Enter the world of biblical reality where evil choices and human responsibility are scrutinized. As we dissect insights from C.S. Lewis and Marvin Olasky, we uncover the subtle temptations that lead us astray. Join us as we reflect on the timeless wisdom of Solomon, the authority of Jesus’ teachings, and how recognizing our own choices can transform our lives away from the tempting allure of determinism.
The CEM Network is pleased to present Ronald L. Dart and Born to Win.
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I thought I knew what to call those little wooden figures with movable arms and legs that are controlled by strings from someone above them. Sort of like Pinocchio was originally meant to be before he came to life. We call that a puppet, right? Actually, technically, no. It’s a marionette. A puppet is, by definition, a small-scale figure, usually with a cloth body and a hollow head, that fits over and is moved by the hand, also known as the ventriloquist’s dummy. Sherry Lewis and Lamb Chop come to mind, or Charlie McCarthy and Edgar Bergen. And, of course, Miss Piggy, Kermit, and all the other Muppets. These are puppets, technically speaking. You learn something new every day, it seems. I learned this from a piece by Marvin Olasky. He was citing a remark by a British psychiatrist named Theodore Dalrymple. He’d written a book titled Life at the Bottom. And Dalrymple writes… Listening as I do every day to the accounts people give of their lives, I am struck by the very small part in them which they ascribe to their own efforts, choices, and actions. They describe themselves as marionettes of helplessness. Now, what exactly does he mean by that? Well, Marvin Olasky called to mind the Virginia Tech killer. According to some sources, he just blew. It wasn’t really his responsibility. He was troubled. He had issues. Maybe, as Representative Jim Moran of Virginia charged, it’s President Bush’s fault. It seems no one had the responsibility to help a young man who had written hyper-violent plays and poems, been declared mentally ill by a judge, said Marvin Walensky. set a fire in his room, and so on. After all this, soon after the multiple murders, the head of Virginia Tech’s campus counseling center held a press conference and suggested the problem was inadequate funding for mental health services in the United States. So, now we know. But no one, it seems, is willing to ascribe actions like this to evil choices made by individuals. and to the presence of human evil. I think the operative term, though, in that paragraph by Marvin Olasky is, no one had the responsibility. Professor Dalrymple went on to give some examples. One killer, for example, said of the murder he committed, the knife went in as if he had nothing to do with it. A thief who broke into churches, stole their silver objects, and then burned the churches down to destroy the evidence said the problem was the churches had poor security and valuable objects. The combination was impossible to resist. Another troubled person said, my head needs sorting out. From this, this is where Dr. Good saw the idea that people see themselves as marionettes, controlled by strings that direct their actions. They can’t help themselves. If they stole your property, it’s your fault for not locking it up. Now, this is a very old idea. In philosophy, it has a name. It’s called determinism. Determinism is the philosophical idea that every event… including human cognition and behavior, decision and action, is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences. In other words, every single thing that happens is caused, and it’s that chain of cause that leads you to this point, and there’s no other way to go. Determinism may also be defined, they say, as the thesis that there is at any instant exactly one physically possible future. So it basically means it’s just going to happen because of the sequence of things that takes place. Now, why is determinism attractive to anyone as opposed to being able to say, hey, I direct my life. I make my choices. I’ll take my responsibility. Why would they want this? Because of this magic phrase, it’s not my fault. It wasn’t my fault. I didn’t do it. It just happened. And it gives us a chance to get free of guilt and not be bogged down by it. Consider the day when Moses came down from Mount Sinai carrying the stone tablets with the Ten Commandments on them. Now you talk about something that’s going to put the pressure on people. Here comes Moses. As he approached the camp, heard riotous noises. And at first he thought it was some battle going on down there. And Joshua said, no, I hear singing. And when he got to the place, he saw the scene, he was absolutely appalled. He found the people dancing around