The following student report was submitted by Ambassador League Agent Luke W. during the 2009-2010 League.
Mission: Research on the Nature of Man
C.S. Lewis said, "Humans are amphibians – half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world but as animals they inhabit time." It was the Great I Am who made man in His "image" and breathed the "breath of life" into man’s nostrils making him a living being.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton, another influential writer in the 20th century, succinctly captured the shortcomings of human nature. When a newspaper invited several eminent authors to write essays on the theme "What's Wrong with the World?" his contribution took the form of a letter:
Dear Sirs,
I am.
Yours truly,
G. K. Chesterton
So we see some dichotomies in the nature of man. Man exists in time but he yearns for the timelessness of eternity. He was made sacred in image of God, but in the name of his own nature he commits sacrilege.
The nature of man is the product of a battle between his inherited sin nature and the inherent imprint of the Creator on his creation – "the light that gives light to every man."
When Adam and Eve took of the fruit, man rejected God. Man manifested evil deeds and the "Lord was grieved that He had made man on the earth, and His heart was filled with pain." He sent a flood to purge the land but He offered the wicked people a savior. Noah built a boat that could have been their saving grace from the torrents of water. They spurned him. Many years afterward God would again send a Savior for His people. The Savior was "despised and rejected" by the ones he came to save. Just as the "Lord was grieved before the flood," later "Jesus wept" for Jerusalem. The "light that gives light to every man" wept upon this earth. "Oh what is man that you are mindful of him?" It is because man rejected the things of God for the ideas of the world that are spun by the serpent that his nature produces evil.
Jesus said to the Pharisees in John 8:44, "You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father's desire. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies." The Pharisees had exchanged the light and the truth of the Messiah for the ideas of the devil which are lies. The legitimate outworking of those lies will be evil. Adam and Eve opened the door to sin and Cain kicked it in. Man’s nature to reject God and accept the lies of the devil remain consistent from Adam, to Noah, to Jesus, to modernity.
Not only evil comes from man, however. Fantastic works of art, advances in medicine, and volumes of philosophy have come from the unregenerate. Whether man will acknowledge it or not, he is made in God's image. God is the creator and so man is creative. The word of the Lord is omnipotent and so man’s words are potent. The light of the Messiah "gives light to every man," and He "causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good."
The effects of man's relation to God as His created entity are not lost. Though the Liar tries to pervert the things that are good, God’s sustaining power still holds mankind back from complete depravity. C.S. Lewis wrote in the Screwtape Letters, "We [Satan’s camp] raise the sophists; He [God] raises up a Socrates to answer them." The general revelation of God, the "light that gives light to every man" does more than keep mankind from total depravation. The light is the word made flesh who is able to save. All of the things that are present in man’s nature and God’s creation are there that man might reach for God who is able to save.
Man rejects God when God is plainly evident. Battling inside of every man is his proclivity to the lies of Satan and the things that God has made plain. This dichotomy explains why the same human nature can be inside of both Mother Teresa and Mao Tse-tung. The only way that the things of God can destroy the lies of Satan is through the Savior who is the word made flesh.
