The More We Live For Ourselves the More We Become Like Monsters

Rev. Ernest O'Neill

Would you remember back with me thousands of years ago?  Do you remember the whole world decided to turn against God? Men and women decided “we’ll do without him and we will do it our own way. We are not going to put up with directions day after day.  We will make our own decisions and work it out our own way.  We will do without God.  We will establish our own security and our own happiness on our own.”  Do you remember what happened at that time?

Maybe you’d look at it in Genesis 6:11, “Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence.”  And back in verse 5, “The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”  We like to feel that you can live your life your own way and live it according to your own directions and do things that many people think are bad and yet it will not affect our own nature.  But do you see what happened to them?  The more they lived for themselves and established their own deity over different sections of the earth, the more they turned into terrible monsters.

Men living for themselves, cutting down anyone who got in the way, turned themselves into monsters.  They bent the original personality God had given them out of all recognition and they became monsters for which there was only one remedy.

That remedy is there if you’d like to look at it in Genesis 6:12-13, “And God saw the earth, and behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted their way upon the earth.  And God said to Noah, ‘I have determined to make an end of all flesh; for the earth is filled with violence through them; behold, I will destroy them with the earth.’”

Brothers and sisters, it is possible to come to that decision where the only answer to sin and disobedience is death.  Do you see that is what death is for?  Death is not to punish us for our sins -– “you bad child, you should not live without trusting me, don’t do that again!” That’s not the purpose of death. The purpose of death is to destroy sin and to destroy a personality that has become hopelessly perverted and twisted by sin.  So that all we could cry out is what the normal Jew could cry out, “I don’t understand my own actions, I do the very thing I do not want.  The thing I want to do, I cannot do.”  That’s a personality that is so twisted and perverted that it no longer makes any sense to itself.  It has no longer any control of itself.  That was the position of the normal Jew hundreds of years ago.  Now, loved ones, the only answer to that kind of perverted personality is death.

Of course, God explained that to us by flooding the whole world in the time of Noah.  Really his problem was this: how do you get rid of that perverted personality without destroying the sinner?  Because that’s what he had to do.  The first time he flooded the world, he destroyed everybody but Noah and his family.

You know that God did discover a way to destroy that perverted personality without destroying the sinner.  You remember he said later on to Noah, “I will never again destroy all flesh upon the earth.”  The reason for that was because there was a Lamb slain before the foundation of the world.  God took the perverted personalities of all of us rebels, he put them into Jesus, and he burned them out with rays of chemotherapy that we ourselves could not have survived.

God, as a physician, took the cancerous desire for greed, envy, jealousy, pride, reputation, security and importance that we have developed in our personalities and he put them into Jesus and destroyed them on the cross.  For that reason, loved ones, he was able to avoid destroying the whole world again with a flood.

 Back to Seeking God Daily Home Page