New Reminders: Corruption
by Ardith Hoff
According to Wikipedia, “The legal definition of the word corruption is: The dishonest or fraudulent misuse of entrusted authority or power for personal or unlawful gain, involving acts like bribery, embezzlement, and extortion. It is characterized by a breach of public trust, particularly in cases of public corruption, where officials act for personal benefit instead of in the public interest. Legal definitions often focus on the abuse of official position for private gain.” We also need to be aware of corruptions of the truth, twisting it to serve a false narrative.
Corruption is most often carried out through lying (making false statements), deceit (saying one thing and doing another), or deception (making something look like something different than it actually is). Our own minds can be corrupted through these means. We can be fooled into thinking something is true that isn’t.
In the Bible there are many examples of how evil people or our own selfishness have used corrupt means to cause people to think and act badly. Corruption in the Bible is “the state of moral contamination and spiritual decay expressed through disobedience toward God. Corruption is closely related to spiritual death.” In Genesis 2:17, God told Adam that, if he ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he would “surely die”. Adam didn’t die a physical death that day but a spiritual one that involved separation from God. In Ephesians 2:1-3 we read, “As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins.” It is not a bodily death but a spiritual death.
Even the most devout Christian can experience doubts that temporarily separate him or her from God. This often happens, when things are not going our way, and God has not rescued us from some terrible situation or has not answered our prayers the way we wanted Him to––the way we know He is capable of doing. When God seems far away and we do not understand his timing, we can’t help but wonder if He even exists, or if He is as kind and loving as we always believed He was. The truth is that we humans are capable of wrestling with God at the same time we are embracing Him. The Greek word “Habakkuk” means exactly that.
The book of Habakkuk, in the bible, describes this phenomenon. There are three chapters in the book and each one outlines the phases we go through in our doubts. The first chapter is about wondering. We wonder where God is and why He is not attending to our requests. The second is about waiting. We don’t understand what is taking so long for God to do something and why He is not answering our prayers. And the third, is about trusting that God is good and that there is a reason He is delaying or denying our requests. If we can trust God to know better than we do, our faith will come through any crisis with a renewed and even stronger faith than we had before we started down the path of doubt.
In his book, Benefit of Doubt, Pastor and author Craig Groeschel shows how our hardest spiritual questions can actually deepen your faith, not destroy it. Instead of hiding from doubt, Groeschel invites the reader to bring it into the light--and “watch what God can do with it.”