Limited by Culpability

Not only are we limited by our context and our capacity, but we are also limited by our culpability or our sin.

Ecclesiastes 7:20 reads, "Surely there is not a righteous man on earth who does good and never sins."

Isaiah 64:6 says, "We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away."

In John chapter 3 we read, "And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil."

Because of our sin, we love darkness. Our hearts are inclined not to love Jesus - the light of the world - but to love what is spiritually evil.

It's uncomfortable for us to accept this. We prefer to think of ourselves as rational and objective. We believe we consider evidence and reach conclusions based on it. We evaluate different arguments' strengths and then choose the most rational path.

Those beliefs about ourselves are accurate, to a degree. They reflect the rational capacities that God gave to us and wants us to employ.

But that way of seeing things has a blind spot. It doesn't have an account for human sin and our perverse love for what is wrong. Because of our sins, we don't want to encounter God! We're afraid of God - and not in the sense of having a proper fear of the Lord, in terms of reverence and awe, but in the sense of running away from him, like Jonah fled to Tarshish.

Given these limits - the limits of our context, our capacity, and our culpability - we have a serious problem. We're lost in the woods.