In Eden, before sin changed everything, Adam and Eve knew only one heart condition. Their hearts were always and only at peace with the Creator. They also were at peace with his creation, and with each other. In absolute terms, everything was right in those relationships. God provided for their every need. They lacked nothing and desired nothing more than to be in their Creator’s favor and to share the joy of being in his presence and in each other’s company.
Then they fell into the abyss of sin, and we suddenly see a new human need emerge. For the first time, Adam and Eve struggled to justify their behavior. Something was telling them they must explain themselves and account for the choices they had made. First they hid. When that failed, Adam deferred to his nakedness as an excuse for hiding. Finally, they took turns playing the blame game. Adam blamed the woman. Eve claimed the serpent was her downfall. Their defense was hollow, feeble, and contrived. But their defense was also significant. Justifying disobedience would become a hallmark of every succeeding generation. All of humanity is now hardwired with the same moral circuitry for blaming others.
We are accountable—to God, and to one another. A conscience, distorted by sin and quickened in the fall, still demands that we justify the immoral things we say and do. But making wrong behaviors right again is far beyond a sinner’s reach.
A heart at war always faces a great risk. The odds that we will despise the enemy, hate him, curse him, lie about him, and seek to destroy him are exceedingly high. One best-selling secular book about conflict says, “When I am seeing others crookedly, what I need in that moment is justification, and I’ll get it any way I can.” Even when the choice to engage is honorable and just, the engagement itself tends to lead us to embrace actions and behaviors that are not. The same source adds, “The more sure I am that I have been mistreated, the more likely I am to miss ways that I have mistreated others myself. My need for justification obscures the truth.”
Not so for a heart that is at peace. To understand how this works, we need to take a closer look at the word justify. Picture a bricklayer, busily constructing a wall. A tautly stretched string marks a straight line for the bricklayer to follow. If his line of bricks does not match the line established by the string, he must find a way to justify it—to make it right again.
But what if the bricklayer is blind? Then it will be impossible for him to change a crooked wall back into a straight one.
The human inclination to fix the crooked line of sin by ourselves is a powerful internal influence, even when the goal is not at all realistic. Our view of the life we need to justify is blinded by sin. Left to our own efforts, that life is doomed to remaining crooked. But that doesn’t stop us from trying.
When our hearts are at war, we are like the bricklayer. We instinctively look for ways to make our wrongs appear to be right—to justify our words and actions. In fact, we can’t stand living with ourselves until we can find ways to validate our behaviors.
For sinners—people for whom the truth is always a relative matter—there are a number of strategies that seem to suit our purposes. However, they really don’t justify anything. These strategies only leave the appearance of being justified. But for some of us that may be enough to satisfy the insatiable hunger.
One simple response is to pretend that the walls of our lives are perfectly straight, even when we know they are not. Or we could ignore the fact of God and try to believe that he doesn’t exist. Without God, it would only be necessary to pull the wool over the eyes of our neighbors, something most of us have been doing since long before the age of puberty. Of course, there is a God; and he is very savvy about what goes on in our pretend lives. He does not buy the act. God knows a crooked line when he sees one.
If eliminating God seems a little extreme, maybe we can convince ourselves (and others) that he is no longer relevant or that he doesn’t really mean what he says. These strategies work if one can somehow ignore the eternal consequences of violating the boundaries that a loving God has set for us and our neighbors.24God fences us off from many dangers and pitfalls by placing the whole human race under the same laws. These are reasonable laws. They are just. Without them, a civil society could not last a day.
I may be able to justify my at-war words and actions by acting as if I am above the law. Then I am not required to answer for the bad choices I make. In the real world, even kings and princes are consigned to living under God’s law, though they may not always like it.
Have you ever tried using some of these strategies? They may work when we are trying to justify our actions to other people. They never work with God.
While the need to be justified is true of every crooked behavior, it is especially true for those behaviors that occur when relationships turn sour.
Excerpt from Heart At Peace: Biblical Strategies for Christian Conflict, 2014 Northwestern Publishing House. All rights reserved.