Right and wrong. The combination is as familiar as peanut butter-and-jelly, and just like the spreads in that classic sandwich, they are hopelessly smeared together in us. Why? Christians believe people once lived in a state of harmony with God and each other but fell from that state.
What caused the fall? Some mistakenly claim it had to do with sex. Others say it’s because we ate from the tree of knowledge so our developing intellect was the cause. But this is a misquote.
Genesis tells us people ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Genesis 2:16-17). This made us a hopeless mix of the two; this Jekyll and Hyde hybrid led to the individual and social wreckage we live with every day. It is easy to lay the world’s problems at the feet of evil.
We can see the destruction caused by addiction, cheating on someone, murder, Ponzi schemes, and a host of other crimes. However, what we think is right can be more dangerous. A man who straps explosives to his body and detonates himself in a cafe doesn’t do this because he thinks it’s wrong.
He does it because he thinks it’s right. When Chance Brannon hurled a Molotov cocktail at a Planned Parenthood last year, he did it because he was convinced it was the right thing to do. Our political atmosphere is bitter and abusive, not because people are trying to misbehave, but because both sides are inflamed by the belief they are right.
When we’re tempted to something wrong, we might struggle with it and moderate our b.