We are used to thinking of Job’s friends being pretty useless as encouragers to a man who has lost everything in life but one of them, Bildad, asks one of the central questions of the Bible: ‘How . . . can a man be righteous before God? How can one born of woman be pure?’ (Job 25: 4) If God is ‘holy’, perfect in His being, how is it possible for any human being to be comfortable in His presence, to live in peace with Him? Our instinct so often is quite simply to live our lives as best we can, cultivate the best qualities, in the hope that in the end the scales will tip more towards the good.
Nick Hornby’s novel How To Be Good shows that this instinct can be powerful even in the lives of people who do not aspire to any faith in God. Young, gifted, well-off they may be but they will not be satisfied unless they can think of themselves as ‘good.‘ The tragedy is that that they never quite get there. There is always something that comes in the way of complete reassurance, a negative reaction to someone, a moral failure, a selfish aspiration. At one point the narrator, Katie, seems to get an inkling that this ‘goodness’ is not something that she can accomplish on her own:
‘When I look at at my sins (and if I think they’re sins, then they are sins), I can see the appeal of born-again Christianity. I suspect that it’s not the Christianity that is so alluring; it’s the rebirth. Because who wouldn’t wish to start all over again?’
Mind you, we have to be clear about this ‘starting all over again’. Coming to faith in God through Christ does not mean that our struggles with ourselves are over. No one was more clear about that than Paul. In Romans 7 he speaks openly about the civil war raging within his being:
‘For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.’ (Romans 7: 18-20)
Remember this is Paul the Apostle! Being dragged into the darkness by his ‘sinful nature.‘ The impossibility of ever being regarded as ‘good’ strikes him deeply:
‘What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?’ (Romans 7: 24).
Sometimes we need to be brought up against the impossibility of ever being able to save ourselves from the worst of ourselves. And this is what Paul is experiencing in this moment. Thankfully he knows the answer:
‘Thanks be to God - through Jesus Christ our Lord!’ (Romans 7: 25)
His death has covered our sins, paid the price for our sins, made it possible for us to live at peace with God, and trusting in His death has opened the way for the Holy Spirit to dwell within us and take us towards that pattern of Christ-likeness God cherishes for all His people.
‘He died that we might be forgiven,
He died to make us good,
That we might go at last to heaven
Saved by His precious blood.’
