So, What's The Problem?

God loves us -- Awesome! God wants us to be in relationship with him -- Really Awesome! So, what's the problem?

The problem is that we are unfit to be with God. (“Your eyes are too pure to look on evil; you cannot tolerate wrong.” -Habakkuk 1:13)

One reason so many people don’t understand the Gospel and are not more excited about Jesus is that they don’t understand how repulsive we are to God. Have you ever been repulsed by someone? Perhaps you can remember hearing about someone on the news, or being near someone, and getting that sickening feeling. You just couldn’t be around them, even if you wanted to. Maybe it was someone that committed some awful act against you, or who deeply hurt you. You are not trying to be judgmental or superior, you just feel repulsed by what they’ve done.

Multiply that by perfection and you have some idea about how God feels toward us humans. If you and I in our very limited purity and sense of justice are repulsed by big evil, how much more is the perfectly good, totally pure, infinitely holy God repulsed by even the smallest evil. It’s not that He doesn’t want to be with you, He can’t. There’s a repulsiveness problem. Holy and unholy don’t mix.

In fact another man who had a peek at God’s holiness might also greet you and add that no one is exempt from this condition:
“All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away … you have hidden your face from us and made us waste away because of our sins.” -Isaiah 64:6,7

Isaiah is not just talking about our evil here, he includes our “righteous acts” — all our good stuff! In comparison to God and His standards, compared to His goodness, even our good deeds are like filthy rags. The word for “filthy rags” in Hebrew is actually the word for menstrual rags used in that day. Isaiah is graphically painting a word picture about the repulsiveness of even our goodness before God. And — just as in Jewish society where menstruating women were declared “unfit” for relationship with God or people until sacrifices were offered, so even in our morality, we are unfit unless something is done. According to the Bible, we are all sinners and unworthy to be with God: “...for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God…” -Romans 3:23

And this sin problem is something which God takes personally: “Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are proved right when you speak and justified when you judge.” -Psalm 51:4

The so called “rules” I have broken go much deeper than that with God. Whether I was conscious of it or not, they are indications of wanting to live life my own way. They are proofs that I don’t trust Him and what He says. Actually, they are proofs that I don’t love Him. So, there is no sin of mine that God doesn’t take personally.

And worse yet, my problem isn’t just that I sin anyway, as if my problem is simply isolated acts, moments of failure. My problem is that I am a sinner. “Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me.” -Psalm 51:5

God says I have a disposition or a “bent” that leads me away from Him. You might call it a rebellious streak or nature. I have a tendency and inclination from birth to oppose God and what He wants. It’s this bent (sinful or sinner) that produces acts of sins, like a tree produces fruit. God’s problem isn’t just with some things I do, but with what I am — my character, my heart, my nature. That’s why we might picture ourselves as having a gulf between us and God, a gulf created by our sin. We’re on one side of the Grand Canyon, and He’s on the other.

Unless something bridges that gulf, we can never be with God. Now, what most of us try to do is jump across. We think there’s some way we can get to God by what we do. We say things like, “Maybe we’ve done enough good, or at least avoided enough bad. Maybe there are a lot of people worse off.” In other words, maybe God grades on a curve, and I’m above average. But as we have seen, this misses the whole point of why God can’t be with us.

If you were as athletic as the most gifted athlete you know, you still wouldn’t be crazy enough to attempt a jump across the Grand Canyon. You would recognize the gulf as too great and your abilities as too inadequate. Two of the most spiritual people I can think of around today are Billy Graham and Mother Teresa. Surely they would be right up there at the top if God was grading on a curve. Yet both would tell you that with all their “goodness” they would still fall miserably short of being fit for God. Even if you were this good, you would need to recognize the gulf as too great and your abilities as too inadequate. Someone has said that getting to God by being good (or going to church, giving money, walking down the aisle, or anything else) is like trying to leap and touch the top of the Empire State Building. You might jump impressively high, but you would fall ridiculously short!

Whatever anyone might answer, unless it addressed seriously the question of our unfitness before a holy God, it wouldn’t have a prayer.