he himself stepped into our world. God became visible. He came in love and dealt with our sins, so that we can be forgiven and enter into a personal relationship with him through his Spirit. When confronted by someone who claimed that God didn't exist, one Christian wag responded, 'That's funny. I was talking to him this morning!' It is still the fool who says in his heart 'there is no God' (Psalm 14.1).

Mistaken about our danger

'God won't judge anyone! All this talk about hell is just to scare people into behaving themselves. But God will not actually judge anyone. He is too good to do that'.

But these familiar suggestions go right back to Satan's lying words to Eve in Eden. 'Go on, eat the fruit. You will not surely die!' But Adam and Eve did die.
The argument about God being too good to judge anyone seems right to many people. But consider what would happen if God never judged sin. You can imagine a conversation between Satan and God that would go something like this.

Satan: 'God, you are meant to be against sin and for goodness. Are you?'
God: 'Yes, I am.'
Satan: 'Well, what about all these sinners who have broken your laws of love and you do nothing about it?'
God: 'I do not punish them because I am a God of love.'
Satan: 'How strange. I'm evil and so I couldn't care less about sin and you are love so you do nothing about sin. In practice you and I are the same, and your loving goodness isn't any different from my evil.'

In other words if God never punished sin, he would be, to all intents and purposes, no different from the devil. God will not have that, and it a fatal mistake to think he will. Precisely because he is good, his wrath for sin is very real. That is why it was necessary for Jesus to die at Calvary.

Mistaken about salvation

'I think Christ is fine for some people, but I believe a devout Muslim, or Buddhist, or even a good atheist will be accepted by God.' That is another way of thinking which seems so plausible to our multi-cultural mindset. 'These good people deserve God's thumbs up', it is said. But this is an enormous mistake.

What underlies such sentiments is the idea that God accepts people on the basis of their own merits. However, God's word states: 'All who rely on observing the law are under a curse' (Galatians 3.10). Why? Because even if we could manage to do what is right in God's eyes at any given moment, that could never make up for the wrong we have done at other times. Just one hole in the bucket means that it cannot hold water! And if this is true of people who seek merit through God's own law, how much more it is true of those who follow other moral or religious codes.

Salvation is not by our merit. It is through God's grace merited for us by Christ on the cross. How crippling Martin Luther found the way of merit before he became a real Christian. 'My conscience', he said, 'kept nagging. It kept telling me, "You fell short there", "You weren't sorry enough".' But how different it all was for Luther once he had made the great discovery of acceptance with God in Christ as a free gift of grace received by faith. He wrote, 'When I realised this I felt myself absolutely born again; the gates of paradise had been flung open and I had entered!'

There are ways that seem right, but end in tragedy. Get it straight. We are ever living souls, more valuable than the world. Our greatest problem is our sin before a holy God. The only way to escape his just judgement is the way God himself has promised and lovingly provided in Jesus Christ. We are all fallible creatures who are capable of making many mistakes. We must commit ourselves into the hands of the infallible Lord Jesus Christ, who makes no mistakes.

JEB

John Benton

© Evangelicals Now - August 2003
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