Hiding behind the trees, lost and don’t know it …

LOST
We are lost. Hiding behind the trees, lost and don’t know it, still hiding. Still stupid. And we don’t want to know where we are.

Let’s think through this for a minute. Why do people fight off attempts by others to help them see their standing before God? A person would think that the logical thing is that a lost person would want directions – he or she would want to be found. But depravity is not logical. It wasn’t logical to listen to the snake, no matter how beautiful and clever, rather than listen to God. Forget logic. We humans are desire-driven, and that is dangerous, no, deadly, if our desires are not found in God.

The land of wishful thinking …
So I don’t think it is a stretch to say that we don’t want to know where we are. And if we don’t know where we are, all we have is wishful thinking when it comes to where we are going. We live in a land of wishful thinking, and wishful thinking, the dangerous territory of our flawed minds, is different than hope. Our build, our blue print for the future, is presumed upon a false schematic, overlooking the design and engineering flaws inherent in each of us, hard wiring anomalies resulting from denial and rebellion.

We’re messed up, and we kind of know it, but we still insist on writing the story ourselves.

The myth of the better place …
Doesn’t this reflect the thoughts of the average person concerning “what comes next?” Listen to the person at the funeral of our friend or family member. “Well, she’s in a better place now.” [I hope.] Could you hear the “I hope?” They didn’t say it; it wasn’t audible, but it was very real. They don’t say I hope, but they wishfully hope it to be true because that is what they are wishing for when they die – a better place. But don’t you dare try to get them to think about “it” now. “It” as in, where they actually are now, separated from God, lost, hiding, God’s enemy, and where this means they will be later … and it’s not a better place.

Don’t you dare try to get them to leave the land of wishful thinking.
Don’t you try to get them to “look under the hood” and check the wiring. Don’t you dare try to warn them about hell and the consequences of denying reality and remaining lost. Let them enjoy the sunshine of a fool’s autonomy, let them love what they do away from the light, let them run to the darkness, let them go to hell. What kind of friend are you anyway?

The Son continues the Father’s quest …
In Genesis three we read how God came looking for Adam and Eve as they hid behind the trees after rebelling against him. In Luke nineteen we see Jesus continuing the search, but now on a much larger scale. He came to seek and to save the lost among all humanity. He is looking behind all the trees.

• For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost (Luke 19:10 ESV).

Luke’s words present the concept of our lostness. From his words we also then deduce that biblically speaking the state of being lost is something to be saved from. Through their rebellion in Genesis three, Adam and Eve introduced spiritual death, which includes among other things our desire to hide from God and our state of being lost.

• Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man [Adam], and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned (Romans 5:12 ESV).

The Bible uses many words to describe our relationship with God, one of those words being “dead” – the state of being spiritually separated from God. The serpent coaxed Adam and Eve with these words.

• But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die” (Genesis 3:4 ESV).

Kind of true (they didn’t physically drop dead on the spot) but not really true, a stretching of the truth that Adam and Eve were willing to accept to fulfill their immediate desires. On the small screen of their lives they missed God’s big picture. They winked at reality in order to grab what they wanted now. So, no, they didn’t drop over dead, but the reality is that the moment they gave in and ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they became spiritually dead (separated from God) and the process of physical death had begun. Death, both physically and spiritually, would now win its battle against every person born onto the planet.

God said they would die. Satan said they wouldn’t. Someone was lying.

• And you were dead in the trespasses and sins (Ephesians 2:1 ESV).

So who will we believe? God or the serpent. Seems to be a no-brainer, but that’s not the way depravity plays out in the lives of humankind.