A Greater Sickness III: The Proper Diagnosis | Behold Your God Podcast

Welcome to the Behold Your God podcast. I'm Teddy James, content producer for Media Grazie, joined by Dr. John Snyder, pastor of Christ Church, New Albany and author of the Behold Your God study series.

Why the Coronavirus Is a Backdrop to a Greater Plague

Now, usually I open the podcast just simply saying, you know, where we are in a series or introducing a new series, but right now the world is talking about one thing and that is the coronavirus and COVID -19 and all of these things.

So if you're tired of hearing about that, let me encourage you to keep listening because that is the backdrop, but we're really talking about something much more serious. We're actually talking about a greater plague than the coronavirus.

We started this in a couple of episodes ago, but I want to remind you of that. We looked last, not last week, but the week before, we looked at a guy named William Bridge for help. And just to remind you of where we've been, he says this, what is my work this day?

And he's talking about a plague that they're experiencing in London. What is my work this day? Now, the work of this day is to trust the Lord. Later he says, but what shall we do that we may trust the Lord in this day of plague?

First of all, you must repent of your own sins. When the plague came in David's time, you know what David did, he repented. Lord says he, I have done foolishly. It is I, Lord, it is I. So go to God and tell the Lord that you do trust him and make him your dwelling place, your fortress and your refuge.

Yeah, now Bridge used those words in the mid 1600s, Puritan, for the great plague in London. But really they are good advice for us. We're not saying that the coronavirus is attached to any single decision of the United States Supreme Court, you know, any grievous thing.

There are plenty of things where we have earned God's wrath, but we are saying that in a time like this, it is good to just stop and to consider the eternally weighty matters and not to leave them just with good concepts in our mind, to live in kind of to live in a world where everything is just a spiritual concept and it's never really made practical or to live in a land of good intentions that where you never really do anything.

So what TJ and I have wanted to do is to take a few podcasts and kind of try to do what William Bridge suggests to do, to take a long, serious look at the extent and nature of sin itself and the cure to that so as to really make the most of this time.

Yeah, and let me just say this, if you're just kind of popping into the podcast, we've just happened to catch this episode, let me encourage you to go back and listen to those previous episodes because there's a lot of groundwork that's kind of laid and why is sin the greatest plague and how it parallels.

But, you know, John, what we're talking about today, our focus is gonna be those, some of those parallels between a physical virus and the virus of sin, the nature that it way, the way that it affects us.

So, but I think before we get too far into it, John, what are some of those comparisons?

How a Virus Mirrors the Deceptive Nature of Sin

Yeah, if you were attending Christ Church in New Albany, you would know that I am quite notorious for trying to give out some, you know, mathematical or scientific facts and I get them so wrong that, you know, we almost have to stop the sermon and say, why, what's so funny?

But, so I was really careful this time. I called two guys for medical statements, all right, for scientific statements. One was, is actually my oldest son who is doing a PhD in immunology. So he's all about viruses.

That's what he wants to talk about all the time. And I think it's fascinating. Then another was a doctor in our church. So I actually got two guys to make sure I didn't do this wrong. So hopefully I won't embarrass them.

But think about some of the parallels between a physical virus and the spiritual disease of sin. And when we say sin, I don't want us to leave that in kind of a vague category. So let's just give a working definition.

Living for yourself. How is a physical virus like living for yourself? So here's what they told me. A virus is, I said, well, can we see it? Well, yes, in some cases, but not with the naked eye. In fact, it's such a small infectious agent.

It is too small to be seen by most microscopes. We need an electron microscope. It's also a parasite, which means it cannot reproduce on its own. So it has to invade the body and kind of hijack our body's cells to be replicated.

And it does this by, in many ways, but one of the ways is it sneaks its own genetic material into the cell. And this tricks the body into thinking that this is not a diseased cell that needs to be put to death, but rather it's a healthy cell that should be replicated.

And the body then unknowingly spreads thousands of infected cells. And that's how the virus grows within us.

Yeah, but we do have an immune system that's designed by God to protect us against these things.

