This morning I watched geese fighting like I had never seen them fight before. Eight geese—four on our back terrace next to our pond, four in the neighbor’s backyard, divided by a chain link fence. Two geese especially were fighting by putting their heads through the chain link fence. The one on my side of the fence was especially aggressive, biting the neck and head of the other goose. The other would bite back and other geese would join in.
They started flapping their wings, honking furiously and making a racket. Finally, the aggressive goose backed off and went away from the fence. The honking continued for a while, but the physical fighting was over.
Even geese fight, just like humans. All of creation, like all of humanity, is infected with the disease of sin (Romans 8:19-22). It is a pandemic that is contagious. I am reminded of the words of the old 18th century hymn “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing”:
Oh, to grace how great a debtor
daily I’m constrained to be!
Let thy goodness, like a fetter,
bind my wandering heart to thee:
prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
prone to leave the God I love;
here’s my heart, O take and seal it;
seal it for thy courts above.
“Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love”—that is the human condition. Those who believe the world is evolving to be better have no idea of, or have rejected the idea of, the human condition. They have denied Scripture: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9).
Until this world and each heart is redeemed by the blood of Jesus Christ and surrenders to Jesus Christ as Lord, the magnetic pull of the desperately wicked human condition will continue. Our hope is in no man or woman, no political party or ideology, but only in Jesus Christ and His transforming power.
“Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love”—that is my condition. That is our nature—our old nature, for those who have made Jesus Christ our Savior. The Good News is that through the power of Jesus Christ we no longer have to succumb to that downward pull. We can overcome the power of gravity through the Higher Life in Jesus Christ. The pull may sometimes be there, but it no longer rules us. That is the redeemed heavenly human condition.
We overcome sin and Satan our accuser by the blood of the Lamb (Jesus Christ), the word of our testimony, and we love not our souls (self-life) unto death (we die to ourselves) (Revelation 11:12).
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