A Choice You Don’t Have to Make

I want to ask you a question. Can you be tempted into being good?  Can anybody be tempted into being good?  Think about that and we’ll get back to it before long.  Notice, I did not ask, “Can a person be tempted into doing something that is good,” but rather, can the person be tempted into being good?

A sad but true fact is that when looked at from the opposite side, it’s ridiculous to even ask the question, “Can a person be tempted into being evil?”  The devil, if he wishes to cause people to be unrighteous, and he does, has all kinds of tricks up his sleeve.  He has a virtually unlimited arsenal of “tools of the trade” he can use against us to try to bring us down. 

Being the devil, you see, means he has never agreed to play by any rules.  Being the epitome of evil he would by his very nature break any rule that he agreed to play by anyway.  We’ve all seen movies or read stories in which a person barters with the devil and in the course of events the person and the devil engage in some kind of gentlemanly negotiation in which the person ends up trading their souls for some ability, or thing, that the devil grants to them up until the time he claims their soul. You have probably heard or read the story, “The Devil and Daniel Webster.” I remember a book about the New York Yankees, the title of which I will not print, in which the hero is given incredible baseball abilities sufficient to lift his team over the Yankees and to the championship. Most likely you know the song by Charlie Daniels, “°The Devil Went Down to Georgia.”  These  may be  enjoyable stories but every one of them has a problem.  The devil is no gentleman. He is the lowest of the low.  He doesn’t bargain with you up front and honestly.  He uses dishonest tricks to take you to Hell with him.  He is pathetic, disgusting slime.  You can’t trust him.

Our first encounter with the devil in the Bible is in Genesis 3.  You all know the story.  We read how Eve was deceived.  She was lied to.  She had a picture painted for her that was not true.  And when I think about the devil doing this, something I see that shows us what a terrible creature he is, is the fact that he literally had nothing to gain from what he was doing.  Oh, he could destroy God’s created being, Eve, but this really didn’t bring anything into the devil’s possession that he didn’t already have .  It didn’t get him out of the situation he was already in, or change it in any way.  It just made Eve’s situation worse.  She listened to his lies and they sounded good.  She visualized his word picture and it made things look good, and she acted on the perceptions she got from the devil and it changed her life in a terrible way.  Then Adam followed suit, and of course achieved the same result.

The Bible admits sin can be pleasurable (Hebrews 11:25) but that doesn’t make it good or right. Sin will separate you from God and Heaven (Isaiah 59:1-2.) That is precisely why God doesn’t want you doing it, and precisely why the devil does want you doing it. And since it can be pleasurable, it can be tempting.

Sin will come at you in that convenience store when you are so hungry and you’re craving chocolate, and maybe even some nuts and caramel, and you look all around the store and you can’t find the clerk, and there are no other customers and you realize - you are the only one in there, and you don’t have enough money for that king size Snickers, but there it sits in a tray right by the door and if you took it no one would ever know and you sure would like to have it.

In school, sin will be calling you from the desk just to the right of you where sits the smartest person in the class and you didn’t have time to study last night for this test (and it really wasn’t your fault, no really) and you are hanging on to your “A” by the skin of your teeth, and you could keep it if you could just copy a couple of those answers from that paper onto your paper, and you need this grade so bad.

Sin will be smiling at the young man from the face of that beautiful girl that he’s alone with in that car and he has plenty of time before he has to have her home and she seems willing, hey, she seems willing and he has thought of a moment like this before and now here he is and here she is.  I’m pretty sure there is a vice versa in that situation as well.

Sin is tempting. If you want to be righteous, you have to make a choice.  Joshua had to make a choice to follow God when the spies came back to report, or his words in Joshua 24:15 wouldn’t have meant anything.  Joseph had to make a choice when he was alone with Potiphar’s wife in Genesis 39.  If you want to be good, or righteous, you have got to actively make a choice to actively follow God. Or you will not be righteous.  And that’s the answer to the question we started with.

A person cannot be tempted into being good, or righteous.  Temptation implies that there is something in it for you.  If you are tempted, you perform the result of your temptation because of the benefit you see coming to you.  I can tempt a person into doing something good.  That’s not hard.  For example, “I’ll give you $10 if you’ll load this lady’s groceries in her car for her.” You weren’t going to do it, but when I dangled $10 in front of you, it looked good, just like the fruit Eve saw, and so because of the promise that there was a benefit for you, you did something good. 

