Today’s Daily Lesson comes from 1 Samuel chapter 2 verses 2 and 3:
2 ‘There is no Holy One like the Lord,
no one besides you;
there is no Rock like our God.
3 Talk no more so very proudly,
let not arrogance come from your mouth;
for the Lord is a God of knowledge,
and by him actions are weighed.
“No one is good but God alone,” Jesus said.
So here is a call for greater humility and for greater honesty about all the mixed motives and impurities found in even the best of our actions. This means no one person or nation or race truly wears a white hat.
The moment we see this about ourselves and own people groups is the moment of wisdom. It is not altogether a moment of freedom, but it is a dawning of consciousness: “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” So we have a shadow side.
Reinhold Niebuhr wrote: “The final enigma of history is therefore not how the righteous will gain victory over the unrighteous, but how the evil in every good and the unrighteousness of the righteous is to be overcome.”
It is an enigma because most of the time we are not even aware of it. We do not see it. In all our justifying, and separating of good and bad and right and wrong, we fail to be conscious of the fact that what Augustine said is true: the line dividing good and evil runs straight down the human heart.
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