I am incessantly amazed at how perfect, wonderful and beautiful the world we live in is, and the older I get, the more I am learning to appreciate the smaller things in life that I rarely paid attention to before, from the beautiful blue sky to the wet and rainy days; from the green trees to the beauty found in the most arid desert. On Sunday during his sermon, Terry played Louis Armstrong's tear-jerking song What a Wonderful World. One would be hard pressed to think of a better way to describe the wondrous creation of our God:

I see trees of green, red roses too
I see them bloom for me and you
And I think to myself: "What a wonderful world!"

I see skies of blue and clouds of white
The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night
And I think to my self: "What a wonderful world!"

The colors of the rainbow so pretty in the sky
Are also on the faces of people going by
I see friends shaking hands saying "How do you do."
They really say: "I love you!"

I hear babies crying I watch them grow
They'll learn much more than I'll ever know
And I think to myself: "What a wonderful world!"
Yes, I think to myself: "What a wonderful world!"

While a beautiful song should not be used to create theological constructs, it can at certainly prompt us to adopt a positive mind-set and view the world through the positive lens which I believe God intended us to use. It can also help us ponder the question “How is it that two different people can wake up in the morning, look at the falling rain and one say ‘What a great day’ while the other says ‘What a horrible day?’”

It so happened that I was thinking about a lot of these things while I was studying Judaism and the Jewish culture; I am even on a “waiting list” at a local synagogue to take some classes on Judaism and learn more about the culture and traditions of the Jewish people, as modern as they may be, hoping that they will help me understand God and his word better.

But one thing that just stuck with me throughout my conversations and studies was the outburst of positive thinking and joy for life coming from all Jewish people both in writing and in person. And of course, this seriously contradicts the Christian idea that man is inherently bad and is the evil refuse of the entire Creation. This should be especially relevant to Preterists since we are so good at using Judaic tradition to justify our eschatology and put the Scripture into a proper historical and cultural context.

In his introductory book to Judaism, David C. Gross writes: “Jewish tradition does recognize that people are born with two opposing life forces: the inclination to do good (yetzer tov) and the equally powerful inclination to commit evil (yetzer ra). By obeying the laws of Judaism, which encompass every aspect of a person’s life, from morning through the night, every day of the year, a person can be helped to avoid evil and do good.”[1]

This reference to man’s “neutral” nature or freedom to equally choose good or evil is what first prompted me to dig deeper into Jewish writings and try to learn more about how Jewish people saw man’s sinfulness and “sin nature.” But I quickly ran into a rather big problem; there was nothing to study! I found exactly zero reference in Rabbinical writings regarding the modern Christian concept of “sin nature.” My efforts were frustrated even more by the fact that there seems to be a tendency within Jewish thought to assume the exact opposite, namely that man is inherently good, possessing a “divine spark” within himself so that “each man, should nurture and develop that spark by living his own life individually, uniquely, so as to reach the highest possible plateaus towards Godliness.”[2]

An even more powerful picture regarding man’s true nature is depicted by Arthur Hertzberg when he writes, “Sin is rebellion against God, but more seriously yet, Judaism considers it the debasement of man’s proper nature. Punishment is therefore not primarily retribution; it is chastisement, as a father chastises his children, to remind them of their proper dignity and character.”[3]

I was very much pleasantly surprised to see how Jewish people understand the problem of sin and sinfulness; rather than exaggerating the obvious reality that all men sin, Judaism takes a balanced approach to the problem, encouraging all men to sincerely repent, recognizing that God is gracious and forgiving towards all men of faith. Does this not truly parallel what Paul was saying regarding Abraham in Romans 4:9, "Faith was credited to Abraham as righteousness." Of course, Paul was actually quoting Genesis where we read about Abraham “…then he believed in the LORD; and He reckoned it to him as righteousness.”[4]

What we therefore observe in Judaism, is not a casual attitude towards sin, but a view that appears to be different than what many Christians hold to today. Sin was not something to which man was born subservient to, rather something that has altered our true nature: “Repentance is therefore in Hebrew teshuvah, returning, man’s turning back to his truest nature.”[5] How can then modern Christianity allow the creation of such a malformed concept of sin and sinfulness that we begin to perceive even newborn babies and children and wicked sinners? Rabbi Menahem Mendel of Kotzk wrote eloquently “My hope is that you do not sin, not because it is forbidden, but because there is not enough time.” He again reinforces the idea that sin is something one commits, not something which is enslaving us against our will.

The fact that Judaism lacked the idea of an inherent sin nature was also noticed by Mircea Eliade when he writes “…the yester ha-ra is no radical evil but a permanent temptation, there is here no servum arbitrium or original sin in the sense of an inherited corrupt nature.”[6] In his classic dualistic way of understanding most religions (as I have written before on the topic of the sacred and the profane) Eliade also observed that “Israel understands the profane as being in analogy with the sacred…thus is the notion of sin oriented toward a liturgical understanding. To the microcosmic concentration of the liturgy in the Temple of Jerusalem corresponds the macrocosmic liturgy of the world with man at its center…thus there is in the Bible no theory of sinfulness, but, very practically, there are sins, a thousand and one ways to go astray from an existence whose whole raise d’etre is to be holy. Here the realism is such that sins corrupt the whole heart, which therefore must be replaced by a pure heart, and not only on the individual level but, eschatologically and actually on the communal level when all Israel is made ‘new,’ ‘whole,’ ‘holy.’”[7]

