Someone asked in another thread what it was that convinced me that there was a God, and I think it is a question that deserves an answer.
I think I have suffered more than my share in my lifetime; as a child I learned that adults weren't always looking out for you and at times should not be trusted and as a teenager I learned that they will rip you off for whatever they can get without a second thought. And that's just for starters. This was at a time when people were singing songs about brotherhood and peace, love and understanding, etc.
I got invited to some kind of revival, and I went. The man who was speaking was one of those people who can make anything crystal clear, and one of the things he said was this:
The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.”
They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds;
there is none who does good.
The Lord looks down from heaven on the children of man,
to see if there are any who understand,
who seek after God.
They have all turned aside; together they have become corrupt;
there is none who does good,
not even one.
And the thing that I had been struggling with, the question of how "good people" could be so evil, was right in front of me. They were not good.
This is not to say that people aren't capable of doing good things, they are. Jesus said that even evil me can give their children good gifts, or that heathens can treat their buddies well. Everybody else is on their own.
People can and will slit your throat for a dime with the proper motivation, and if there are enough dimes at stake, and that means anybody and everybody. As Son House once said:
You know your mother would talk about you
Your own sisters and your brothers too
They just don’t care how you’re tryin’ to live
They’ll talk about you still...
You know they’ll jump you up and down
They’ll carry you all 'round and 'round
Just as soon as your back is turned
They’ll be tryin’ to crush you down
And he ought to have known. This is why things like covetousness, adultery, gossip, perjury, disrespect to parents, stealing, etc. were forbidden by the law - they were known offenses.
For the scriptures to have said in several places that without God, without a savior, the world is doomed, was such profound wisdom it could have only been Divinely inspired.
And yet, there will always be somebody who will want to say that people are basically good, even after watching the newscast with reports of two or three murders, child abductions, and assaults and battery.
Realizing that people are basically rotten, including myself, and in need of a savior, is the only thing that has enabled me to make sense of it.
