Good or Bad?

Philosophers much smarter than I have long argued about whether people are inherently
good or bad.

I think the answer is ‘yes’. Human beings as God first made us were good. We reflected only characteristics of God (His communicable attributes). We were made perfect, God’s original dream was or us to be good and holy.

Then the Fall. The dream was tarnished by sin. We became a fallen broken people. Only one person has lived who was perfect and that was Jesus. The rest of us are sinful, but the good things of God have not been fully squeezed out of us, and the memory of being good and holy is not, however unconsciously, wholly forgotten by our souls.

So while I once only reflected God’s creation, now I have diminished in that respect and taken on sinful dimensions as well. Pride has taken root within me. I am neither as full as God created me nor as pure. I am broken.

Yet by God’s grace I am sanctified. There is great mystery in this, because I am and I am being transformed.

It is true that evil still lurks within me, pride still dwells inside me. I am fallen and I am sanctified. It is like living in two different dimensions. Jesus when he first met Simon Peter (John 1:40-42), did not see him as a fisherman, but as a pillar of his Church. He did not evaluate him by his sinful self, but by the dreams God had created Peter for, the same dreams that Jesus had come to redeem by his death. Jesus saw Simon according to his true identity, as God had originally made him to be, and so renamed him "Peter."

That is the paradigm I try to operate within. Not the perspective of seeing what is plainly before me living in the reality of who I am, but choosing to live by the identity which Christ is calling me to. I am choosing Peter over Simon, to see myself not as I have been but as I am being transformed. Also I am striving to see others not as they are, but by the identity and the potential that God has created them for and made possible through redemption.

So people are born fallen, broken, apt to evil, but by Jesus’ work of redemption we are able and becoming and to operate in the goodness that God first created us for.