So what we observe in the Jewish mind is a very plain understanding of sin and sinfulness. Sin is an action, the doing of the sinner; the sinner sins. Indeed just as Eliade rightly noted, Judaism was consistent in both professing an inherently neutral nature of man, and an inevitable “falling-away” process of all men which could be restored through a life of following the Torah: “…there is not a righteous man on earth who continually does good and who never sins.”[8] Free-will is therefore prevalent throughout Rabbinical teaching and it is being emphasized strongly to this day. Abraham Cohen writes: “Inasmuch as the evil impulse is an inherent and indispensable part of man’s constitution, is he not bound to sin? To this question the Rabbis gave an emphatic negative answer.”[9] In the Talmud, no mention is made of the righteous or wicked future of a person when the angel Lailah, who is the angel appointed over conception takes a seminal drop and brings it before God to ask “Sovereign of the Universe! What is to become of this drop? Is it to develop into a person strong or weak, wise or foolish, rich or poor? But no mention is made of its becoming wicked or righteous.”[10] Ultimately, the Rabbis simply explain the apparent conflict between free-will and God’s foreknowledge easily as I have often said it before: “Everything is foreseen (by God), yet freedom of choice is given.”[11]

The power of God believing in you

So why should we be concerned at all with how Jewish people viewed sin and sin-nature? My answer to that question is twofold. First, it is important for us to know if Jewish people were wrong in their view of man’s inherent neutrality and freedom to choose right or wrong; it is also relevant to know that there isn’t one single piece of Jewish literature to suggest an inherent sin nature, or depraved nature of man. So then was Paul crystallizing a new philosophy of universal sin and corruption of the Creation in his exhortation to the Romans, or was he reiterating the rabbinical beliefs that all men sin yet all men are ultimately free? In the covenantal context of Paul’s words, the eschatological implications of the whole of Israel being renewed and restored from the communal corruption – as Eliade eloquently put it – are very relevant to my earlier suggestion which may be contradictory but also satisfactory to a reasonable audience: God indeed knows all future things, yet he graciously allows man to freely choose the course of all action. Ironically when I first explained this idea to someone a couple of years ago I had no knowledge that Jewish Rabbis have been teaching this very same concept for thousands of years.

Secondly, not many people can deny the power of perception; by that I mean the importance of how one sees himself or herself in light of his own theology. I firmly believe that God gave all of us a certain reputation to live up to, and many have spoiled that reputation with overly negative worldviews. My initial example of two individuals looking at a rainy day illustrates well my point. When one person sees a rainy day as being miserable, another sees it as a blessing for his crops and plants; and the same individual hating to get wet could as well take his children outside to run and play in the rain turning something wet and nasty into a wonderful experience.

Is it with sadness that I say that most people out there, including Christians, let the power of perception dictate their lives; that certainly includes how we see those around us and ourselves in light of our worldviews and philosophies. If we look at a three-year-old boy and see him as a sinner then we would be hard pressed to expect much good to come out of him; in fact we would expect the opposite; should we then be surprised in the boy grows up and lives up to our expectations?

We often tell ourselves and those around us how important it is to believe in God; but do we ever talk about God believing in us? It may sound like a strange concept, but Rob Bell opened up my eyes to the power of perception when he spoke of Jesus’ faith in Peter, and how that faith empowered Peter to walk on water. Indeed, it seems to me that most of us tend to live up to what we think God expects from us: if God sees us as nothing more than vermin and refuse, we tend to end up being and doing what vermin do. This is why the two people waking up in the same town, on the same morning will see the very same day with different eyes.

So I encourage all of you to overcome your circumstances and live up to what God thinks of us. The world we live in is not full of sin and evil, it is rather dripping with God’s glory and power. It is a wonderful world, full of beauty, kindness and love. There are infinitely more people shaking hands than shooting at each other; infinitely more husbands loving their wives than beating them; infinitely more people helping the poor than abandoning them. In all these things, people and pictures we see the unmistakable face of God. The God who loves all men, is patient to all men, and sees the potential in all men. I believe our Creator has given all of us a reputation to live up to, and that reputation is the divine spark of which ancient Jewish Rabbis spoke of. And that spark should prompt all of us, every day, to think to ourselves “What a wonderful world!”

Footnotes:

[1] David C. Gross, 1,401 Questions and Answers about Judaism, Hippocrene Books, Inc., New York, NY, pp. 5.

[2] Ibid, pp. 33

[3] Arthur Hertzberg, Judaism: An Anthology of the Key Spiritual writings of the Jewish tradition, The Free Press, New York, NY, pp. 251

[4] Genesis 15:6

[5] Arthur Hertzberg, Judaism: An Anthology of the Key Spiritual writings of the Jewish tradition, The Free Press, New York, NY, pp. 251

[6] Mircea Eliade, The Encyclopedia of Religion, Vol. 14, Macmillan Publishing Co., New York, page 328

[7] Ibid, page 327

[8] Ecclesiastes 7:20

[9] Abraham Cohen, Everyman’s Talmud, Schocken Books, New York, pp. 93

[10] Ber. 33b

[11] Aboth III. 19