NeoZine

Foolish Hearts

More than one life is poisoned by the ungrateful heart. Paul describes everybody’s plight: it’s passed along to the children.

For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Romans 1:21 (NASB)

Born on this side of eternity, living in a ravaged, spiritual wasteland, we actually live the brutal world of Mad Max — it’s the emotional realm, not a post-nuclear holocaust as in Mad Max. We’re plagued by our own darkened, “foolish heart” that creates a harsh desert of ingratitude. We grow up in it. Everywhere, stretched far into the horizon are thankless, complaining, embittered people—even those near-at-hand.

Yes, our parents were ungrateful too! And so were their parents…

Primoridal Soup

Ingratitude is the building stuff of this realm. It mandates an economy of currency, because people will otherwise take without any thought of payment. Ingratitude fuels insatiable appetites, the wars and conquests of human history.

Biologists speculate that life originated in a dark, toxic realm someone called “Primordial Soup”. The Bible calls it “Ingratitude”, and it’s the dark realm where human life  is spawned every day. Ingratitude is foundational to the human condition, and it is ultimately tied to our problem with God: “after all, He created this mess! And He abandoned me!”

But ingratitude with God guarantees an emotional short-circuit: to be cut-off from God means facing life alone, which means lots of fumbling and stumbling in the dark, which means lots of hurt feelings, which gather in cesspools in dark places in the heart. It’s called a “foolish heart” because it’s filled with the hurt of foolish mistakes. It’s called a “dark heart” because everyone hides their poisonous feelings–but they erupt, sooner or later.

Thus, the daily grind of life is poised with moaning, unhappy people. New management theories try to control it, employees are “empowered”, businesses restructure to increase profits, but the workday still grinds us down. Why? Because the workplace is filled with so many ungrateful people! No matter how many raises or benefits we get, the poison of ingratitude cannot be ignored for long, so it leaks, splashes and explodes.

“Change the social order!” Karl Marx wrote, and so millions died. Communism said the problem was out there, with everyone else, and tried building a world of “Comrades”. But it was a foolish and blood-soaked dream.

Communism was the most costly and bloody experiment in social engineering ever attempted, and the results should never be dismissed or forgotten. Why didn’t Marxism deliver the promised Utopia? The answer is simple: Marx downplayed the glaring monster of ingratitude guaranteed to tear communal living apart. It’s been raging in families since Cain killed Able. If ingratitude so alienates blood relatives, won’t the monster snarl at strangers?

How could Marx miss it? Ungrateful people don’t behave like Comrades: they lash out, like Mad Max!

This beast snarls when the God-issue arises. People are unwilling to talk about God precisely because their resentments are so complicated and repressed.

To raise the God-issue means hope and a promise for something better. If God is not “good”, then we should consider the Russians’ wisdom from the Cold War: “when one hears the air raid sirens, one should pick up a shovel and quietly proceed to the nearest cemetery, to dig your own grave.” With enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world 20 times over, our “nuclear drills” and duck-and-cover exercises in the 1960s were silly.

To avoid Him is like avoiding life (He created life, after all). Ingratitude can be the only reason to avoid God, if you think about it: shouldn’t God receive more honor and thankfulness than any living creature in the universe? If not, then all of us are in deep, deep trouble.

Wether you agree or not, it doesn’t matter: it’s not a philosophical issue. It’s not a religious issue. It’s an issue deep inside our hearts, wether visible or not, and the Bible makes it a clear issue not to make us feel guilty, but to help us see the things we hide from everyone, including ourselves.

Real and False Gratitude

The word Paul uses for “give thanks” is eucharisteo in Greek, and it goes beyond merely feeling grateful. “Eucharisteo” means to be openly, visibly, demonstrably thankful. “Thanksgiving” is more precise than “thankful”.

A grateful, passing thought is far different from a demonstration of gratitude. Someone may claim to be grateful for their parents, but when was the last time it was expressed? Until expressed, this fleeting thought is not eucharisteo .

Three simple questions can measure your attitude of gratitude:

1. To whom have you given thanks in the past week?
2. What did you do to express gratitude?
3. If asked, would the other person remember your last effort to demonstrate gratitude?

These are hard questions, but reasonable. If I’m grateful, of course it should show at least once a week! (Are we pulling teeth here?) And it shouldn’t be vague, and it should register with people around me.