Yeah, and so I asked them about that and they told me that some viruses actually have, we could say, you know, they have strategies to deal with this. Some viruses wrap themselves in the exterior membrane of a cell that they have infected.

And it acts as kind of a mask, allowing it to hide from the immune system. Other viruses cause their host cells to downgrade the alarm signals that they would normally be sending to the immune system.

So that it makes it hard for the immune system to realize how dangerous, you know, the infection is and to respond adequately. Some viruses can hide in a cell without causing any symptoms for years, biding their time until it's safe to begin replication.

Why an Accurate Diagnosis Matters More Than Good Intentions

Yeah, I think before we get too far into it, a good place to start for us is gonna be discussing the diagnosis, right? Because we can talk about, you know, different types of viruses and different types of sins, but, you know, with the virus, it's invisible.

So we can't really see it. What we see first is always the symptoms, right? So we need to see, we need to examine the symptoms, but because so many sicknesses share symptoms, we need to go to somebody who's really qualified, who can say, okay, this set of symptoms means you have this, rather than just going to WebMD and saying, here's what I've got.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, all of us that have little kids know what it's like for mom to go online, or maybe dad, and to say, okay, my kid has these symptoms, so it must be this. But then, you know, I mean, there are a lot of options.

And if you're a loving mom, you might tend to react strongly and say, what if it's this, you know, and you think, honey, that disease is in, you know, South Africa, it doesn't come here.

Yeah, honey, we have not been across the ocean.

And we don't have that.

So why is it important now, particularly with sin, that we get the right diagnosis?

Well, if we get a wrong diagnosis, then everything we do from that point forward really is a waste. So imagine a doctor, a good doctor, earnest. I mean, he really cares about the patient. He diagnoses the patient, but he misdiagnoses the patient.

So it's a well-meaning doctor with a misdiagnosis. He's made a mistake. Now, that means that all the medicines he prescribes, they're good medicines, but they're not really gonna treat the problem because of the misdiagnosis, they're misdirected.

And if the patient goes and goes to the pharmacy, gets the medication, comes home, reads the bottles, and takes the medicine exactly as the doctor says it has to be taken. So you have a patient who is very careful to do everything the doctor said with the medication.

So you have a situation here, a well-meaning doctor, good medicine, diligent patient. But if it's a wrong diagnosis, no matter how well-meaning the doctor, no matter how earnest or diligent the patient or good the medicine, none of it will do the patient any good.

In fact, because it's a misdirected diagnosis, precious time is wasted. As the patient thinks to himself, well, I don't seem to be getting better, but I need to give the medicine a chance to work. And if it's a disease that's possibly fatal and it's spreading throughout his system while he takes the wrong medication, then really a misdiagnosis and an earnest application of a wrong diagnosis and a wrong cure ultimately is more dangerous than not knowing what you have.

Yeah, well, and all of this is, it kind of has an underlying assumption that the patient knows there's something wrong and has gone to the doctor. And I don't know that there's anybody who would say, no, there's nothing really wrong out there.

There's nothing wrong with me. There's nothing wrong with the world. We all know that there is a problem. We all know that something is wrong. But I think often where we tend to start wrong is that we think the problem is outside of us.

We think that the problem is out here somewhere and I can find the solution in here. And we even see that in the rise of what many would call Christian communities where there's this rise in mindfulness and this rise of meditation and secular meditation, not biblical meditation.

We've talked about the difference there. But you can see that because they'll say, well, if only I could get my marriage to change or if only I could get my job to be different or maybe we need a new church or maybe we need a new something.

And we try to fix these things that are outside when really the problem is internal and the solution cannot be internal. So some of the fruits of this, right? We recognize the spiritual problems and so maybe we try even a religious solution.

But the fact of the matter is, you misread the disease, you misread the cause of the disease and you miss the solution for the disease.

The Purpose Driven Life and Other False Cures

Yeah, let's take a really popular book from a couple of years ago, The Purpose Driven Life. So I don't mean this to be a particularly scathing criticism of the book. Many people bought the book and they would say there was a lot of good stuff in there.

But here's what I wanna say. Feeling purposeless, being purposeless is a symptom. It's not the root problem. And so if a person grabs up a book off the shelf because it says Purpose Driven Life and they think, you know what, I feel purposeless.