But that did not make you good.  Paul, in Philippians 1:15-18, spoke of people who were actually preaching the gospel, but doing it for the wrong reason.  It was good that people might be saved, but the preachers were not righteous.  They were, in fact, evil.  Paul also tells us in 1 Cor. 13:1-3 that no matter how good the things we are doing are, we are not righteous if we are not doing them for the right reason.

So doing good and being good are two different things.  The difference is that if you truly want to be good, or righteous, the only reason you have for doing it is because it is good, because it is righteous.  There is not one single reward of any kind in this world that you are considering.  You do what you do and you are what you are simply because it is the right thing to do and to be. That is when you are good.  That is the only way you are righteous.  Now I don’t mean to discount the fact that our only real hope of righteousness comes through Jesus, but I’m speaking of whatever part we can actually play in being good.  And you have to choose to be good.  It won’t just happen.

Imagine many years ago, a time when the countryside was mostly farmland.  Not houses, not apartment complexes and people and congestion.  Farms. Cotton farms. And you’re sitting on a wooden fence that runs along the road.  Across the road is a cotton field and its fall, harvest time.  Off in the distance in that field you see several hired hands filling their sacks with cotton.  But just across the road from you a bunch of local scoundrels take over the cotton field with their sacks.  They pick through the field unorganized, loading their sacks, trashing the plants, and run off down the road into an untended field with weeds and bushes and they just scatter the cotton all over the untended field. What do you think as you watch?  I think the proper response would be outrage at such behavior, and the desire to see them brought to justice.

In Matt. 12:30, Jesus said, “He who does not gather with me scatters abroad.”  Sitting on the fence watching thieves and being outraged does no good.  If you are not in there working with the good guys, Jesus says you are the same as, you are equal to, the bad guys.  Too many people think that if you’re not trying to be bad, that’s good enough.  There is no such thing as, “I’m not trying to be bad, so I’m good.”  That’s not how it is. That’s not what Jesus said. The fact of life for very many people is, “I’m not trying to be good, so I’m bad.”  That is how Jesus said it works in Matt. 12:30.  There is no such thing as sitting on the fence being good.  Jesus said, ‘If you are not in the field doing the work, you are identical to pathetic creatures that would destroy a farmer’s field just to watch him suffer for it.” It pains me to notice this, but I can’t help it now. I already noticed it.  The space between those who scatter abroad, that destroy a crop for the thrill of destroying it, and the one who tempted Eve for no other reason than to bring her down is not very big.  And Jesus said if you’re not in the field doing the work, you’re just like that kind.

Evil will push you. It will pull you, It will frighten you, ridicule you, pressure you and everything else you into being evil.  Good/righteousness, by its very nature can’t do any of that because you can only be good by choosing it.  By the very nature of righteousness/goodness, it requires that you are good, you are righteous, because you choose to be good only for the sake of being good. 

But being evil is a choice you don’t have to make.  You will be evil if you do not choose to be good.  In the wishy-washy world we live in I know that sounds a little harsh.  I would love to be able to soften it up a little bit, to put some cushioning around the edges.  But God in His infinite wisdom and power can’t change the nature of righteousness.  Being evil is easy.  Anybody can do it.  It doesn’t take one iota of grit, determination, will-power or anything else to give in to all those temptations in which people around you in the world are reveling.  In fact, you don’t even have to give in to those temptations.  Just simply don’t do what is good.

That’s all it takes to equal them.  They are water running headlong down a hillside with no sense of purpose.  You don’t even have to make a choice to be like them.

You have to make a choice to be like God.  This is where the hard work comes in.  Jesus knew that when He said “Strait is the gate and narrow is the way that leases to life.  Broad is the gate and wide is the way that leads to destruction.”  Making that choice means you will have to study to find out what that choice is really all about (2 Tim. 2:15).  It means you will have to attend (Heb. 10:25), associate with, and be encouraged by others who have made that same choice, (Acts 2:42-47.) You will have to pray (1 Thess 5:17), and worship (Col. 3:15-17) to maintain a close relationship with God and His Son who is the ultimate source of any righteousness you are able to attain (1 Cor. 1:30-31). You will have to work for the good of others and be an influence for others who are trying to stay on top of the mountain.

It’s not about choosing between two items; are you going to choose good or are you going to choose evil.  There is only one choice. Are you going to choose good? Because if you don’t choose good, you are already evil (Matt. 12:30.) What I’m hoping is that we will all make the choice for now, and tomorrow, and next week, and every day to be what is right simply because it is right, knowing that it will be a difficult path, but that God will enable us to succeed.