Three Impulses That Are in Us by Nature

Not one of these men of this evil generation shall see the good land that I swore to give your fathers. Deuteronomy 1:35

What was in the nature of the parents was also in the children. And what was in these people is also in us.

By nature, we rebel against God: “Yet you would not go up, but rebelled against the command of the LORD your God” (1:26). Our corruption goes deeper than a few sins and mistakes. By nature, we resent God. We resist His authority over our lives. By nature, we want to assert our independence from God. We want to be our own savior and our own lord.

By nature, we treat God with contempt: “You murmured in your tents and said, ‘Because the LORD hated us he has brought us out of the land of Egypt…’” (1:27). Deliverance from Egypt was the extraordinary miracle of grace in the Old Testament, but sin made the people so twisted that they saw God’s miraculous deliverance as a plot that God was working against them.

This same impulse is in us. By nature, we hold back praise for God’s goodness and blame him for evil instead. By nature, we say, “Here I am in a desert, and it’s all God’s fault.” By nature, we insult God and treat the goodness of God with contempt.

By nature, we blame others: “Our brothers have made our hearts melt, saying, ‘The people are greater and taller than we’” (1:28). When the spies came back, ten of them said that it would be too difficult to conquer the land. Here the people blame the spies. “It’s all their fault.”

By nature, we blame others for all our problems. What’s wrong is always somebody else’s fault. By nature, we see a two-by-four in every other eye, and not even a speck of sawdust in our own.

Where have you seen your own impulse to resist God’s authority, treat God with contempt, or blame others?