Awkward Gratitude

The problem is, however, that people feel awkward expressing gratitude, and this is true especially in those old, weary relationships like parents. Why is this? Should gratitude not increase for those long-term relationships, the ones with substance and commitment? But the ungrateful heart is a stern accountant of wrongs perceived, and a spendthrift of grace received!

Men feel especially awkward demonstrating gratitude, with the exception of the workplace where gratitude is the expected reward for a job well-done. Naturally the rules are different at work, so gratitude is economic or perhaps expressed through an awards banquet. But why is it so rare at home?

Before consigning gratitude to the grave of gooey, touchy-feely irrelevance, consider the devastating effects of its antonyms: ingratitude, indifference, resentment and everything that grows in place of thankfulness. Ingratitude is not just a “bad hair day” or simple neglect, but a poison saturating the human condition. It is a terrific furnace for human suffering.

Alienation in a few of its many guises

People so quickly elect the alienation option for relational problems! If there’s any struggle, any pain, any difficulty, then alienation is often the first, most convenient choice. The “Ingratitude” diagram demonstrates the many diverse ways the ungrateful heart creates alienation. Why is this creative energy not spent resolving relationships?

Raw Alienation

This is the primary and most devastating effect of ingratitude: resentment severs relationships and drives us apart. The fountainhead of all alienation is that between the creature and Creator, as we read in Romans 1:21ff, sealed by ingratitude. This alienation turns creation upside-down:

they exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures. Romans 1:23 (NASB95)

Alienation with God means a perverted relationship with creation as various creatures take turns standing on the throne of Almighty God in the hearts of the unbelieving. As evidence, Paul parades a hideous succession of degenerating gods: man, birds, cows, and finally crawling creatures! Each in turn not only fails to deliver the promises of deity, but each leads to a more debased and dehumanizing slavery.

Yes, dehumanizing slavery precisely describes alienation. What sane person could possibly worship crawling creatures? Is this not the epitome of insanity? Yet entire cultures have worshipped scorpions and snakes! As grotesque as it sounds, is it really any better than worshipping other humans? Disappointment is guaranteed either way, followed by even more ingratitude.

If even the God Almighty does not deserve gratitude, then who does? That is the most reasonable question in the universe. To judge God means entering an insane world of reversed roles:

You turn things upside down, as if the potter were thought to be like the clay! Shall what is formed say to him who formed it, “He did not make me”? Can the pot say of the potter, “He knows nothing”? Isaiah 29:16 (NIV)

Self-reliance

“But I am thankful!” says the ungrateful heart. “I am, after all, thankful for myself! And I’m surprised more people aren’t!”

When alienation grows, it supplants relationships with self-reliance. Some take a different angle, but it’s equally self-reliant: “I’m such a loser…” (and it sounds rather humble at this point), “and I can’t believe that [God / my parents / my friend / everybody else] made me this way!” The conclusion is the same: “I’ll have to depend on myself from now on…”

The angry and alienated philosopher H.D. Thoreau epitomized it: “Know thyself!” He wrote these famous words while living the epitome of ingratitude alone at Walden Pond and wrote a book by that name which became a classic American treatise of ingratitude towards everyone and anyone. It is a call to distrust everyone except oneself.

“Know Thyself!” is actually the prolog for the book, “Resentful Independence from God.” It is an embittered, perverted view of the goodness of God, but Thoreau didn’t invent it:

Why are the nations in an uproar and the peoples devising a vain [empty] thing?
The kings of the earth take their stand and the rulers take counsel together against the LORD and against His Anointed [Messiah], saying,
“Let us tear their fetters apart And cast away their cords from us!” Psalms 2:1-3

The Psalmist is baffled: is God’s leadership and authority little more than chains and fetters? This is news to God! It happens all the time. People say, “Yeah, that religion stuff ain’t fer me right now…nossiree! Meybe when I gets t’be older…” and it’s the same complaint: God means chains and fetters. Really, is God such a cruel taskmaster?

This is what the LORD says: “What fault did your fathers find in me, that they strayed so far from me? They followed worthless idols and became worthless themselves. Jeremiah 2:5 (NIV)

Contra Thoreau, God has a different view of self-reliance:

…they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools. Romans 1:21b-22

Irrational Loneliness

The only problem with “Know thyself!” is the undeniable fact that relational beings must relate. Either deny the relational being, or deny self-reliance, but only an Infantile’s make-believe world can demand both relationships and self-reliance, whatever is most convenient. In reality it’s not a convenient choice because a price is paid for one or the other. The leap into self-reliance and out again occurs by the price of scars inflicted on surrounding relationships. Loneliness is the price paid, and it is unreasonable to assume otherwise.