a golden calf. It’s only a little later we learned that the people were dancing naked. And only through archaeology and history did we learn that calf worship involved naked orgies as well as child sacrifice. And this was the direction everything was going at the foot of Mount Sinai, allegedly because Moses was gone a little longer than anybody thought he ought to be gone. Now, the confrontation of Moses with Aaron, who had been in charge while he was gone, is really interesting. It’s in Exodus chapter 32, verse 21. Moses said to Aaron, What did these people do to you that you have brought so great a sin upon them? My, Moses must have thought, well, the people tortured him. The people backed him into a corner. They held a knife to his throat. What did they do to you to make you do this? And Aaron said, let not the anger of my Lord wax hot. You know the people. You know they’re set on mischief. For they said to me, make us gods that will go before us. As for this Moses, the man that brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we don’t know what’s become of him. Now, mind you, Moses hadn’t even been gone 40 days when this started taking place. And Aaron said, Well, I said to them, Whoever has any gold, let them break it off. So they gave it to me. Then I cast that gold into the fire, and there came out this calf. Now, Moses’ face must have been a real study about this time. To have his own brother, the high priest of the Lord, stand there, look him in the face, and say, Well, I threw the gold in there, and out came this calf. Aaron refused to accept any responsibility for what he had done. And here’s the story, a little earlier in the chapter, where it tells us what exactly did happen. All the people broke off the golden earrings in their ears, and they brought them to Aaron. He received them at their hand and fashioned it with a graving tool after he had made it a molten calf. Who? Aaron. Aaron. They made a molten calf. Aaron got out his graving tool and began to work on the thing. And they said, These are your gods, O Israel, that brought you out of the land of Egypt. And when Aaron saw it, he built an offer before it. And Aaron made a proclamation and said, Tomorrow is a feast to the Lord. Aaron even pronounced God’s blessing on what they were doing. Now, how on earth do you explain this sequence of events and the denial, the utter denial of responsibility on Aaron’s part? Now, I don’t want to suggest that Aaron’s that different from anybody else because, candidly, most of us are quite willing to do exactly the same thing. Mistakes were made, we’ll say. We don’t say, I made a mistake. I screwed up. I was wrong. It was my fault. Oh, no. Mistakes were made or, well, stuff happens and so on it goes. And, you know, I find myself fascinated to hear so much of, what shall I call it, justification of evil coming from intelligent, educated people who, instead of owning up to and facing the fact of evil, the fact that a person, a human being, made evil choices, bad decisions for which he should be held responsible for, I hear them going around looking for every excuse under the sun to blame society, to blame the educational system, to blame the federal government, to blame one political party or another for what has happened here, instead of blaming themselves, blaming the person who did it, and accepting the fact that somebody made a choice that was evil. But we see it all the time. And I wonder, what is the appeal of determinism? I would think the dignity of man would lead us to want to be responsible. And as long as things are going well, men are happy to take credit for it. And the incredible salaries that follow, they’re also happy to take those. But when things go sour, they suddenly become determinists. They say, out came this calf. It’s a miracle. It’s amazing. I don’t know how it happened. It just happened. And yet as long as they’re doing well and things are on the up, they are happy to say, look what this management technique of ours has accomplished. Well, men high and low like to plead the innocence of inevitability. But evil is not inevitable. It is a matter of choice. Marvin Alasky chose a really interesting illustration of this, and I’ll tell you what it is. But first, grab a pencil and a piece of paper.
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I have an important offer for you, and then I’ll be right back. King Solomon was easily the wisest man who ever lived, and his work is worth reading on that basis alone. But there is more to the story than that. To discover more, write or call and ask for a free introductory CD titled The Wisdom Books, Walking with the Wise. Write to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. Or call toll free 1-888-BIBLE-44.