I feel like there's no reason to even get out of bed. So let me grab this book. And they take it home and think that a book on finding spiritual purpose will fix their life. Then you're only dealing with the symptoms.

If that book, if that book doesn't deal with the real root issues between man and God, then ultimately it's only like putting a Band-Aid on it. And so whether that book was sufficient or not, I think when we look at the outcome, millions and millions of Americans buy the book.

Even people that have no interest in church,.

They read the book.

We would ask ourselves, you know, 10 years later, is America a land full of millions of people with real spiritual purpose? And we probably would have to say no. So we have to be careful. Sometimes good things, good religious things are not a good cure because we haven't got the diagnosis correct.

Even when we see the symptoms, we see the right symptoms, we can still have the wrong disease. I mean, just over the last couple of weeks, how many people, now that we have the test for the coronavirus available, how many people have gone and been tested to find out, nope, you have something that's not the coronavirus?

And as a matter of fact, Stephen McCaskill, our director, he went on a trip to London, came back, had a dry cough, had some other symptoms, and the doctor said, yeah, you could have coronavirus, so let's get you tested.

Did the test, waited two days, didn't have it. Symptoms were all there. Looked like that may be the case, but it wasn't. And so, just like with the coronavirus, it's the same thing with sin. We have to have an expert diagnosis.

We need to know what's going on.

Why Sin Is Hard to Diagnose Because It Deceives and Affects Everyone

Yeah, like with the physical virus, it can be difficult to get a good diagnosis. And there are a couple of reasons that spiritually sin is pretty hard to pin down. And they might be things that kind of shock us.

The first one isn't very shocking. That is that sin is hard to really get a right understanding of. It's hard to know the true nature of sin because sin in its very nature is a very, it's a deceptive thing.

So it's, imagine a virus that enters into a man and it immediately begins to alter the way the man thinks about things. And it, or you think of a disease that enters a man and immediately every place that it spreads in the body, it has an ability to numb or to, you know, to shut down the system that would tell you something's wrong in you.

So where you ought to feel pain, you don't feel any pain. And because sin does that spiritually as it enters into a man and his life begins to fall apart and all of his friends look at him and think, man, what, why are you, you're headed down the self-destructive road.

And the man looks in the mirror and thinks, I'm just fine. It's not my problem, it's everybody else. Because sin is by nature a thing that masks itself. So it is hard to get a really a right read on sin.

Yeah, one thing that we have to realize though, is that sin is universal. It impacts everyone, everywhere. So it might surprise you to find out that, it might surprise you to find out that something that is universal and that impacts literally every human being who's ever lived can go unseen.

It can be unseen, but okay. So John, this is really silly, but imagine if there was a virus that swept humanity that made us lose our left arm. In 100 years, a couple of generations later, there hasn't been anybody with a left arm in 100 years.

Think of the difference we would see. Shirts would no longer have a sleeve. Gloves would now be sold in singles rather than in doubles. And nobody would think anything about it. So if we go all the way back to Adam and Eve, when sin entered the world, we can't, sin is simply the water we swim in and we don't realize the impact.

We're blinded really to the impact that it has on us.

Why We Need an Expert Who Has Never Yielded to Sin

Yeah, so ultimately what we find is in getting a right understanding of the nature of the spiritual pandemic of living for me, me, me against God, me against the people around me,.

Me above all.

The problem with that is when we look about for an expert to give us some advice, we need someone who has not had any contact with it. Normally, when we think about going to a doctor, so let's say that it's a surgery that you need and it's a pretty serious surgery, so like dealing with cancer or heart or brain.

And you think, okay, I don't wanna go down to Joe because Joe just got out of medical school and he just finished all that he has to do to become a doctor. He's a real doctor, but he's never done one of these.

So Joe has all the book knowledge and let's say Joe's the top of his class and everybody brags on Joe, man, top of his class. How many has he done? You're gonna be the first one. You say, okay, thanks, but no thanks.

I'm gonna go over here and what I want to hear from my doctor is this.

Who's doing your surgery?

