AP

Say “Yeah . . . Nah” to drink driving.

Drink drivers are full of it.

These are slogans of recent anti-drink-driving campaigns. Dozens of similar ads campaign against all manner of social evils:

It’s not love, its coercive control.

Turn up respect (domestic violence).

Kids absorb your drinking.

Alcohol, think again (alcohol abuse).

Chances are, you’re about to lose (gambling addiction).

Safe driving starts with you.

These government campaigns suppose that bad behaviour derives from ignorance. If we just educate people then they will cease to act badly. This approach is very ancient-Greek. Ernst Achilles summarised Socrates and Plato on the matter:

An unenlightened and ignorant man does evil involuntarily, and this is the basis of all ruin and corruption. Enlightenment leads to knowledge and frees him from evil, causing him to do good and so creating the moral man.

Government ad campaigns address real problems. But there is an air of futility about them because those who most need to heed them are those most likely to ignore them.

They are also highly selective and superficial, confronting only those matters which the state is willing to allow as problems. The deeper and state-institutionalised social scourges of sexual incontinence, abortion, no-fault divorce, marriage redefinition, the demotion of motherhood, stranger child-care, assisted suicide, the coercion of conscience, and other appalling social evils, are never broached.

In this context mixed messaging is inevitable. The “Any amount a mother drinks, the baby drinks” campaign urges mothers not to harm their unborn children. How does that fit with publicly funded abortion, on demand, to full term?

There are more hypocrisies. Can a government which funds the SBS and its extensive catalogue of pornographic movies really be serious about respecting women? Or a government which collects billions from state lotteries be serious about addressing gambling addiction? And how can a government which has legalised assisted suicide also offer, with a straight face, its “National Suicide Prevention Strategy”?

In any case the problems that social-conduct campaigns address are not improving. By all accounts violence, substance abuse, recklessness, and addiction are all on the rise. The reason these campaigns fail is that they do not address the root cause of violence, abuse, addiction, and recklessness: the heart.

In the Bible the words lēv (לב) and kardia (καρδια), translated “heart,” only rarely speak of the physical organ. Johannes Behm explains how they refer most often to the seat of our inner self:

Our feelings, including our emotions desires, and passions;

Our intellect, including our understanding, thought, and reflection;

Our will and resolve.

Thus Solomon urged, “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it” (Prov. 4:23). Some propose reading the Greatest Commandment like this: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, that is with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30).

The heart is essentially the whole man, with all his attributes. . . . It is the heart which makes a man what he is, and governs all his actions (IVP New Bible Dictionary, third edition).

Humanity’s catastrophe is that the heart, the centre of everything, is corrupt and evil.

Before he flooded the earth:

The LORD saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time (Gen. 6:5).

Notice the every, only, and all. Jesus taught the same, that:

It is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come – sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and defile a person (Mark 7:21–23).

In Galatians Paul labels the evil heart “the flesh” (σαρξ, sarx). He writes that “the acts of the flesh are obvious”:

sexual immorality (πορνεια, porneia), impurity and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like (Gal. 5:19–21).

As sewerage pipes disgorge effluent, these vile behaviours pour out naturally from our wicked hearts and flesh.

Worse, the flesh tries to find God’s favour on its own terms, in a way that leaves room for rebellious autonomy. In Galatians that is the unspoken trade-off of the Circumcision Party’s legalism: “By adding ceremonial law-keeping to faith in Christ we take control of our own lives and purchase room for egotism, sexual license, and greed.”

The flesh uses legalism to make a hypocritical show of obedience and devotion, while all the time living for self. That is how insidious the evil of the human heart is. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick/wicked; who can understand it?” (Jer. 17:9).

So, we are not born with morally neutral souls which, like plasticene, can be shaped into good by the fingers of knowledge and education. We are born instead with evil hearts: “Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me” (Ps. 51:5). Education cannot change this any more than it can change our height or eye-colour. “Can an Ethiopian change his skin or a leopard its spots? Neither can you do good who are accustomed to doing evil” (Jer. 13:23).

Education may equip an evil heart to do evil more subtly and cleverly, but it cannot change its character. By his common grace God greatly restrains our evil and permits us to treat others with care and kindness: “He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous,” so that even tax collectors and pagans know how to treat their friends decently (Mat. 5:45–47). Nonetheless our evil hearts more-or-less poison everything we do and say.

How richly we deserve the condemnation and wrath of God.

You cannot free someone from toothache by brushing the tooth with toothpaste. Nor does paracetamol deal with the problem. You must drill out the decay and corruption which causes the ache.

Education alone cannot deal with society’s ills because it does not and cannot address the root problem: evil hearts that do not love God, and which as a result do not love his image bearers.

Nor can religious laws, ceremonies, rituals, and festivals transform wicked hearts, which in Galatians was the error of the Circumcision Party.

What we need is a change of heart

The Prophets promised time and again that God would deal with our evil hearts by giving us new hearts:

I will give them a heart to know me, that I am the Lord. They will be my people, and I will be their God, for they will return to me with all their heart (Jer. 24:7, also 31:33).

I will give them an undivided heart and put a new spirit in them; I will remove from them their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh. Then they will follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. They will be my people, and I will be their God (Ezek. 11:19–20).

New hearts would come by a new Spirit: the Spirit of Jesus who knows and loves God and his laws and who is careful to live God’s way.

Caught in adultery and murder, that is exactly what David prayed for:

Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Do not cast me from your presence or take your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me (Ps. 51:10–12).

The Good News is that Jesus was crucified for our sins on Good Friday – by which both our condemnation and our sinful hearts were crucified. And he rose from the grave on Easter Sunday – by which a new us was born again to everlasting and abundant life.

When we hear and believe and take hold of this Good News then our sinful heart and flesh is crucified, and the Spirit of Jesus makes his home in us and empowers a radical new life:

I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me (Gal. 2:20).

Instead of living by the flesh and its lust, greed, egotism, and idolatry, the Spirit of Christ grows within us an entirely new type of fruit: “Love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” (Gal. 5:22–23).

What could never be done by the laws and ceremonies of the Torah, or government educational campaigns, Jesus Christhas done. Reject the flesh. Trust in Jesus alone. Live by his Spirit.

[For] those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit (Gal. 5:24–25).

–  Campbell Markham