Hmmmm I wonder where man developed this concept?
In the beginning God created man in the image of Himself, male and female He created them in the image of God. Man and woman were in intimate fellowship with their Creator, yet they were deceived by the great deceiver and they believed the lie and denied the truth and sin entered the world and their hearts.
Since this moment the world that was once good has become not so good, and man in the garden tried to blame God for his choice then and still today man tries to blame God for his choices and for the choices of others and for the receiving of the consequences of these choices.
We see all through the Scriptures how man has tried to prove his own goodness by comparing himself to others he deemed not as good as himself. All through the Scriptures we see man blaming God for his choices and blaming God for the consequences of a fallen world. All through the Scriptures we see man trying to make his own way to a god he created because he could make the rules. All through the Scriptures we see man arguing with God out of foolish ignorance of the magnitude of His holiness. All through the world, in the media, on t.v., on the Internet, we see man is still doing the same thing today.
So how does God respond?
I believe God responded with the “Human Heart Experiment.”
God repeatedly has reached out to man and He has not stopped and He won’t until the day of the white throne judgment (Daniel 7:9-10, Rev 20:11-15). Man for some reason just does not want to admit that they need God. Man wants to think that he is not so bad and is doing just fine. He just needs a break, needs society to adapt to him, needs better circumstances; he’s merely a product of his environment and his upbringing. No not at all, he is merely a product of his heart, and he needs God, not a god, but the GOD, and God conducts His experiment to prove it, not to Himself, He knows our hearts, but to prove it to us.
Many years ago a man named Abram was born in the Middle East in a city called Ur. This ordinary man God called out, and said go with Me, listen to Me, I will make you a great nation, give you a land, and in you all the nations will be blessed. This man listened.
God kept His word as He always does, and Abram became Abraham, and he had a son Isaac, who had a son Jacob, who had twelve sons who became the nation of Israel (the accounts of their lives are recorded in the book of Genesis). Israel would be God’s test group in the “Human Heart Experiment.”
We know that Jacob and his twelve sons moved to Egypt during a famine, and there they eventually ended up an enslaved people, yet even in their slavery God blessed them and they grew in number and became a nation. (This was all foretold to Abraham and passed down from father to son as we can tell from the words of Joseph at his death recorded in Genesis 50.)
God brings this nation out of slavery led by a man named Moses. In Exodus 12 God institutes His test group, as He says this month shall be the beginning of months for you, God delivers the nation of Israel out of slavery redeeming them with a great and mighty outstretched arm. He does all the work for them, cares for them , feeds them, and the whole time they are complaining, God has delivered them out of slavery, given them food money and clothing and shelter and yet they still aren’t happy, He still isn’t doing enough to satisfy them (does this sound familiar?).
It took the nation three months to get to Sinai, once there God made the people, the nation of Israel, a proposition. He told them that if they would obey His voice and keep His commandments He would bless them like crazy but if they turned away from Him and broke their promise He would curse them.
God delivered to them His standard of righteousness, the Law, the nation heard the commandments and agreed with God that they were good (because they merely were the written moral law that already was within them) and God gave them the ceremonial Law, which showed them how to approach Him, their holy God. The nation entered into covenant with God, they shook hands and sprinkled blood and said “it’s a deal”.
The test group formed, the standard presented, the variable in place, now what would be the result? We see the result from Exodus 32 through the Prophets, the variable could never meet the standard. No matter how hard they tried, no matter how many chances they had, no matter how many times they went over the rules, they couldn’t do it. Here’s the thing, God knew they couldn’t do it, but they, we, have to realize it ourselves.
Throughout the Scriptures God describes the nations as waters, so we shall do here. Let’s picture the world as a well of water, and we want to check the purity of that water, how do we do it? We take a sample of that water and we test it, and if in that one sample we discover pollutants and disease we declare the entire well polluted and unfit.
God took a sample for the purity of the human heart through the hearts of the nation of Israel, and He tested that sample. He gave them amazing advantage through the revealing of Himself in signs and wonders and His written word, but still the hearts of the people remained polluted. God already knows all human hearts are polluted (Genesis 6:5, Jeremiah 17:9). He has so proven it to us through the Law and the nation of Israel and if we are honest we know that He has proven it within our own hearts.
Now we know that whatever the Law says,
it speaks to those who are under the Law,
so that every mouth may be closed
and all the world may become accountable to God;
because by the works of the Law
no flesh will be justified in His sight;
for through the Law comes the knowledge of sin.
Romans 3:19-20
One of the reasons God gave us the Law was to erase any questions and all excuses. Those who do not have the written Law, yet try to walk by the moral law within them, show the others around them their own sin thus the reason we constantly try and find someone who is worse than us or either we gather all those around us who are most like us with our same sin to somehow make our sin not so bad in our own eyes.
People respond to the knowledge of their sin in several ways, they try to hide it, deny it, justify it, fix it, or seek to destroy the who or what that brought attention to it.
Makes sense now why the nations have always hated the Jew, why the people fight to have the Ten Commandments yanked down from public display, if we destroy the test sample, if we ignore the standard, then we can pretend as though we are just fine. Sorry it doesn't work that way, whether a sample of the well water was taken or not doesn't change the pollutants and disease that is there, it just keeps killing the people who in ignorance drink the water.
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