The young aristocrat hadn’t asked to have his portrait painted, but the artist had found his physical beauty so captivating that he had all but insisted. And although he didn’t consider himself particularly vain, he did seem to be gifted with features that people found uncommonly attractive. As the artist deftly brushed those features onto the canvas, the young aristocrat realized all too acutely that his physical appearance, beautiful as it was, would only diminish and then deteriorate with the passing of time. If only, he found himself wishing aloud, I would remain the same and this portrait would age instead of me.
Through forces beyond his understanding, that idly spoken wish was somehow granted. Twenty years passed, but although the aristocrat was no longer young, he still possessed the same astonishing physical beauty that had captivated the artist so many years before, unchanged from the day that he had sat for the portrait. Only the portrait was no longer the same. Hidden away in the attic of the aristocrat’s great house, the portrait had aged to reflect not merely the passage of time, but also the condition of the aristocrat’s inner being. Whereas the aristocrat had once been as innocent and guileless as he was young, a gradual yet persistent slide into loose living and moral decrepitude had taken its toll. The portrait was horrifying to behold. Yet the aristocrat found himself drawn to gaze at it almost obsessively. Wizened and withered, with hollow, sunken cheeks, bloodshot eyes, a pallid, sallow complexion, the face with which he was confronted was a decaying mockery of its former beauty. The expression on that face was more terrifying still—the mouth was contorted into a cruel and malicious smirk, as if to remind him that his periodic resolutions to turn his life around were nothing more than a futile exercise in self-deception. The aristocrat’s outward comeliness concealed an inward being that was irremediably and inexpressibly wretched.
Inward Reality
How would we look if we aged not according to the length of our years but according to the state of our inner being? Although Oscar Wilde downplayed the existence of any moral undertones in his novel, the aristocrat in The Picture of Dorian Gray nevertheless vividly presents the contrast between our outward appearance and our inward condition. Our appearance may be fair, but would we dare open, if we could, a window into our inner being? How would our being appear if it were possible to capture it on film or to portray it on a canvas? What if our tongue articulated not only the words that we consciously voice, but also every thought that goes through our minds? Sooner or later we must confront the fact that the reality of the person we are is not the appearance we project, but rather the inner self artfully concealed beneath our outer shell.
We regard our peccadilloes and faults with tolerance and even indulgence. We comfort ourselves by telling ourselves that we are essentially good people. And indeed, human beings are capable of much good. Yet during the course of our essentially good and moral lives, beasts occasionally seem to rise out of our being: an outburst of anger that surprises even ourselves; a surge of malice far out of proportion to the harm perpetrated; an insuppressible falsehood that simply rolls off the tongue when we are confronted with blame or reproach. It is at such times that we catch a glimpse of the monsters that lurk in the unplumbed depths beneath our amiable exteriors.
Wretched
What is the source of this apparent incongruity between the persona we project and the anima we carefully keep hidden? The Bible tells us that we are a constitution of sin.1 In our mind we desire to do good, to be good and to think good things, but we are prevented from doing so because sin dwells in us. Sin is in our nature and in our being. We sin not strictly because we choose to sin—although we sometimes do so—but because we cannot help but sin. As a result, our experience resembles that described in the Bible: “For I know that in me, that is, in my flesh, nothing good dwells; for to will is present with me, but to work out the good is not. For I do not do the good which I will; but the evil which I do not will, this I practice.”2 We want to improve ourselves, and we make resolutions to do so, but we find ourselves unable to realize the noble intentions in our hearts. Indeed, instead of doing the things we set out to do, despite our most determined efforts and our most strenuous exercise of willpower, we find ourselves doing exactly those things we set out not to do. Thus, despite our deep desire to be righteous, good, moral, and virtuous, we remain in bondage, subject to the power of sin, mired in a cesspool from which we are unable to rescue ourselves. Our cry echoes that expressed by the apostle Paul: “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from the body of this death?”3
* * * * *
Deliverance was at hand. The people had sinned against the very God who had rescued them from slavery in Egypt and who had promised to bring them into a land of their own. When the journey to their promised land took them through a parched, desolate wilderness, the people despaired and began to murmur against not only Moses, but also God Himself. Then the serpents came upon them. Their venom defied even the most skilled healers, and once someone was bitten, death invariably followed. Finally, the leaders among the people went to Moses and repented of their sins in speaking against him and against God, and they beseeched him to pray to God to deliver them from the serpents. So Moses prayed to God, and God told him to cast a serpent out of bronze, to set it upon a pole, and to lift up the bronze serpent before the people. And all who had been bitten, when they looked upon the bronze serpent, lived.4
When the Israelites sinned against God and were beset by poisonous serpents as a result of their sins, their problem before God was not merely that they had sinned, but that their very being had been poisoned. They could not hope to be delivered from their poisoned condition by acknowledging or repenting of their sins or by promising to do better. Rather, their lives were saved by looking upon a bronze serpent set up on a pole, a bronze serpent that had the form, but not the poison, of a serpent. In the eyes of God, this bronze serpent bore the sins of the Israelites, and when God judged this serpent in their stead, they were freed from their sin and received life.