Dr. So-and-so. Dr. So-and-so, he is our expert in this field. He's done thousands of these. He's the guy that we always go to. You think, oh, good, I want Dr. So-and-so. When we want to be treated with a physical ailment that's life-threatening, we want a guy that has the book knowledge and experience.

When it comes to an expert on the issue of sin, we need someone who knows all the facts about sin but has never, ever had personal experience with sin because, again, of what sin does to us. Sin enters into a man and immediately begins to deceive the man.

Now, let's imagine two guys sitting together and guy one, his life is, his marriage is starting to really crack up and things are just, there's a lot of pressure. So he's sitting at work with guy two and guy two is already divorced.

In fact, he's been divorced quite a few times and his present relationship, the girl he's living with is not his wife and he's always unhappy. You know, he's always looking for something to make him happy, nothing works.

So guy one says to guy two, man, my life's a mess and guy two's a good friend to him so he listens and then he just starts giving him tons of advice and you're watching the scene and you think, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, like, why are you asking him?

Like, his life, he's about, he's train wrecked a number of marriages and the relationship he's in right now is terrible. It's toxic, why do you ask him advice? Well, you think, well, but he's been through what I've been through, yeah, he's been through it and he's been deceived by sin over and over and he's made bad choices.

So when it comes to a spiritual diagnosis, we have to find an expert who knows everything about us and everything about the nature of sin but has never actually experienced sin's poisoning, deceiving influence.

C .S. Lewis has a great quote on this. He says, only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it. And Christ, because he was the only man who never yielded to temptation, he is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means, the only complete realist.

God Alone Knows Sin Perfectly and Hates It Without Compromise

Yeah, that's a great quote. God is the only realist. God is the only expert on sin because God knows the facts but has never allowed sin to enter into his existence, has never had his view of things warped, has never had that lens of self, you know, of sin in front of him.

And so

He's never been numbed like we talked about earlier.

Yeah, so he hates sin with the perfect hatred. He loves what's right with the perfect love. And he has given us a book in which he has told us the truth about sin, which is what we're gonna be looking at.

Now, before we kind of draw things together today, we wanna ask this question. In light of all that's out there that we could be looking at, and especially in light of the fact that it's a pretty gloomy time for the whole world, wouldn't it be better, wouldn't there be better topics to look at?

You know, we could look at, you know, the kindness of God. We could deal with practical issues like how to handle anxiety. I mean, that would be a really good, look at what the Bible says about anxiety.

So why look at sin? And I think the answer to that is that when we look at the truths of Scripture, think of your diet. You need a balanced spiritual diet. So if all you did was look at the ugliness of sin, I think you would get unbalanced as a Christian,.

Wouldn't be very healthy.

But if you never look at what the Scripture says about the true nature of sin, then also you become unhealthy.

The Right Order for Studying God, Ourselves, Sin, and Salvation

Yeah, but not only is diet important, but also the order in which you take that diet. I mean, if, you know, if all we wanted to have was dessert and that's what you had first and you filled up and then you're like, well, I'm gonna eat some vegetables too.

Well, you know, so dessert's not bad, but in a proper order. So, you know, I've never really, I never really saw the order put in place and discussed as precisely as when I went through Behold Your God for the first time.

And so, you know, in that you talk about God first, then we talk about us, we talk about sin, we talk about salvation, and it's in a very particular order that you go through. So as we're going through this, you know, each one built upon the truths of the last that we talked about.

So order is incredibly important.

Yeah, and that actually, that certainly was not original to me. I don't think it was probably original to the other man that I heard it from, but it was Richard Owen Roberts that was discussing that. What a man believes about God affects what he believes about himself.

And what he believes about God and himself must then affect what he believes about the nature of sin. And those three affect what a man thinks salvation is. I mean, what do you save from? And why do you need it?

I mean, all that's built on those previous things. You can get truths out of order and they're still true, and there's still value in them because they're God's truths, but they carry much less effective weight, you know.

What we want is all these truths in the right order. So when they come slamming against the life, it's like a whole train coming, impacting the life for good. And I think that we can see that there are some real benefits from taking a short but serious look at the nature of sin.

