To trust in the Lord with all our hearts (that is, with our whole being, mind and emotion) is not an unnatural thing. In fact, it’s the most natural thing in the world. It’s rebellion against this – against God – that’s actually unnatural. The person who relies on their own understanding is in effect trying to understand themselves and the world in terms of themself. But this is God’s world and we are His creation. Life can only be understood, therefore, by referencing His sovereign purposes. At no point can we step outside of God’s sovereignty and the attempt to do so, whether with open defiance or any form of neglect, is a recipe for disaster.
A bird that doesn’t fly is like a fish that can’t swim. These are like men who don’t worship and acknowledge God. The attempt to step outside of our nature as image-bearers of God is the source of all our troubles in life because it’s the attempt to live in a false world, one of make-believe where fish fly, birds swim and men live without God as moral free-agents. The fish that refused the water would die in short order. The bird that rejected the air would likewise perish. It is only God’s grace that keeps man on his feet, breath in his lungs, food in his belly and a smile on his lips when he trusts in anything but God.
How then is it that God will make straight our paths when we wholeheartedly acknowledge Him and reject our own mind and life as the world’s final reference point? Well, in the first way it’s God’s sovereign pleasure to interact with His people. He is not an abstraction or an impersonal force but the ultimate personality. This is why we have unique personalities! We do not “find ourselves” outside of God; we find sin. In God, in Christ’s love and grace, we find our true self because we live naturally at last – lovingly submitting to the God who saves us.
In the second place, it’s a “coming back to God” that brings us back to ourselves as we can and ought to be. The repentant sinner who turns to Christ for the free gift of grace is restored by God to that image that was fractured by sin. This is important to understand.
Yes, God will direct our paths. He will direct us personally and sovereignly. These paths will be straight in that they will lead to Him and, therefore, to righteousness. A truly straight path must lead to God. That path, indeed, will be individual. It will be unique…in the Lord and in Him only. No man or institution is fit to find a man’s private path because the image-bearer is God’s. He doesn’t belong to the state, the church, the family, or to himself. Sure, he is in those things but not of them. The image-bearer of God will live in a family work in a vocation and be under a state but these are derivative structures that are only straight insofar as they point back to the ultimate authority of Christ. Part of the sin problem is that we keep attempting to define ourselves (and life) in reference to either ourselves alone or through such derivative institutions and/or vocations.
People are fond of saying that “family is everything” but that’s certainly false. Only God is everything. Or we hear, “winning is the only thing.” Again, that’s certainly not true. Or we hear, “love conquers all.” No. Our love will fail if it springs from the heart of sin and self-glory. The love of God doesn’t fail.
The attempt to define ourselves through the sub-structures of life will always fail since that is a continuation of the sin principle. We were made to live in these sub-structures but not for them. We were made for God only.
To better comprehend what’s wrong with this approach we must grasp what it is to be an image-bearer of God in the first place. Cornelius Van Til wrote: “Then when we wish to emphasize the fact that man resembles God especially in the splendor of his moral attributes we say that when man was created he had true knowledge, true righteousness and true holiness. This doctrine is based upon the fact that in the New Testament we are told that Christ came to restore us to true knowledge, righteousness and holiness (Col. 3:10; Ephesians 4:24).” In other words, in our original state, before sin, man was like God in that he was without sin.
What exactly does this mean? An easy way to grasp it is that every act and choice of man is a moral choice for or against God. Thus, in every act of knowledge, Van Til further pointed out, man would manifest righteousness and true holiness. He did this by leaning on God and acknowledging his (man’s) dependence upon God for all predication. This is the critical aspect to grasp. We were created in God’s image, which is to say that then as well as now we are dependent upon Him, never independent. We can’t escape our creature-hood. Sin is the attempted fracture of this natural, God-created relationship. We are like God but always on the creaturely level. We can never be like God on the levels of His divine attributes. God’s incommunicable attributes – His aseity, unity, immutability, transcendence and infinity, etc. – are not and can never be man’s.
Sin is the refusal to accept this. Repentance is the turning back from that unnatural and personally destructive choice. The acceptance of Christ by the sinner restores us to the ability, through grace alone, to “lean on God” once again in all our choices. And, again, every thought and action of man is a moral issue. Will we acknowledge God or won’t we?
The sinner who refuses to acknowledge God accepts the principle of sickness into his being. Sin is unnatural and destructive to our personal lives, emotions, and the world around us. Our paths are made crooked by sin. It is in Christ alone that one’s paths are straight again – made natural. The non-Christian refuses to acknowledge that he is God’s creature and life, psychologically and spiritually, then becomes destructive in the ultimate sense. Instead of living for God’s glory, the unrepentant sinner lives for his own or for that of a counterfeit. The sinner believes he is ultimately responsible only for himself and to himself, not God. This is the source of conflict and suffering all over the world. The repentant sinner is turned back from the life of such deceit and lives for God’s glory. He is, in Christ, morally reconstructive and lovingly accountable to God in Christ, through faith. To know God in faith is to love God for who He is and what’s He’s done for us in Christ and it’s this mindset that’s actually natural for us since we were created by Him and for Him. This alone will make straight our paths. All other paths are crooked and ultimately ruinous.
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