Again it goes back to a gratitude problem.Without gratitude, who can be trusted? Without trust, self-reliance is mandatory. Then comes the loneliness. Read how this progression devours the soul of Job in the Bible when he too struggled with great sufferings that snuffed-out gratitude:

“Therefore I will not restrain my mouth; I will speak in the anguish of my spirit, I will complain in the bitterness of my soul…I waste away; I will not live forever. Leave me alone, for my days are but a breath.” Job 7:11,16

Suffering is one thing, but alienation is quite a different matter. Does alienation resolve suffering? Quite the opposite is true. Alienation is the domain of demons long-accustomed to distrust. The fabric of the universe is ripped apart by rebellion and accusation against the goodness of God, and these self-reliant creatures, once angels, are now called demons. Fueled by self-reliance, they become predators, by necessity:

“Now when the unclean spirit goes out of a man, it passes through waterless places seeking rest, and does not find it.” Matthew 12:43.[1]

“Waterless places” means “empty” or “lonely places” and it’s precisely this kind of emotional dessert self-reliance wanders, “seeking rest.” But of course there is no rest. Until a relational being connects emotionally with another relational being, it “does not find it.” The Waterless Places option is a frequent refuge for the hurt and anger of Infantile rage seeking rest, but ironically it’s a blazing desert devoid of peace, where hurt and anger is fueled still more. Yet Waterless Places is such a widespread malady and growing: it describes the alienated atmospheres hanging thick in family homes everywhere.

Even the great prophet Elijah fell into a snit of self-pity and ingratitude. Much like an Infantile, he ran away into a lonely place to lick his wounds. There he developed an unreal picture of his own lonely world:

He said, “I have been very zealous for the LORD, the God of hosts; for the sons of Israel have forsaken Your covenant, torn down Your altars and killed Your prophets with the sword. And I alone am left; and they seek my life, to take it away.” 1 Kings 19:10

The truth was far different. Elijah’s view that “I alone am left” was so distorted and so self-absorbed, God first had to smack Elijah with an earthquake and a fireball rolling up the valley to get his attention. Elijah felt lonely because he ran away. It was that simple. Once inside the Waterless Places of alienation, “seeking rest” was an impossible quest. Elijah would never find it out there. What did he imagine would happen? Would he continue running and running deeper into the desert until everything changed? It was an irrational course, which of course accompanies loneliness. But once Elijah connected with God his eyes were opened and he learned there were thousands of others standing with him.

In the same way God pursued silly Elijah and endured Elijah’s silly view of the world, He pursues each one of us today with His love. If only we would respond! Everything would look so very different.

To connect with another relational being is the beginning of the end of loneliness, and this is obvious. God’s love is readily available. Why then would anyone opt for Waterless Places? Quite simply, as with Elijah’s experience, loneliness is so deceptive and creates an irrational, distorted world that even God’s love cannot penetrate. Why is this? Since God’s love “rejoices in the truth” (1 Cor. 13:5), and sine loneliness deceives, something has to give way. God won’t. So the irrationality of alienation must be challenged, and few allow this intrusion into their isolated but deceived world. Elijah allowed the intrusion, but it took a fireball to do it.

There is only one relevant question that remains, and the answer determines the depth of the loneliness we suffer: will you allow the rationale behind your loneliness to be tested? If so, just start with a few simple questions:

1. Are you alienated from a relationship that should be close? This could be an authority figure, the parents or siblings, a friend, offspring or a spouse.
2. Is there anything in this relationship worthy of any gratitude? Carefully consider this question.
3. Finally, can you possibly demonstrate thankfulness by going back to pay the price required to end this alienation? It could mean mean setting aside the hurt or anger causing so much separation, but isn’t this a great, substantial demonstration of gratitude?

Next up: the ingratitude of Legalism.

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[1] The phrase ἄνυδρος τόπος (Matthew 12:43, Luke 11:24), literally ‘waterless place,’ is a set phrase equivalent to ἐρημία and may be translated as ‘wilderness’ or ‘uninhabited country. —Louw & Nida: NT Greek-English Lexicon

Related posts:

1. Ingratitude and Thankfulness
2. The Demands of Loneliness
3. The Poison of Ingratitude