Turn Away!

“To what shall we compare the Kingdom of God, or what parable can we use for it? It is like a mustard seed that, when it is sown in the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on the earth. But once it is sown, it springs up and becomes the largest of plants and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the sky can dwell in its shade.” Mark 4:30-32

Most of our ideas begin from something small. Most projects, plans, businesses, organizations, heroes, etc. start out like Jesus’ mustard seed. In the first reading about King David and Bathsheba from 2 Samuel 11:1-17, we see that David’s terrible sin against God started when he remained in his palace instead of going with his army out on campaign. After his siesta, he strolled about lazily on the roof and saw a beautiful woman bathing. Instead of looking away, he asked about her and invited her into his room. She became pregnant and he devised all sorts of plans for her husband, a faithful soldier, to lie with Bathsheba. When Uriah did not do so, David took the irrevocable step of having him murdered. David was a man “after God’s own heart”. How could he conceive of such a dastardly deed? 

“True, I was born guilty, ​a sinner, even as my mother conceived me,” King David acknowledges in Psalm 51:5. I listened to Dr. Clay Jones on YouTube speaking about the depths of human depravity. He is with the Christian Apologetics program at Talbots Seminary, and the author of “Why Does God Allow Evil?” Dr. Jones studied genocide, the Japanese atrocities in Nanking China in 1937 where sons were forced to rape their mothers, the Holocaust where millions of Jews, dissidents and homosexuals were systematically murdered by the German Nazi regime between 1933 to 1945, and other evils. He concluded that those who commit genocide are not inhuman monsters but it is the average members of the population who commit the horrendous evil. Just as those who approve of the abortion of 60 million babies, pulling babies’ legs or suctioning them or scraping them out while still alive are ordinary people like you and me. How is that possible? 

Goodness or evil starts small, starts from a seed. We have to be very careful what we allow to grow in the fertile soil of our heart and our mind. What kind of ideas do we entertain? We need to be vigilant against temptations that are offered to us from the books we read, the shows we watch, the sites we visit on the internet. We may think, “Oh I’m just going to take a peep! No harm can come out of it.” Unfortunately many people have gotten into serious trouble from just that attitude. By the grace of God, we should snip the pesky seductions in the bud and turn away.