Topical Studies
What the Bible says about
Blaming God for Our Problems
(From Forerunner Commentary)
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Genesis 3:11-13
God asks the questions to impress them on their minds, allowing Adam and Eve to convict themselves with thoughtful and honest answers. Honest, yes, and very revealing. Both cast a measure of blame away from themselves. They plainly believe that they are not to blame and should not bear full responsibility for their transgressions. Thus began mankind's practice of self-justification in defense of sin. But neither Satan nor anyone else made them sin. Nobody twisted their arms. Notice how the sin of self-justification intensifies the original sin. By attempting to dodge responsibility, claiming that circumstances made them sin, they compounded their sin by lying. Adam's sin is particularly egregious, blaming God's gift to him, Eve, whom he had held in such high regard just moments before. In a somewhat roundabout manner, he is blaming God, essentially saying, “God, if you hadn't given me this woman, I wouldn't have sinned!” Similarly, Eve says, “If You hadn't allowed that Serpent into the Garden, I wouldn't have sinned.” Today, we might say that it is in our genes to sin; that we grew up in a bad neighborhood; that our parents failed to teach us; or that our father or mother was a drug addict or alcoholic. Some of those circumstances may be true, but they do not make us sin. God is teaching us that, regarding sin, circumstances offer us little assistance when under God's judgment. Should a situation that invites sin arise, it is our responsibility to exercise faith and control ourselves, remaining in alignment with God's righteousness. When he told his audience that he had done something wrong, comedian Flip Wilson claimed, “The Devil made me do it!” and everybody laughed. But that, too, is simply a backhanded way of blaming God, as He created the angelic being who became the Devil. We can reach a couple of brief conclusions from our evaluation of Adam and Eve's experience: First, if we do not honestly and fully accept responsibility for our sins before God, we will surely reap their grim effects. Sin's fruit, regardless of the circumstances in which it is committed, is always the same. When sin occurs in the course of history makes no difference. Adam's and Eve's sins occurred at the outset of mankind's history, and they are still affecting us. Not every sin has this level of power, but the potential exists. Besides the death of the sinner, like leaven, sin's effect is to spread from its initial point of origin. Second, as shown by Adam's and Eve's excuses, self-justification tends to blind us to God's goodness, His gifts, because it intensifies what originally occurred. In our haste to absolve ourselves, we forget things that God has provided us: life itself, a mind that can gather information, the ability to reason, the ability to remember, and a spirit that, not only makes us human, but confers the potential to be like God. Adam's blaming of God for His gift of Eve reveals his horrendous ingratitude for what he had been given.
John W. Ritenbaugh
Leadership and Covenants (Part Seven)
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Ecclesiastes 7:29
This verse is especially thought-provoking as an Old Testament insight into what is called the Doctrine of Original Sin. It plainly asserts that God did not create man for the purpose of sinning. Through the millennia, mankind has shown a persistent and strong proclivity to blame God for all his troubles. We are indeed created in the image of God (Genesis 1:26). God gave us a spirit (Job 32:8), and by it, we have the ability to understand and harness many of the powers that He placed within our nature and environment. But Ecclesiastes 7:29 clearly indicates that man, specifically Adam and then all humanity after him, including women, have deliberately chosen to sin. This point appears in the final part, “But they have sought out many schemes.” Time and history have proven repeatedly that we do not always do things constructively. We seem to pollute everything we touch, creating new problems with each generation, most of which we cannot solve. Potential problems exist now that could, except for God's mercy, wipe life itself from the face of the earth. We could loosely interpret verse 29 as, “God made man to be upright, but man has defeated himself by his own schemes. He strives to do things his way. He goes to so much trouble to make trouble for himself instead of reading God's Book, believing it, and submitting to it.” Mark Twain is highly respected as a writer, but according to contemporary accounts, he was sarcastic and cynical about God and life in general. By means of his skilled writing, he managed to hide from the public his hatred of God, Christianity, and life itself. However, in Huckleberry Finn, his most popular and critically acclaimed novel, he portrays God, and Christians especially, as ignorant, pharisaical, and silly, demanding dolts, killjoys who take all the fun out of life. Twain blamed God for all of mankind's troubles. On these thoughts, he wrote a book in the last few months of his life, Letters to Earth, and it so offended his daughter that she would not allow it to be published until thirty years or so after his death, fearing it would destroy his reputation. In another place he wrote, “Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world.” Thank God that there is also a Last Adam! By virtue of His sinless life, atoning death, and resurrection, we can by God's grace receive the quality of life God intended from the beginning. We do not have the wisdom to solve all the deep mysteries of life, but from our experiences, we should be wise enough to look within ourselves and see the deadly sin in our hearts, asking God to be our Savior through Jesus Christ.
