Tuesday, October 07, 2014
Humanity
Justin Taylor quote Malcolm Muggeridge:
To think otherwise is a failure to come to terms with sin. It is an attempt to pretend that we are "OK" as we are and that God seeks to make us better when instead we are severely disfigured and broken things seeking to be restored to our created beauty. Understanding our brokenness is mandatory to our coming to terms with the restorative process. A broken thing cannot function properly - it must be acted upon to restore functionality. We cannot participate in our own restoration to humanity, it must be granted to us.
humanity restoration sin
. . . it has become abundantly clear in the second half of the twentieth century that Western Man has decided to abolish himself.I love that phrase, "Having wearied of the struggle to be himself." too often when discussing spiritual transformation I hear people talk about becoming "super-human," or some variant. Nothing could be further from the truth. Sin has made us sub-human and the transformation offered by the Holy Spirit restores us to our humanity. We, in fact, struggle to be ourselves.
Having wearied of the struggle to be himself, he has created
his own boredom out of his own affluence,
his own impotence out of his own erotomania,
his own vulnerability out of his own strength;
himself blowing the trumpet that brings the walls of his own city tumbling down, and, in a process of auto-genocide, convincing himself that he is too numerous, and labouring accordingly with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer in order to be an easier prey for his enemies;
until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keels over a weary, battered old brontosaurus and becomes extinct.
To think otherwise is a failure to come to terms with sin. It is an attempt to pretend that we are "OK" as we are and that God seeks to make us better when instead we are severely disfigured and broken things seeking to be restored to our created beauty. Understanding our brokenness is mandatory to our coming to terms with the restorative process. A broken thing cannot function properly - it must be acted upon to restore functionality. We cannot participate in our own restoration to humanity, it must be granted to us.
humanity restoration sin
