(Click here for the full comic)
Whether Chris Harding (writer) has a Christian background or not, I can’t say but he really nails a deep truth about human nature here. (Chris will tell you that his comic is about robots, not people, so I should really say, “robot nature”) Either way, it illustrates the point I want to make.
In this strip, Mikey (left) prays to God about a situation that he’s dealing with at school. As he prays, he winds up in a dramatic dialogue (on the basis that prayer is a two-way communication, not a one-way monologue). Mikey finally ends up with this great revelation (as displayed), “How come every natural impulse I have just gets me deeper in the hole with you?”
Mikey’s great revelation is nothing new. The Bible is a testament that life without God, without Jesus simply ends up, as Mikey says, getting up deeper in the hole with God. For all the good people seek to do, it just doesn’t match up to God’s standards. As the story goes, Adam and Eve desired to have wisdom and ate from the forbidden fruit, and disobeying God in the process. God’s standards in humankind was corrupted and ever since, history is a witness, that humankind is just completely messed up.
As harsh as it may sound, humankind is incapable of good, that is, good that meets God’s standards. So, what now? Do we just give up? Fortunately, no. Fortunately, ever since Adam and Eve messed everything up for their descendents, there has been a plan to fix it all up. However, to many people’s disappointment it isn’t one that happens in an instance.
It’s not to say we don’t try. Paul writing to the church in Rome makes this statement (Romans 7:15),
“I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.”
He goes on to explain that this goes back to our corrupt nature, our sinful nature. Further he says (verses 18b-20),
“For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, 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 does it, but it is sin living in me that does it.”
It’s true, ain’t it? We do what we don’t want to do, but fail to do what we do want to do. “How come every natural impulse I have just gets me deeper in the hole with you, God?” I said earlier, this all because we live life without God. Life with God in the picture is different. Life with Jesus in the picture is different. Through the work of the Spirit of God, what we want to do can be done, what we do not want to do we do not do.
However, life is always in conflict with God. Our human tendency is to want to have our own solution and you will constantly find life, even life with Jesus, a struggle to do what is good and right. But hey, no one said life is easy.
