The Old Testament prophet Isaiah had a life changing
experience, which is described in the sixth chapter of the book that bears his
name: “In the year that King Uzziah
died, I saw the Lord, sitting on a throne, high and lifted up; and the train of
his robe filled the temple…. And I said ‘Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean
lips, and…my eyes have seen the Lord of hosts!”
Below are three paragraphs about the British journalist
Malcolm Muggeridge, written by pastor and author Richard D. Phillips.
Malcolm Muggeridge, the famous British journalist, had a
life- changing experience that was very different from the prophet Isaiah. Yet in one respect it was quite similar: they
both came to a piercing awareness of their depraved spiritual condition. But whereas Isaiah learned to say “Woe is
me!” in the face of God, Muggeridge learned it in the face of a leper woman.
On assignment in India, Muggeridge went to a river for a
swim. As he entered the water, his eyes
fell on a woman bathing. He felt an
impulse to go to her and seduce her, just as King David felt when he saw Bathsheba. Temptation storming in his mind, he began
swimming toward her. The words of his
wedding vows came to his mind, but he responded by just going faster. The voice of allurement called out, “Stolen
water is sweet” (Prov. 9:17), and he swam more furiously still. But when he pulled up near the woman and she
turned, Muggeridge saw, “She was a leper…. This creature grinned at me, showing
a toothless mask.” His first reaction
was to despise her: “What a dirty, lecherous woman!” he thought. But then
it crashed in on him that it was not the woman who was lecherous; it was his
own heart. This is precisely the
teaching of the Bible about the moral and spiritual condition of men and women:
our hearts are corrupt, our minds are depraved, and our desires are enslaved to
the passions of sin.
It was not by chance that Isaiah felt his depravity when confronted
with God’s holy presence, any more than it was by chance that Muggeridge’s
glimpse of his true condition led to his conversion to Christianity. One way to put this is that theology and
anthropology are always linked. In order
to understand the truth about yourself and other people, you have to see the
truth about God – and vice versa. John
Calvin made this point in his Institutes
of the Christian Religion”, commenting that one may begin a study of
theology either with God or with man, since to know either correctly, you must
correctly know the other.
(From the book “What’s
So Great About the Doctrines of Grace”, by Richard D Phillips)
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