Lost!

A friend and I, both adjunct professors at our local Baptist seminary, were doing one of our favorite things: drinking coffee and talking about students, classes, theology, and such.

He said, “I tell my students there is one huge thing they must understand about human nature: people are stupid.”

I laughed, “Could you find some more theologically correct way of putting that?”

He said, “I mean it. Think about it. They can not be counted on to do even the most basic thing in life–look out for their own best interests.”

If that’s the definition of stupid–working against one’s own welfare–then it’s hard to argue with my friend.

–The drivers on the interstate around here comprise the alpha and omega of this argument for my money. Watch them risking their future and the lives of their riders for a little more speed, a little better position, a few more thrills. After watching a daredevil scoot in and out of narrow slots in high-speed traffic while endangering everyone around him, we would like to ask that driver, “Friend, was it worth what you risked to gain a little better position on the highway?”

We don’t do that, of course. We already know the answer: he wasn’t thinking. He was responding to the adrenalin in his system. He was not in control of his thinking. He was acting stupid.

–The daily newspaper in any city in America will furnish all the anecdotal evidence for the self-destructiveness of humanity. A medical doctor loses his license and livelihood and goes to prison for selling prescriptions for controlled substances, all for a little more money. A politician who was making a hundred thousand a year sells his influence for a tiny fraction of that, and ends up losing everything.

Friends who live a few miles west of New Orleans were all abuzz the other night. Helicopters were hovering over their homes. When a woman went out to put her garbage on the curb, a policeman suggested she stay in the house. The next morning, the newspaper announced that cops had arrested three people who had robbed a bank in that area. They had pulled ski masks over their faces, held up the bank, and then sped away. Witnesses called 911 and they were apprehended. They “owned” the loot from the robbery for a few hours; they will pay for that with 20 years of their lives.

–A respected pastor with a long record of service to God and the church “falls in love” with his secretary, a deacon’s wife, a counselee, or the church organist. To “fulfill his needs,” he breaks the hearts of his wife and chiildren, breaks the trust of thousands who have respected and followed his leadership, and breaks the vows he made to God.

What are you thinking?

“I wasn’t thinking,” one man told me. “I was stupid.”

In listening to such a confession, no hearer delights in the self-destructive behavior of the penitent. For there is one inescapable fact that looms over this entire conversation:

We are all stupid; we have all done self-destructive things. None are faultless.

And that is the saddest thing I know. People are so lost.


“There is none righteous, no not one…. For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:10,23).

A hundred years ago, a theological movement that was gathering steam taught that people are basically good and evolving into a better grade of humanity. We look back at that now and laugh at the naivete and absurdity of it. Two world wars and too many smaller wars to count have forever disabused us of that notion.

You would think. But it hasn’t.

We’re stupid, remember?

These days, “people are basically good” is not so much a movement as an undercurrent. Against all evidence and contrary to everything we see in our own hearts and know in our own minds, something inside us wants to believe that people can always be counted on to do the right thing.

“We don’t always lock our doors around here,” my friends said. I was spending the night with them and would be returning that evening before they arrived home from their concert. They would leave the front door unlocked. As a longtime resident of a metropolitan area, I was stunned. And, lest anyone think my friends reside in Mayberry, they live in a city larger than mine.

It reminded me of a conversation my wife and I used to have with our teenage daughter. We would return home to discover she had arrived from school and was in the house with the doors unlocked. She would say, “Well, nothing happened so what’s the big deal?” We would answer, “Honey, it just takes one time.”

When our oldest grandson was a pre-schooler, he warned me about watching something or other on television because of the bad words. “There!” he said when some character crossed that line. The word had been “stupid.”

I said, “That’s a bad word?” Grant said, “Yes. You’re not supposed to call someone stupid.”

As a dutiful grandfather, I did not disagree. But what I thought was, “What about when they are?”

The thesaurus on the shelf behind me lists a few alternatives to this “bad” word.

“Unintelligent, fatuous, foolish, obtuse, bovine, dull, lumpish, doltish, simple, simpleminded, moronic, imbecilic, cretinous, subnormal, feebleminded, weak-minded, stolid, dull-witted, thick-witted, thick-skulled, slow-witted, witless, brainless, mindless, empty-headed, featherbrained, featherheaded, oxlike, addlebrained, addled, dopey, dim, dim-witted, halfwitted, thick, thickheaded, dense, pinheaded, birdbrained, dumb, boneheaded, silly, frivolous, asinine, harebrained, insane, mad, scatterbrained, absurd, inane, idiotic, lunatic, ridiculous, laughable, ludicrous, nonsensical, senseless, irresponsible, irrational, ill-advised, imprudent, unwise, foolhardy, half-baked, crazy, cockeyed, daft, cuckoo, balmy, insipid, dull….”

Apparently, there are so many shades of meaning to stupidity, even Mr. Roget is taxed to list them all. (One wonders if he consulted a thesaurus himself.)

