The following student report was submitted by Ambassador League Agent Joshua F. during the 2009-2010 League.
Mission: Research on The Nature of Man
In Genesis 8:21 (NIV), God says, "Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood." But wait! That's taken out of context, right? Well, maybe it is, but any verse that isn't surrounded by the rest of the chapter is "taken out of context" technically. But that's only one verse… right? Not really, look at this verse, Jeremiah 17:9 (NIV), "The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?" Well, we might not be able to understand the heart completely, but we sure can try to understand the nature of man. And that is what we will attempt to do in the following paragraphs.
We know because of Romans 3:23 that all people sin. EVERYONE SINS!!? Every person who's only human at least. We sin because we're sinful, to the core in a sense. At our very hearts we are sinful. If we stop to think about how many cultures and peoples exist in this world it's almost hard to really believe that everyone sins-yet it's true, all have sinned. Sin isn't limited to one specific race or group of people. Sin is something that permeates every culture ever heard of, every civilization. There are those who claim that man is basically good… I feel bad for those people because the evidence is completely against them. There are thousands upon thousands of people who live different types of lives and not one of them has found a way to live without sin.
When we stop and think about that we realize that it's like Jeremiah 17:9 states, as humans our hearts are beyond cure. Even those of us who are Christians, cannot operate with our old hearts we instead must die to self. I think that's part of what Paul meant when he said that anyone who is in Christ is a new creature (or creation, depending on translation), the old has gone the new has come (2 Corinthians 5:17). We die to our old self, our flesh and our hearts-and become something different, something new.
Now comes the interesting part; we're going to take a quick look at why this is the case. Going back to Genesis (more specifically Genesis 2:16-17), we get to take a look at God giving Adam the 411 on how things are going to work. He tells Adam that he can eat of any tree in the garden except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. (On a side note God added "for on that day you shall surely die" (that's a bit paraphrased). God wasn't saying that he'd die on that day-just that on that day he would be doomed to die. That tree is very puzzling; it's a physical plant that has spiritual effectiveness. If you eat of it you will be like God (according to the devil in Genesis 3:5, who mixes truth with lie), in the sense that you will know of both good and evil. After Adam and Eve ate of it… Eve and Adam, they possessed the knowledge of what was good and what was evil, and the uncanny ability to pass down that knowledge to all of their offspring. We know of both good and evil today because they ate of the tree thousands of years ago (see what I meant about this tree being puzzling). Because of their mistake, we now know what's good and what's bad, and there's something about us humans that always seem to like the good but choose to do the bad; according to the book of Romans all of us have done that at least once. And I could bet you all of my money (if I was allowed to bet) that everyone who has sinned, has sinned again after that. We all fall short of being perfect. Yet as Christians, having become new creations, we are to put to death our sinful flesh that we might live (Romans 8:13 paraphrased).
Romans 8:13 basically sums up the human nature that we had before we became "new creations". Without Jesus living inside us, we have sin as our nature. If you read the rest of the chapter you'll find that with Jesus living inside of us we have the power to put to death that nature and live without it. But even after we put it to death we must rely on Jesus to help us to overcome the ghosts of our former selves that will continually plague us. As long as we live on this earth we will be capable of sin. For though old habits die hard, your very nature dies a whole lot harder.