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Marvin Olasky quoted a speech by C.S. Lewis that I never had heard before. He was speaking to university students in 1944, students who were on their way to becoming England’s leaders. And he said this, To 9 out of 10 of you, the choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colors. Obviously, bad men, obviously threatening or bribing will almost certainly not appear. I thought this is interesting. 9 out of 10 of you are going to face this, he said, but it will not be dramatic colors. Lewis noted that the invitation to do wrong would come in a way hard to turn down. He said, it’ll come over a drink or a cup of coffee, disguised as triviality, sandwiched between two jokes from the lips of a man or a woman whom you have recently beginning to know rather better and whom you hope to know better still, just at the moment when you are most anxious not to appear crude or naive or a prig. The hint will come. You will be drawn in if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease. And this gets really interesting to me at this point. You’ll be drawn in simply because at that moment when the cup was so near to your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world. Lewis was describing the desire to be in the inner ring. And he emphasized, of all the passions, the passion for the inner ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things. And it’s so clear when it’s put to you that way. when you realize it’s not usually a bowl-you-over type of thing. It does come at just those offhand moments, at a time when the cup is right to your lips and you can’t bear the thought of not being an insider, that the decision is made. If you are drawn in, Lewis said, Next week it will be something a little further from the rules, and next year something further still, but all in the jolliest, friendliest spirit. It may end in a crash, a scandal, in penal servitude, or it may end in millions, in peerage, in the giving of prizes at your old school, but you will be a scoundrel. And this next thing is very important. The scoundrel looking back rarely remembers choosing. His life just blew. Enron just happened. You know, when you get far enough down the road and you’re able to sit back and look back down the road at the choices you made, you begin to understand how true what he’s saying here is. When you get yourself into some kind of trouble, maybe big, it may be small, you rarely remember choosing. You rarely remember the choices. It just happened. Life just blew. And you end up looking at yourself as being just a marionette, a puppet on a string. But you know, if that’s the way life is, then there is no value of wisdom over folly. There’s no reason to beat your head against the wall in a university to gain an education, for there are no choices that are not predetermined. Somebody else is pulling your strings. So it doesn’t matter what you do. Now, what really astonishes me is the number of Christian thinkers who accept a theological determinism. It’s something like predestination, that we have no choice. That some people believe that God made up his mind before we were ever born which of us would be saved and which of us would be lost. And we have no choice in the matter. It’s amazing to me. Free will seems so obvious in God’s plan that I can’t imagine anybody seeing it another way. And yet there are serious Christian people who do. I don’t get it. Because you see, if that is the truth, then you have no choice. And any serious reader of the Bible knows better than that. Is wisdom better than folly? Well, according to Solomon it was. He said in Ecclesiastes 2, verse 13, Then I saw that wisdom excels folly as far as light excels darkness. So do we have choices to make that are not predetermined? Well, in the book of Proverbs, Solomon has a number of things of advice to his son. One of them is found in the very first chapter in verse 10. He says this, and it sounds very much like C.S. Lewis’ story of the inner ring. My son, if sinners entice you, don’t consent. If sinners entice you. Entice is an interesting word. They’re not bludgeoning you. They’re not threatening you. It’s just like C.S. Lewis said. It happens at a moment between two jokes in the friendliest of terms when you’re really very much wanting to be a member of the inner circle, and they invite you. If they sum, come with us. Let’s lay wait for blood. Let’s lurk privily for the innocent without cause. Let’s swallow them up alive as the grave and whole as those that go down to the pit. We’ll find all precious substance. We’ll fill our houses with spoil. Cast in your lot with us. We’ll all have one purse. Now, candidly, I don’t know whether Solomon is saying here the way it will come to you or the reality of what is coming to you. Is he necessarily disagreeing with C.S. Lewis that these people are going to come and say, oh, let’s go murder somebody? Or is it what he is saying is this is tantamount to what they are saying. This is the reality of what they’re saying. No matter how innocent it says coming in because the word entice says they’re trying to entice you. What follows sounds pretty blunt. He says, don’t do that. My son, walk not in the way with these people. Don’t walk down the road with them. Get away from them. Refrain your foot from their path, for their feet run to evil, and they make haste to shed blood. Surely in vain the net is spread in the sight of any bird. If you put that net out there to catch the bird and the bird can see it, you’re not going to get him. And you would think human beings, when they see the net, would get away from it. But they don’t. They don’t see it. He said they lay wait for their own blood. They lurk privily for their own lives. So are the ways of everyone that is greedy of gain. which takes away the life of the owners thereof. I think what Solomon is describing here is the temptation to the inner circle. It’s the temptation to be drawn into a circle of people whom you may admire, whom you may be envious of, who you kind of wish you could walk with them, that you could actually be a part of it, be admired by them, respected by them. And they want you to go with them in something that you know you should not do if you think about it. The problem, when we get to that situation, usually we don’t allow ourselves to think. We block it out. Now, there are plenty of people who would be glad to help you go down that road. Why? I don’t know, unless it’s because they’re on that road themselves and they just don’t want to have to deal with it. Another thing, the temptation to the inner circle will exist wherever power accumulates. And it’s just as true in religious organizations as it is in the corporate culture. I think this lies behind something Jesus said to his disciples on one occasion. The