It's not a pleasant feeling to realize that you would be one of the Pharisees that Jesus was attacking when He was on Earth.Forget this "when he was on Earth" business: He was attacking me in the present day!
I always imagined that if I met Jesus, He would embrace me and it would be an ethereal or intimate moment.
But it seems that from what the Bible tells us about Him, He would have ridiculed me for my pride and self-righteousness.
For somebody who claims to be Christian this is a horrifying thought.
But the real horror was yet to come.
At this point of my journey, I was merely realizing how my utter conviction I was good in God's eyes was foolish and that God hates such Pride.
If I didn't change my ways, I'd be on a trip to Hell, despite all my claims to accepting Jesus Christ as my savior.
Then comes the thought: why?
Why was it wrong for me to hate sinners and the Godless? It seemed logical to be unhappy with the lousy job humanity has done to live up to His expectations.
In order to progress beyond this realization of being on the wrong side, I have to fully understand what did I do wrong, not merely know that I did wrong.
I looked at my behavior from God's Point of View.
What we know of God from the Bible is that He is unflinching in his goodwill to the spiritual well being of humanity.
When He incarnated Himself as Jesus Christ, He never harmed a fly, never made a wrong turn; was ridiculed, tortured and executed without ever raising a hand to defend Himself or stop it.
He took the world's sins that were heaped on him; He didn't hate back.
I then though of that Myth of Violence: the projection of my own un-Godliness on others and hating them to make myself good in the eyes of God.
This is where the true horror began.
To merely discover that you may go to Hell is one thing, but to actually see in nakedness the evil that I have committed is by far the most horrifying thing I've experienced.
To be honest, it totally blew away any fright Hell put into me; possibly because I understood I deserved Hell for being so evil.
I hated people. Hated them!
I mentally killed each person who never said "Excuse me" when they butted in front of me; I mentally executed those who disobeyed God; and I mentally tortured those fools who supported views without even understanding what they were talking about.
What despicable thing I was!
Taking it upon myself to punish people for not being Godly.
Even worse, that wasn't quite the case: I was hating people for not being like me.
Why was I the model of this excellence? Because I became convinced that I was God, or close enough to for the mistaken identity.
Talk about foolishness!
What is very important to understand is that I did not think quite this way when I was a Pharisee.
That is the nature of evil: it deceives you and dresses up evil acts and thoughts as good.
We humans fall for the deception all the time and truly believe we are good.
My folly was basically identical to those of the Liberal Humanists.
What then, now?
Am I doomed?
No.
Thank God (the phrase has never been more truly stated)!
There are always second chances. No strike outs in God's game of baseball. No Game Overs.
This much is very clear, even to those who aren't religious: one of Jesus' main teachings is that anyone can be forgiven, anyone can change their ways no matter what.
Whew.
But how?
I was still in a state of self-hatred.
The evils that I projected on others came back to me ten-fold and now I was more loathsome than ever.
I saw clearly that I was a horrible human being, as un-Godly as they come. The mere thought of God's goodness brought shudders to my body, for His goodness is brilliant power and my evil is like a rotting frame.
C.S. Lewis, strangely enough, talks about this in Mere Christianity when he addresses the question over why some Christians are nasty people.
His argument is that merely being "nice" is not the measure of Christianity, for there are nice atheists and if a Christian's goal is to be nice like the atheist, than Christianity is merely to be as good as a human can be good on his own (168-169).
This is illogical since the very core of Christianity is that we need a savior; we need a God to show us how bad we are and that we can't be truly good without him.
The niceness of an atheist is not that true goodness, but merely the result of a fortunate and comfortable life in which the atheist has no need to be angry with people.
Lewis than illustrates how it is the nasty Christian who is in better shape than the nice atheist: when they die and are judged, would not the atheist's reaction be "Look how good I was! I didn't even believe in you and yet I am good like you!"
The nasty Christian, being at least faithful and aware of his sinfulness would say "I'm not worthy. Please have mercy, for I failed you."
Which one would go to Heaven?
Jesus Himself gives us the answer in "The Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector":
"...all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted." (Luke 18: 9-14)
I suspect Lewis was intentionally remaking Jesus' parable for it tells the same story: a pharisee who met God and thought he was good enough to get in versus a tax collector who convinced by the culture around him understood himself to be sinful and unworthy.
Suddenly, that famous Beatitude makes sense: "Blessed are the Poor in Spirit"
Allow Lewis to explain:
If [nasty people] make any attempt at goodness at all, they learn, in double quick time, that they need help. It is Christ or nothing for them...They are the lost sheep; He came specially to find them. They are...'poor': He blessed them. (169)Christianity states that the world and its people are inherently Fallen, which means we are easily deceived into being evil.
Hence nobody is good and worthy on their own; that is exactly why we need a savior. That is why believing in Christ is so important: it's not merely to believe He existed, but to believe His existence is the only way we can be justified in God's eyes, not by our own means.
It is the "Poor in Spirit" who have the best chance of understanding this. Nice and happy people don't realize they need anything else; they are sitting pretty. It's the lowly of us who are acutely aware of how messed up we are and how we can't do a thing about it.
People of this sort are blessed because they are privileged to experience the joy of being saved by God Himself!
At this point in my journey, my horror began to fade away.
No.
It was blown away.
The very brilliant power of God that shamed by evil soul, breathed new life into it.
The Hell of knowing how evil I am was eradicated by God's love.
I was on my knees desperate for help; desperate for salvation. God reached down, grabbed my hand and told me to get up.
Get up for what?
First, simply to experience the awesome beauty that is God himself.
I thought being pious to the un-Godly was a good feeling? That was nothing compared to the indescribable joy of feeling God's unforgiving love.
I didn't deserve salvation. I did the dirty deeds and should have gone to Hell for it. But God loves me, loves me enough to berate me as Jesus berated the Pharisees, not to punish but to educate me of my true evil.
Once I recognized that evil and did not resist what God was revealing to me, God's love for me manifested itself as mercy: get up, you are not condemned but saved by your own admittance to needing supernatural intercession.
What a feeling!
The feeling that God Himself forgave me despite being just about the most loathsome example of a human being.
Even in my sinister and diseased state, He cared enough for me to not overlook that I was deceived and capable of improving.
I used the word "supernatural" earlier quite specifically.
By natural law, I deserve to go to Hell and hence it makes no use to rectify myself by suddenly being good.
By definition, it is supernatural for me to be excused of this.
By the Law of Moses, I should have lived the rest of my days in shame and penance in order to exalt the goodness of God.
But God has better plans than for us to retreat from life and resort to apologizing over and over again.
He is by definition "supernatural"; His ways are "supernatural"; and when He touches you with His grace the way He touched me, you are then called upon to be "supernatural".
What does this mean? Are we to be superheroes?
Not quite.
We are to be what C.S. Lewis called the "New Man"; the next step in human evolution. "Not mere improvement but Transformation" like a horse into Pegasus (171)
We are called upon to transform into a new version of man that does things we previously couldn't do, much like a horse who can now fly.
It is not so much a condition of God's grace, but merely the result of the grace. Much like how growth is the result of hormones, rather than the condition.
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