Mike Browning

Tag: Human Nature

  • The Wisest Man Who Ever Lived

    The Wisest Man Who Ever Lived

    If this guy couldn’t do it, that should tell you something.

    Solomon is usually treated like a success story.

    The wisest man who ever lived. Builder of the temple. King at the height of Israel’s power. Probably the richest man who ever lived.

    All of that is true.

    But if you read it straight through, it doesn’t land that way. He may be the most tragic figure in the Bible, although he’s got a lot of competition.

    God gave him what he asked for, wisdom, and then added everything he didn’t ask for. Wealth, power, reach. And He didn’t leave Solomon guessing. He appeared to him and told him directly what to do and what not to do.

    The instructions weren’t complicated. Stay loyal. Don’t go after other gods. Don’t marry foreign wives who would pull him that direction.

    That was the deal.

    He didn’t keep it.

    Not all at once. It builds. More alliances. More marriages. More tolerance for things he would have rejected earlier. At some point it isn’t drift anymore, it’s direction.

    Seven hundred foreign wives and three hundred concubines. That’s not fudging what God says on some technicality. It’s about as blatant as you can get.

    And it didn’t stay private. He followed their gods, built places of worship for them, and made it normal.

    The wisest man who ever lived saw God, heard Him, knew better, and still walked straight into it.

    That part tends to get glossed over.

    Because it gets in the way of something people want to believe. That if things lined up for them, they would do better. More clarity, more money, more control, and they would handle it correctly.

    Don’t buy it.

    We’ve all seen it when we’re looking at someone else. Give them a little more room, a little more success, a little less pressure, and the lines start moving. What used to be off limits becomes negotiable. Then it becomes normal.

    You can check your own track record.

    It doesn’t take 700 wives to see it.

    So when someone says they would be different if they just had the right setup, don’t buy it. Things lined up for him as much as they ever will for anyone.

    Didn’t matter.

    The question isn’t whether you’ll hold the line perfectly. That part is already answered.

    Provision wasn’t made because we might succeed. It was made because we won’t.

    Through Jesus Christ.

    If you’re waiting until you feel more capable or more disciplined, you’re waiting on something that doesn’t show up.

    It’s never too late.

    Until it is.

    P.S.
    If you’d like to read through the Bible this year, you can join us at His Word Together.
    No commentary.
    No telling you what to think.
    Nothing to buy.
    Nothing fancy.
    Just steady time in the Word.

    Check it out here.

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  • Worse Than Even I Thought

    Worse Than Even I Thought

    Mathematical proof you can’t do it yourself.

    Last week I wrote about how we are not “good enough.”

    Not close.

    Numbers in the Old Testament prescribed sacrifices for sins people committed without even knowing it.

    Jesus raised the standard higher.

    If you look with lust, you’ve committed adultery in your heart.
    If you harbor anger, you’re in danger of judgment.

    Paul says in Romans there is none righteous. Not one.

    God’s standard is perfection.

    One sin disqualifies you.

    And we all know, if we’re honest, we can’t go very long without messing up.

    But here’s what I did not expect.

    Vox Day wrote a working paper called Quantifying the Fall of Man that attempts to test the doctrine of Original Sin against behavioral data.

    Day only included sins clearly condemned in the New Testament.

    Lying.
    Lustful thought.
    Sinful anger.
    Envy.
    Dishonesty.
    Gossip.

    No ceremonial law.
    No disputed edge cases.
    No sins of omission.

    And he used the lowest available numbers from peer-reviewed studies. Mostly self-reported data, which likely underestimates everything.

    The conservative floor?

    4.33 sins per person per day.

    That’s the minimum.

    From age 3 to age 78, using those conservative inputs, that comes out to about 114,000 sins in one lifetime.

    That’s the floor.

    A more realistic estimate would push past 250,000.

    Now here’s where it gets uncomfortable.

    What are the odds of going one full day without committing one of those sins?

    About 1 in 1,190.

    So maybe three sinless days per decade, if you’re average.

    Encouraging?

    Not really.

    Because the probability of stringing together 27,000 of those days in a row is effectively zero.

    On the order of 10 to the negative eighty-something power.

    In plain English:
    Across roughly 112 billion humans who have ever lived, the expected number of naturally sinless lives is zero.

    Not “unlikely.”
    Zero.

    And remember, this excludes sins of omission.
    It excludes pride.
    It excludes ingratitude.
    It excludes the full force of the Sermon on the Mount.

    We are not just slightly flawed.

    We are mathematically incapable of pulling this off ourselves.

    That should end the political fantasies.

    Elect the right people.
    Pass the right laws.
    Fix the system.

    It doesn’t solve the core problem.

    The problem is upstream.

    The distribution never reaches zero.

    There has only been one exception.

    And if the math is right, that exception cannot be explained by natural human variation.

    Which is exactly what Christianity has claimed from the beginning.

    Here’s the good news.

    Jesus does not require you to fix yourself before coming to Him.

    That would defeat the entire point.

    You can’t clean yourself up enough.

    Just come.

    P.S. If you’d like to read through the Bible with us this year, you can join at His Word Together.

    Nothing fancy. Just steady time in the Word.

    Check It Out Here