Self-Sabotage
Biosphere 2 is the largest man-made, completely sealed ecosystem ever built. The designers placed rainforest, ocean, and desert terrain under three acres, like an industrial-sized aquarium designed for complete self-sufficiency. In the first mission, the crew divided into two groups that hated each other. Vandalism, lawsuits, and financial problems ended the second mission. We can engineer for self-sufficiency but haven't figured out how to end self-sabotage.
Paul makes a pun: when we say God is unworthy, he makes our minds unworthy. Our negative view of God doesn't affect God's worthiness at all. When I turn off all the lights in my house at night, the power grid keeps producing power. But I'm in the dark. If we reject Truth, our minds fill up with lies. If we reject Love, our hearts fill up with hatred. God is the living, personal fullness of everything good. To turn away from him is to turn toward everything bad. Paul draws a connection between what we think about and what we do. First our minds become corrupt, then our lives collapse. It's a dynamic at work in everyone, not just unbelievers. I remember feeling jealous of a co-worker's skill. In my pettiness, I developed a process so that I could prove I was better. Instead of celebrating each other's gifts, I tried to tear someone else down. Both my mind and actions were set against what God wanted. Paul lists twenty-one toxic traits. He doesn't finish the list, but keeps piling them up. For instance, he says that without God, we become unloving. One commentator suggests that to be unloving "speaks of the hardness of heart of the kind of people who would be entertained by the dying agonies of the gladiators." Toxic people create toxic communities. It's like the TV show Dance Moms. It ran for eight seasons and became embedded in pop culture, celebrated as a talent pipeline. The star of the show, Abby Lee Miller, publicly humiliated the children, manufactured conflict, and mocked their weight. The mothers watched their kids suffer, but kept signing up for another season on TV. The scandal was called a success. When Luke traveled with Paul, he heard Paul publicly state that he had approved of killing Christians (Acts 22:20, 26:10). So Luke tells us that Paul "agreed with putting [Stephen] to death" (Acts 8:1). Paul was once an evil, murdering, God-hating man. But then Jesus stopped him on the road to Damascus, and Paul became "a servant of Christ Jesus" (Romans 1:1).
Why do you think it can be entertaining to watch people do what's wrong?
What does it tell you about God that he commissioned Paul to write this letter?
Which item on this list do you recognize in yourself?
What's one thing you like to watch because it humiliates someone else? Tell a friend, "I'm not going to watch [that content] any more, because it's teaching me to celebrate what's wrong."