So TJ, let's run through a few of these.

Seeing How Sin Removes Its Mask, Exposes False Cures, and Deepens Holiness

Yeah, so first one of the things is that it strips the mask off of sin and temptation. One of the greatest, I think, one of the greatest strategies of sin is that it is very deceptive. And it can, even though it lies to us again and again and again, we're so tempted to say, maybe this time, maybe this time it'll tell the truth.

Maybe this time the picture that I see of the happiness I would experience by embracing this sin is actually gonna happen, come to fruition. But when we have a true understanding of sin, that mask is removed and we get to see it for how vile it truly is.

Yeah, and anybody that could see that for what it is would say like, I want nothing to do with that death and destruction. Second, like we mentioned, to get a right view of the nature of sin ought to help us deal with the temptation of false cures, kind of homespun remedies.

You're like, you know, if I just do this,.

My life will be better.

So I've been living for myself. I'm finding all these negative consequences, you know, me and my kids, me and my wife, me and my job, me at church, you know, me when I look in the mirror and I know what I am on the inside and nobody else knows.

You might try to fix that until you see how desperately sick you are, how wretched it is. And then you realize, you know what, there's no hope of me fixing this. I'm gonna have to go to someone else for the cure.

And when you see just how much has to be done, I mean, the work of God in rescuing you from sin, it does make the work of God that much more precious to you. And again, warms your heart. You see the wisdom, the power, the love of God that's behind and throughout your rescue, not just your salvation, but that ongoing rescue from sin.

Yeah, and the final benefit we really hope to see is that the Christian would see the beauty of a life of holiness. I'm not talking about keeping a bunch of rules strictly. There are rules in Scripture.

We don't want to de-emphasize that. But holiness is primarily being brought near God, brought to Him to be all His. And in this new position, this new relationship by union with Christ, I can walk as close to Him as possible.

So no longer do we want, when we see sin for what it is, no longer do we want to ask God this question. So how close can I get to that without getting in trouble? But rather, how close can I walk with you?

A friend of ours, a few years ago, passed away, a pastor. And he preached in the church here as he was coming close to the end of this earthly life, he had cancer, and he preached on the Christian looking for the return of Christ.

And he mentioned the fact that Christ has given us a robe of perfect righteousness. And he said, like John says in his first epistle, like knowing that Christ is coming, we want to keep ourselves pure.

And he just said, do you want to take that beautiful robe and go and get into the muck again with it? Well, no, as we anticipate Christ's coming, we want to keep that life clean. So a lot of benefits of seeing the truth about sin.

Why American Gospel Calls Out False Teaching by Name

There's an ideology today that uses the name gospel, but has none of the good news in it. And yet many of its ideas and doctrines are finding their way into more and more churches across America. That is why we believe the film, American Gospel, Christ Alone, is an important film for every church, family, and Christian in America to view.

The Bible is explicit. False teachers must be called out by name. I mean, Paul called out Peter, you know, the top dog. He called him out when he was acting in such a way that was out of line with the gospel.

We are exporting the very worst of what Christianity has to offer.

I'm strong, I'm healthy, I'm blessed, I'm favored. I am a victor, not a victim. I'm gonna live a long, productive, faith-filled life.

In terms of biblical Christianity, Christianity is about dying.

To learn more about American Gospel, Christ Alone, visit Mediagratia .org or click the link in the description below.

A Prayer for God to Reclaim the Human Heart

Well, TJ, one of the things that we've talked about before is the benefit we receive by reading some of the prayers of the saints that went before us. And there are a couple of great resources for that.

And you're gonna put some resource in the show notes for that. But why don't you bring our podcast to a close with a prayer by Philip Doddridge.

Oh, great, eternal, original, and author of all created beings and happiness, I adore you who has made man a creature capable of religion and taught us to say, where is God our maker? We lament that degeneracy has spread over the whole human race, which has turned our glory into shame and has rendered the forgetfulness of God, unnatural as it is, so common and so universal a disease.

Holy Father, we know it is your presence and your teaching alone that can reclaim your wondering children and impress a sense of divine things on the heart.