Of Foul Cesspools and Life Giving Springs

When God gives a person over to a reprobate mind, appalling and awful things grow in it. And while it may not be obvious at first blush, there’s a coherent, logical, and recognizable reason for why those appalling and awful things grow. Paul charts out the end result of this dreadful process for us in Romans 1:28-31, and in the very first verse in that passage he identifies that reason. There, he says that because some people didn’t see fit to keep in their minds a respectful knowledge of the God who created them, God released them to the sinful desires generated by the dark corners of those minds. In other words, God stopped striving with them for their betterment, and gave to them the very rubbish they wanted instead of him.  What followed God’s decision to give them what they wanted was a laundry list of evils that would then relentlessly govern their lives – evils like murder, deceit, ruthlessness, arrogance, untrustworthiness, unholy lusts, strife, and envy. If you remove the lamp from a room with no windows, that room grows very dark, very quickly. If you remove the heater from a house in the perpetual winter of the arctic tundra, that house will grow unbearably cold. If you remove the good people from a neighborhood, that neighborhood rots into a place of destitution and violence. If God is removed from your mind, it will breed selfish evils that will then fill your heart through a river of sewage, turning it into a cesspool of death and foul putrefaction. You may end up with an eternally bad quality of life with no God and no goodness in it.  Perhaps worst of all is that you may then take a perverted joy in leading others into the same present hell that you occupy, even though you know that the people who are doing the things that you are encouraging deserve death for doing them (Romans 1:33). When that happens, you have become loveless, inconsiderate, and evil. 

This process is always evidenced when people -- either as individuals or nations -- remove God from their personal or collective minds. In modern western society, people are numb to the killing of children through abortion, the promotion of pride for abortions, as well as pride for sexual choices which are known to be outside of God’s design for his image bearers, and a strange and twisted support for the delusion that men can be women, and that women can be men. This promotion and celebration of darkness traps people in loops of confused self-destruction which carry a kind of death to goodness and peace. This death occurs precisely because God has been either partially or wholly removed from their thinking, leaving space for all kinds of pestilence to take hold and be nourished.

In utter contrast, a person who has God in his mind is transformed to receive a heart filled with the Holy Spirit, which then leads them not into death and confusion, but into an eternal quality of life that is marked by love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, and self-control (Romans 12:1-2, Galatians 5:22-23).  Such people do not have cesspool hearts full of foul death and darkness. They have springs of life welling up inside of them, pushing out ungodly pollution as they are transformed over the course of their journey with Christ (John 4:14, Proverbs 4:23). They are resistant to confusion and delusion, and they do not celebrate or promote sin, death and darkness in others. Instead, they help people find the light so that they, too, may enjoy an eternal quality of life (1 Corinthians 14:33, Romans 10:1, Jude 1:21-23, Acts 1:8, Matthew 28:16-20).