The other day I was watching this show on TV about Charles Manson, and they were replaying clips from an interview with him from twenty years ago. There’s no doubt that the guy is crazy… enough drugs will do that, but it was still very interesting to hear what he had to say. I think that if he was brought up in a good environment and didn’t get messed up on drugs that he would have probably become one of the great thinkers of our day. I know… it sounds crazy and very controversial, but I think it’s true. How did someone like him turn into a cult leader whose followers committed murder? How did such a smart man become entangled in so much sin? There are two basic views of humanity. One says that everyone is basically good, and wants to do good things. The other view say that everyone is born evil and wants to sin. Well which is it? If its a mix of the two then are we good people who sin or sinful people who do good? It’s easy to say that Hitler and Manson were evil people and that we’re good people, but were they always that way? And are we always that way? Maybe the answer is in itself a paradox. Perhaps we are born with desire to do something, to have something or be someone… and this desire is neither good or bad. Lets call this the X Factor for now. (lame term… but keep tracking) Suppose that the X Factor is something good. Now lets suppose that it’s also a person… so a someone rather than a something. If we want to be like the X Factor then we have to be good, but there’s a danger. At some point we can start to want what the X Factor has and so we find our selves playing the roll of the X Factor without being like the X Factor.If your completely confused then substitute the X Factor with God. God is good. People want to be like God. (we’re basically good) But some times we want what God has… the universe, control, all that stuff. People want to be God. (we’re basically evil) So you see that your on your perspective of God determines weather everyone is basically good or bad… or both.
So obviously it’s a good thing to want to be like God in his character, but why do we sin? Why do we try to be God? Why do we fall?
Playing God leads to Chaos Theory… The idea behind chaos theory is that everything moves from order to disorder. I think that this has been the natural progression of everything on earth since the fall. The further we get from God, the more crazy things on earth become. Playing God and trying to do everything without his help doesn’t work so well either, as we saw in Bruce Almighty. But while the earth and everything on it is moving towards chaos and sin we still have another force with much greater power opposing it. Obviously I’m talking about LOVE… not the sappy kind you get in romance novels in the grocery store but the kind of love that’s full of truth, sacrifice and God. To live out this lifestyle is to live in the Kingdom of God rather than the chaos. I simply call it Kingdom Theory… the ongoing restoration of the world by the way we live. It’s up to us to take all the chaos and sin and transform them into life and truth. So we need Kingdom theory to reverse the process, but how do we practically live in the Kingdom? At the xrds fall retreat (Equip 07) I’ll be discussing this topic in more detail.