When the Bible wants to emphasize the greatness of God’s love, there is no better way than mentioning His gift of a Savior, His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ Himself. “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever….” (John 3:16). And again, “We know love by this, that He laid down His life for us….” (I John 3:16).

But when Scripture wants to dramatize the lostness of man, the depth of his depravity, and the seriousness of his condition, one thing in particular stands out: the treatment the Lord Jesus received on earth.

At Pentecost, the Apostle Peter said, “This man…you nailed to a cross by the hands of godless men and put him to death” (Acts 2:23).

One day later, Peter preached, “The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of our fathers, has glorified his servant Jesus, the one whom you delivered up and disowned in the presence of Pilate, when he had decided to release him. But you disowned the Holy and Righteous One, and asked for a murderer to be granted to you and put to death the Prince of life, the one whom God raised from the dead, a fact to which we are witnesses” (Acts 3:13-15).

Why did they do this? Peter said, “I know that you acted in ignorance, just as your rulers did also” (3:17).

He did everything except tell them they acted out of stupidity.

Preaching to his executioners on the theme of the historical rejection of their Saviors by the Jews, Stephen came to the climax of his message: “You men who are stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears are always resisting the Holy Spirit; you are doing just what your fathers did” (Acts 7:51).

It’s places like this where Eugene Peterson is at his best. In his paraphrase called The Message, Stephen says, “And you continue, so bullheaded! Calluses on your hearts, flaps on your ears! Deliberately ignoring the Holy Spirit, you’re just like your ancestors.”

Such straight talk is a rarity these days. And for good reason–it got Stephen killed. That’s a high price to pay for speaking the truth.

I’m told that some of the modern celebrity preachers–no need to call names here; readers will know–who can be seen on television around the clock have decided that there is no need to deal with people’s sins. “They already know they are sinners,” one was quoted as saying recently. “Let’s tell them the good news.”

So they ladle out pleasant words of hope and faith and love to a people who drink it in as though they knew this was what they deserved all along if the other preachers had just known.

The prophet had a word on this, too: “They have healed the brokenness of my people superficially, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ but there is no peace” (Jeremiah 6:14). (Repeated in Jeremiah 8:11 also.)

No news is good news until it addresses the wrongs it would put right.

Before the doctor could pronounce me free from cancer, he had to do surgery on my tongue and prescribe six weeks of daily radiation. Had he looked at the shiny substance under my tongue and chosen to ignore it out of a desire not to make me uncomfortable, I would be dead today.

I can’t speak for your doctor, but mine does not mind making his patients uncomfortable. Nor does my dentist, who incidentally, found the cancer in my mouth. These men deal with the ugliness in their patients’ lives in order that they might live. The pain they inflict is necessary to get to the healing process and a small price to pay for us to go on living.

Idolatry, the Old Testament prophets minced no words in saying, is stupid.

“Who would not fear Thee, O Lord; Thou art great, and great is Thy name in might. Who would not fear Thee, O King of the nations? Indeed it is thy due! For…there is none like Thee. But they are altogether stupid and foolish in their discipline of delusion–their idol is wood” (Jeremiah 10:7-8).

Later, on the same subject, Jeremiah adds, “All mankind is stupid; devoid of knowledge; every goldsmith is put to shame by his idols…” (51:17 NASB).

Well, that was just the Old Testament prophets, right? The New Testament lets us off easier, right? Hardly.

These are the words of our Lord:

“In their case (i.e., those rejecting Jesus and His message), the prophecy of Isaiah is being fulfilled, which says, ‘You will keep on hearing, but will not understand; you will keep on seeing but will not perceive; For the heart of this people has become dull, and with their ears they scarcely hear and they have closed their eyes lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with their hearts and return and I should heal them'” (Matthew 13:14-15).

Of false teachers in the early church, the Apostle Peter said, “…angels who are greater in might and power do not bring a reviling judgment against them before the Lord. But these, like unreasoning animals, born as creatures of instinct to be captured and killed, reviling where they have no knowledge, will in the destruction of those creatures also be destroyed….”

Peter likens them to Balaam “who loved the wages of unrighteousness, but he received a rebuke for his own transgression; for a dumb donkey, speaking with the voice of a man, restrained the madness of the prophet” (II Peter 2:11-16).

The prayer of the Apostle Paul for the people of the Lord was that they might “prove yourselves to be blameless and innocent, children of God above reproach in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you appear as lights in the world” (Philippians 2:15).

We who are commissioned as “lights in the world” must give up our naivete. We must quit expecting the lost to act like they are saved. We must stop addressing the destructive behavior of the world and deal with the underlying problem of their lostness.

People need a Savior. There is One, that’s the best news: the Lord Jesus Christ.

But there is only One, and that is another aspect of man’s stupidity we must deal with. Many would admit that Jesus is “a” Savior, but not “the” Savior.

“Neither is there salvation in any other. For there is no other name under Heaven given among men whereby we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).

Act in your own best interest, friend. Repent and turn your life over to Jesus. Start living for Him. It’s the smartest choice you will ever make.

Act in the best interest of your people, Pastor. Tell them the truth.

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