21 States of Man without God
(Second in series)
In the continuation of our series about the 21 states of man without God we will look at the five Ds of our condition that cause us to live apart from God. These five Ds are: darkened, dead in sin, deceived, defiled or filthy, and disobedience. And as I mentioned at the start of this series when we look at these conditions that we find ourselves in, we will need to reflect very carefully upon what it is that we desire most in our lives: to live temporally in this world, which means we are spending more time working on the worldly things and little to no time on the spiritual things. Those spiritual things include reading the Bible, spending time in prayer with God, finding time to worship God, and spending time in service to God through a church and fellowship with other Christian believers. In so doing, we are led to understand and accept the gift of salvation through Christ Jesus, living an eternal life in heaven. While being worldly leads us away from God to live a life of eternity in the lake of fire. And in so looking at our condition we should realize that we do need to turn to the One True and Living God to save us from ourselves.
1. Darkened
a. This is the state where our spiritual vision becomes clouded and blurred so that light cannot come into the soul. And this concept we find in Matthew 6:22-23:
b. The lamp of the body is the eye. If therefore your eye is good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness!
c. Here is where we get the saying “The eyes are the windows to the soul”. In this scripture Jesus is saying that if the eyes were in good condition, the body would receive plenty of good light which is used by the brain to form our thoughts and ideas of Christ as our Lord and Savior. And as Jesus so often does, He uses this parable to show how, due to our desire to not see God, our spiritual state is darkened.
d. A website called the "Experience Project" describes itself as the place to share "life experiences from people like you." (As of November 2016 the site has had over 36 million visitors. But the site is now gone) Visitors to the site are asked to share their thoughts about life experiences by answering questions like "What does loneliness feel like?" or "Who do you want to spend time with?" or "What is your favorite pastime?" In one post, readers were asked to respond to the following statement: "I prefer darkness over light." A young woman going by the screen name "Beyond Repair" offered a particularly honest—and insightful—response:
i. I prefer darkness over light. The darkness allows me to hide who I am and what I truly feel. In the light all things have a chance to be revealed …. Darkness makes it easier to hide. In the dark you cannot see what is coming next …. The darkness is a place where you can lose yourself. Lost in the dark is a great place to be because then you are free from what you were and can be what you want. The darkness is bliss.
e. In the darkness of our hearts we can hide from ourselves, never acknowledging the fact that we need to be saved. In that darkness we cannot see the truth, and therefore never having to acknowledge the need for a savior.
f. So, if your spiritual sight is healthy then so will your view of the One and True living God be, having a greater reverence toward Him, knowing that He sent His Son to save us from ourselves. And in having this healthy spiritual sight your personality will not be darkened.
g. So, let us do as Jesus says in this scripture “If therefore your eye is good, your whole body will be full of light”; now this is not a reference only one eye, but is a message that we have a fixed healthy vision or goal. And that goal being to serve God and God only.
2. Dead in sin
a. In this state we are spiritually dead and on our way to the lake of fire. But Jesus tells us that we can escape from this death trap:
b. Most assuredly, I say to you, he who hears My word and believes in Him who sent Me has everlasting life, and shall not come into judgment, but has passed from death into life. ~John 5:24
c. To be dead in our sin means that we will be separated from God (and, thus, His life). Understand that in death there are two deaths: one is the physical dead of the body, the other is spiritual dead; being separated from God.
d. This means that we are separated from God's salvation. But it also means that it is impossible for that person to produce spiritual fruit, to show signs of life. Imagine such a person as a dead branch broken from a tree in a storm. Where it lies on the ground, separated from its source of nourishment, it will never again produce tender buds or green leaves or sweet fruit.
e. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. ~Romans 6:23
f. But by accepting Christ Jesus as your Lord and Savior you can be grafted back into the body of believers and receive the nourishment your spirit needs.
g. In the previous darkened state of man Jesus spoke of the eye, now He speaks of the ear and how it also needs to take in the fact that He was sent by God for the purpose of saving those that are dead in sin. Jesus tells us that the Word of God has the power to resurrect us from our dead state to a living state, and all we must do is hear the Word of God and believe what we hear.
3. Deceived
a. This state of man without God goes together with a darkened mind. If our vision is cloudy, we are more apt to see the wrong thing and believe what we see. And in so doing we become deceived. Seeing is not always believing!
b. Let me give you an example of a person who was deceived by the Koran.
i. A Christian university student shared a room with a Muslim. As they became friends, their conversation turned to religion. The believer asked the Muslim if he’d ever read the Bible. He answered no, but then asked if the Christian had ever read the Koran.
The believer responded, “No, I haven’t, but I’m sure it would be interesting. Why don’t we read both together, once a week, alternating books?” The young man accepted the challenge, their friendship deepened, and during the second term he became a believer in Jesus.
One evening, late in the term, he burst into the room and shouted at the longtime believer, “You deceived me!”
“What are you talking about?” the believer asked.
