Drawing the Line

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them! But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? -- Solzhenitsyn

It gets a little scary when I realize that what I see on the outside is much more a function of what is going on on the inside than most of us would like to think.  As long as I project evil onto another person, a party, group, movement, nation, etc., I do not have to draw the line in my heart.

Christianity gets mixed up with the "ands", polluted and syncretized to the point that much of the preaching and teaching we hear is about how bad other groups are treating us -- a great deviation from what Jesus taught and how He lived.  But Jesus on his part did not entrust himself to them, because he knew all people and needed no one to bear witness about man, for he himself knew what was in man (John 2:25).

That is, in all men save the Savior Himself.  The rest of us have a line of demarcation.  There is no wall, no fence, no guarded barricade.  We wish often that a great wall did exist, topped with razor-wire, preceded by a piranha-filled moat.  It would make it harder to sneak across.  That is not the way it works.  As easy as it must be to come over to the right side, it is just as easy to stray back to the wrong.  We have the Word to illuminate the path and the low-voltage shock-collar of conscience to let us know when we are a toke or two over the line.  Faith, hope, and love, like herding dogs, will try to keep us from wandering, and while they can't follow us into our little realm of wickedness, they always welcome back when we repent.

There are parts of us, preferences, pleasures, and parasites, that we have to abandon to the darkness.  I was playing with my grandson's Thomas the Tank Engine train set.  Each little car and engine has a magnet front and back that attracts to the opposite pole magnet on the appropriate end of another piece.  I'm always fascinated by the feel of two south poles pushing away from one another.  Some things are repelled by the light and comfortable only at the other pole -- beyond the shadow's edge.

The answer to Solzhenitsyn's rhetorical question is the bad news, but the good news is that we do not have to deal with our hearts of darkness solely by our own efforts.  Jesus broke His own pure heart, had it pierced that mine might be circumcised and saved, by grace through faith.