Regenerated
Similarly, the poison in our being is so deeply wrought into us that it has become a part of us. Like the ancient Israelites, we have been injected with an insidious poison to which human society possesses no antidote. We have in our flesh a serpentine nature that relentlessly wars against our desire to do good; our human nature has become infected and transmuted into an evil nature of sin. As a result, our hope of deliverance from our condition lies not in striving to do better or to improve ourselves; neither does it lie merely in recognizing the sin in us and in repenting of it. Nor does it lie in equipping ourselves with more knowledge, a higher education, or even an uplifted set of morals. No matter how hard we try to improve ourselves, no matter how precisely we fine-tune and hone the persona we present to the world, we cannot escape the specter of sin in our being. We have no hope in ourselves. Jesus Christ said, “That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.”5 Any attempts to deal with our fallen nature that have their source in the flesh are doomed to failure. We need a new spiritual beginning, a new spiritual birth.
Thus, the Bible tells us that, in order to be delivered from the sinful nature that contaminates the very core of our being, we need to be regenerated. To be regenerated is to be born anew with the life of God by believing into Jesus Christ and receiving His divine life.6 Because our flesh is irredeemable and unsalvageable, we need to give up hope in the flesh of sin and be born again of the Spirit. When we are regenerated, we are reborn as new persons with the uncreated, eternal, divine life of God as our new source and new element. This regeneration fully terminates the evil nature of sin in our being and delivers us from our poisoned serpentine condition.
Jesus Christ said that He was the way of salvation for all of humankind, just as the bronze serpent had given the Israelites in the wilderness the way to have life: “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that everyone who believes into Him may have eternal life.”7 Jesus Christ, the Son of God, had the form, but not the sinful nature, of a man. Although it is our own serpentine nature that was condemned before God, Jesus Christ, as the bronze serpent that possessed our form but not our sinful nature, was lifted up on the cross for our salvation. When He was on the cross, God judged Him on our behalf and afforded us a way to be rescued from our sinful nature and to have His life. When we look to Him, He regenerates us, and we receive His divine life.
Looking Away
Just as the stricken people of Israel looked upon the bronze serpent and received salvation, we need to turn our eyes away from our own poisoned condition and fix our gaze upon Jesus. Our need—a need never revealed to the doomed Dorian Gray—is to stop looking at and analyzing our own inner condition, indeed to give up on our human condition entirely, and to look to a divine source. Oscar Wilde exposed the problem of our human condition but was unable to provide a solution; at the end of his novel, Dorian Gray destroyed both the painting and himself in one last frenzied outburst of desperation. Jesus Christ came to expose our condition, but also provided the solution—Himself as life to all who believe into Him. We need to look away unto Jesus, the Author and Perfecter of our faith and the Author of life itself.8 Then in Him we will both find life and be rescued from our fallen sinful nature.
1 Romans 5:19. (back) 2 Romans 7:18-19. (back) 3 Romans 7:24. (back) 4 See Numbers 21:4-9. (back) 5 John 3:6. (back) 6 John 3:3, 1:12. (back) 7 John 3:14-15. (back) 8 Hebrews 12:2; Acts 3:15 (back)
If you wish to be born anew to receive the divine life of God, simply open your heart and pray,
Lord Jesus, I realize my need to be born of God. Thank You that Your precious blood cleanses me of my sins. Thank You that I can receive the divine life, which You made available to me in Your resurrection. Lord Jesus, I receive You as the divine life right now. Thank You that in addition to my human life, I now have the life of God. I love You, Lord Jesus!
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All Bible verses are taken from the Recovery Version of the Bible ©1999.