Fallen,

Sin ruined the Earth’s Shalom.  Shalom is harmony with ourselves and God, harmony with ourselves and other people, harmony with ourselves and the environment, and harmony in our own selves.  It’s been wrecked by sin.  CS Lewis once wrote that God is in charge of all that is music while the enemy rules over noise.  Life is so noisy and often far from harmonic.  I think about first moving to Pittsburgh after spending a summer in the quiet Laurel Mountains.  Of course, not having air-conditioning warranted me to keep my windows wide open at night (hard to imagine this as I sit writing this in 28-degree February air!).  I just remember finding myself unable to sleep well for the first several nights because of the city NOISE.  But I’d just get used to it after a while, to the extent that the 700am school bus that blares its horn for the kids across the street, I rarely notice.  We are so used to the noise of sin!  But the truth is that we ALL have depraved hearts because of the sin in and around us.  It’s what has wrecked the Shalom God intended for our hearts, for our environment, for others, and for our relationship with Him.  Let’s make no peace with our sin, a part of reality in our fallenness.  We weren’t created to have the capacity to fight in our own strength—we need God’s strength and the community and fellowship of others to fight the powers of darkness, a fight which is not against flesh and blood (Ephesians 6:10-20).  We are both able and called to fight in community!

“The most experienced psychologist or observer of human nature knows infinitely less of the human heart than the simplest Christian who lives beneath the Cross of Jesus. The greatest psychological insight, ability, and experience cannot grasp this one thing: what sin is. Worldly wisdom knows what distress and weakness and failure are, but it does not know the godlessness of man. And so it also does not know that man is destroyed only by his sin and can be healed only by forgiveness. Only the Christian knows this. In the presence of a psychiatrist I can only be a sick man; in the presence of a Christian brother I can dare to be a sinner. The psychiatrist must first search my heart and yet he never plumbs its ultimate depth. The Christian brother knows when I come to him: here is a sinner like myself, a godless man who wants to confess and yearns for God’s forgiveness. The psychiatrist views me as if there were no God. The brother views me as I am before the judging and merciful God in the Cross of Jesus Christ.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Faith in Community

                We are fallen, yet redeemed.  We have so much to rest in (but more on that tomorrow), in each other and in Christ.  “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, & is seated at the right hand of the throne of God” –Hebrews 12: 1-2 (ESV).  Take that and run with it!