The new believer opened his Bible and said, “I’ve been reading it through, like you told me, and just read that the Word is living and active!” He grinned. “You knew all along that the Bible contained God’s power and that the Koran is a book like any other. I never had a chance!”
“Now you’ll hate me for life?” asked the believer.
“No,” he said, “but it was an unfair contest.”
c. Note previously that Jesus told us to see as well as hear. And in seeing and hearing we need to verify it by the Word of God. In the book of Titus Paul writes to the young pastor and reminds him of this state that we maybe in or once was in, and lays out the qualities or attributes of this state of man without God:
d. For we ourselves were also once foolish, disobedient, deceived, serving various lusts and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful and hating one another. ~Titus 3:3
e. Paul lists these attributes as one of foolishness, disobedience, being deceived, and other corruptions of the personality. And the sad thing is, that we do not see these things in ourselves because it is the lens that we are looking through. To illustrate this, I have a letter from a pastor by the name of Dan Meyers who talks about his deceived state.
i. When I was a teenager, I met a man who had this disturbing way of pointing things out that I found downright uncomfortable. In one discussion, John suggested that I didn't know as much about myself as I thought I did and, furthermore, I would probably never change. I hurled back that he was wrong; I understood myself pretty well; I was on top of things in most areas of my life; and who was he to tell me that I could never change if I wanted to! Then John said something that blew me apart and left me standing dazed and silent among the ruins of my self-perception: "Dan," he said, "there are things about you that you can never change. The reason you can never change them is you can't see them. The reason you can't see them is that you are using them to see."
Many years have gone by since then, but the truth of that man's observation has only sifted deeper and deeper into my soul. I have come to realize how hard genuine change of character and behavior is for me, how hard it is for me to discern what needs changing about me, because my perception of myself and the world around me is so distorted.
Like the man who corrected me, God gently says to us: "I understand why you see things the way you do. I know that you look at your heart and it doesn't look bad; but that's simply because you are using it to see. In truth, '[You] are darkened in [your] understanding and separated from the life [I want to give you] because of the ignorance that is in [you] due to the hardening of [your] heart.' But if you allow me, I will "give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh."
4. Defiled or filthy
a. This is the state of having a defiled or tarnished mindset. So, do you see the progression? From the eyes, to the ears, to perception, and now to our thought process.
b. To the pure all things are pure, but to those who are defiled and unbelieving nothing is pure; but even their mind and conscience are defiled. ~Titus 1:15
c. Again, we can see that the state of man without God is one where the mind is corrupt and nothing that comes into it is used as a pure or constructive thought. The mind and heart and everything that comes from it is defiled.
d. The book of Isaiah 64:6 tells us of this state of filthiness:
i. But we are all like an unclean thing, And all our righteousnesses are like filthy rags; We all fade as a leaf, And our iniquities, like the wind, Have taken us away.
e. Our defiled mind has taken us away from the truth of God and is causing us to be dead in our sins. But we can know that through our faith in Christ Jesus we can be cleansed. We know that by His stripes we are healed and brought from death to life. All we need to do is see with our eyes, hear with our ears, believe with our heart, and confess with our mouth that Jesus is Lord and we shall be healed.
f. that if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. ~Romans 10:9-10
g. For us today, seeing is reading the Word of God and hearing is by way of the man or woman of God who has presented the Word of God to you in your hearing.
5. Disobedient
a. This is the state where we decide to just not listen to what God has to say to us. In this state we turn away from any good advice and act upon our own heart’s desires.
b. And you He made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sins, in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience, among whom also we all once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others. But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up together, and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. ~Ephesians 2:1-7.
c. We can see how this final D in the state of man without God is the combination of all the other D’s spoken of in this message. Disobedience has and always will be the quickest road to destruction for mankind. The desire to follow your own will, a will that has no clue of what tomorrow will bring, a will that has limited knowledge of yourself, let alone the world, a will that is darkened, dead in sins, deceived, defiled and disobedient, a will apart from God.
i. Jan Davis, sixty, a professional parachutist, was BASE jumping when she fell to her death. Her husband, who was filming the jump, and several reporters were stunned when Davis crashed onto the rocks. She was jumping off the thirty-two-hundred-foot granite cliff, El Capitan, in Yosemite National Park, California, when her chute failed to open.
She and the other jumpers knew that BASE jumping was illegal in Yosemite Park. The law was passed because six people and numerous others had been injured in Yosemite due to BASE jumping. The five jumpers, including Davis, were protesting the park’s restrictions by proving the sport is safe. They knew the law, but they deliberately chose to defy it. Davis paid for that disobedience with her life.
ii. In a similar way, many people think they can deliberately violate God’s law. Eventually they learn, sometimes the hard way, that God’s laws exist to protect us.
d. So, let us have a single eye, fixed on the Lord Jesus who is able to fix us. Wake up and fix your mind on Christ Jesus, the only one that can bring you from death to life.