mother of two of his disciples came to him with his sons, did obeisance to Jesus, and wanted to ask a certain thing of him. This is in Matthew 20, verse 20. And he said, what is it that you want? And she said, grant that these, my two sons, may sit, the one on your right hand and the other on your left, in your kingdom. You talk about the inner circle. How can you be closer to the inner circle than on the right hand, the left hand of Christ in his kingdom? It is a raw example of the temptation to the inner circle. But Jesus answered and said, you don’t know what you’re asking for. And he looked at the two young men who were there with her, and they were there. He said, are you able to drink the cup that I’m going to drink of, be baptized with the baptism I’m baptized with? And they said to him, we’re able. He said, well, you shall indeed drink of my cup. You shall indeed be baptized with the baptism I’m baptized with. But to sit on my right hand and on my left is not mine to give. It shall be given to them for whom it is prepared of my Father. Well, it was a sad moment, and then the other ten disciples heard about it, and they were really upset. They were moved with indignation over this issue. So Jesus could see he had to get this thing clear right away. He called everybody together and sat them down and said this. Look, guys, you know that the princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion over them. You know they that are great exercise authority upon them. But it shall not be so among you. Now, I hear a lot of conversation from time to time being associated with various churches about how churches are governed. And there is really precious little instruction in Jesus’ words in the Gospels about how the church should be governed, except for this. This one thing he tells them about church government, I guess he leaves the rest of it to them. He says, you are not allowed to exercise dominion over or authority upon. It was proscribed. He said, whoever will be great among you, let him be your servant. Whoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant. Even as the Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister and to give his life a ransom for many. So Jesus ruled out authoritarian structures among his disciples, and thus he denied the permissibility of an inner circle. I think that’s very important. Frankly, if you’re in a situation like that where you can see that sort of thing developing, you need to really watch out because the temptation to the inner circle will be there for you sooner or later. So Jesus said no. I think it’s for this reason that Jesus denied his church the right to concentrate power. Because if they did, they would then rely on their own power instead of his power. And I’ll bet that you have seen how this works or how it doesn’t work for yourself by this time in your life. If you’ve been around churches, large and small, if you’ve seen how the political structure in a church begins to develop, then you already know that the larger a church becomes and the more powerful it becomes, the more certain it is to develop an inner circle. What Jesus wanted his men to choose was responsibility rather than authority. And there’s a big difference between them. Once the disciples, for example, had demonstrated the power of God in the church after Pentecost, the temptation to the inner circle appeared again. And you can imagine how easy it would have been. In Acts 4, verse 33, With great power gave the apostles witness of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all. With that kind of power, healings taking place, this is impressive. And people were noticing them. neither was there any among them that lacked, for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them and brought the prices of the things that were sold and laid them down at the apostles’ feet, and they distributed to everybody according as he had need. And Joseph, who was by the apostles’ surname Barnabas, he was a Levite of the country of Cyprus, having land sold it and brought the money and laid it at the apostles’ feet.” Now, I have no doubt that this act created a great deal of admiration for Barnabas. And indeed, he does seem to be a major player in days to come, a member of the inner circle in the eyes of some. And that temptation to be in the inner circle was right there.
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I’ll be right back. For a free CD of this radio program that you can share with friends and others, write or call this week only and request the program titled The Choice. Write to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. Or call toll free 1-888-BIBLE-44. That’s 1-888-242-5344.
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The temptation fell on a man named Ananias and his wife Sapphira. They sold a possession, but they kept back part of the price. His wife was also privy to it, and they brought a certain part and laid it at the apostles’ feet. And Peter said, Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and keep back part of the price of the land? While it remained, wasn’t it your own? And even after it was sold, wasn’t it your own? Why have you conceived this thing in your heart? Why are you doing this? See, the thing is, Ananias didn’t have to give it at all. That was something the people who were doing it were doing strictly voluntarily. Ananias and Sapphira did it because they wanted to be in the inner circle. It wasn’t just a matter of the prestige that went with it. They wanted to be insiders in all of this. The result, Ananias fell down dead. And a little later, his wife came in, privy to the whole thing. She also fell down, and they carried them away. And the Scriptures tell us great fear came on all the church, and as many as us heard these things. Now, I think the severity of the response to this by God is intended to impress upon our minds the risks we take when we are tempted to the inner circle. But you need to realize, at all times, it is your choice. You can try, but you cannot evade the responsibility for what you have done. So think about it now, and remember, the choice is yours.
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Until next time. The Born to Win radio program with Ronald L. Dart is sponsored by Christian Educational Ministries and made possible by donations from listeners like you. If you can help, please send your donation to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. You may call us at 1-888-BIBLE44 and visit us online at borntowin.net.
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Christian Educational Ministries is happy to announce a new full-color Born to Win monthly newsletter with articles and free offers from Ronald L. Dart. Call us today at 1-888-BIBLE44 to sign up or visit us at born2win.net.