John W. Ritenbaugh
Ecclesiastes and Christian Living (Part Thirteen): Confessions
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Ecclesiastes 7:29
The word “only” is inserted in his conclusion to draw attention to its importance. Righteous living is truly rare, and it has been so from the beginning, from Adam and Eve until now. After this qualification, Solomon immediately asserts that God did not create human beings to sin but to live righteous lives. He is implying that we should stop blaming God for all of mankind's troubles—that we get ourselves into this mess we call life. God made us upright, but we all have deliberately chosen to sin. Undoubtedly, he is reflecting on the early chapters of Genesis, where a clear pattern of deliberate, willful sin appears. Genesis 1:31 states God's evaluation of His creation: “Then God saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good.” Will we challenge God's judgment of what He had just created? Adam and Eve had already been created at this point, and God judged what He had made as “very good.” They were not flawed by sin, and God had not placed in them a mechanism to sin deliberately. They had not been created to live fractured, sinful lives but upright, righteous lives. In terms of sin, whatever became part of them occurred after this point. He did not entrap them. However, they were capable of sinning because God created them with minds able to learn, discern, and make choices between options. Sinning was something they opted to do. Genesis 6:5 suggests an interesting connection between the overwhelming sinfulness of the days of Noah and Solomon's conclusion in Ecclesiastes 7:29: “Then the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” The intriguing relationship is between the word “schemes,” “inventions,” or “devices,” depending on what translation is used in Ecclesiastes 7:29, and the word “intent” in Genesis 6:5. While not the same word, both derive from the same root, indicating thinking and/or planning. In both contexts, the thinking is being done with evil intent. That is, the ones doing the devising are deliberately planning evil.
John W. Ritenbaugh
Ecclesiastes and Christian Living (Part Fourteen): A Summary
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Mark 4:26-29
The parable is clearly about the process of growth, comparing the development of a plant from sowing to harvest to the spiritual maturation of a citizen of the Kingdom of God, a Christian. What sets this parable apart from other similar parables is that its emphasis is on the invisible and miraculous nature of growth. The sower may put the seed in the ground and do some cultivating, but "he himself does not know how" actual development happens. God is behind the scenes, bringing His children to spiritual maturity in preparation for their harvest to eternal life. Like its physical counterpart, spiritual growth happens slowly and incrementally. We should not expect a newly baptized Christian to be able to produce self-control as easily and to the same degree as one who has been in the church of God for several decades. In the parable, Jesus compares the Christian to a growing seed, and no one expects a sprout to produce ripe fruit immediately. This process takes time and steady progress through a series of stages of learning and experience. This should be comforting, especially to those new to the faith. It should also set a goal or series of goals for each of us to strive toward. We do not want to remain a spiritual sprout like the wicked servant with one talent in the Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:24-30). Fearful and lazy, he squandered all of his opportunities for growth by burying his talent while making excuses and blaming his master for his shortcomings. Instead, we should desire to fulfill by the end of our spiritual lives the awesome goal Christ Himself gave us, to "be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect" (Matthew 5:48). As we continue to develop under Christ, we must accept that we may not see much improvement at any given time. It is not as some Christian pollsters try to tell us, that spiritual growth is easily quantifiable, whether we read so many chapters of the Bible or pray for x hours each day. Because it is of a spiritual nature—by definition, something beyond our physical senses—Christian growth can be challenging to determine, discernible only when a person's godly speech and actions reveal a marked improvement. We may see growth somewhat crudely in certain stages, but most will occur unnoticed and unheralded. The actual mechanics of spiritual growth are beyond understanding, like trying to fathom the infinite depths of the mind of God. As hymnist William Cowper wrote, "God moves in a mysterious way/His wonders to perform." We might as well ask how a kernel of grain becomes a fruitful stalk of wheat. All we really know is that God is faithful, continuing to work in His people to bring His crop of firstfruits to harvest (I Corinthians 1:4-9). He will ensure that every plant that He has chosen for His field has what it needs to grow, produce pleasing fruit, and enter into the fullness of His Kingdom.
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Like a Growing Seed (Part Two)
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