BY Jeff Chamblee, Program director, AFA New Media
January 2011 –A few years ago, Steve Camp came out with Playing Marbles with Diamonds, a song that asked a lot of important questions about why we treat sacred things with a light-hearted attitude. I think it’s a valid concern.
It seems in our efforts to be more relevant to the culture, modern evangelicals often opt for a non-scriptural view of God that’s less threatening to the lost. This has given us a Gospel that emphasizes God’s blessings rather than God’s holiness, man’s purpose rather than man’s problem and mere decisions rather than real conversions. Many in our churches have become captivated not by Christ, but by superficial methods, strategies and trends.
In his introduction to the book Salvation in Full Color, evangelist Richard Owen Roberts says that a right view of God leads to a right view of man, which leads to a right view of sin, which in turn leads to a right view of salvation. Our view of God determines everything.
The Bible describes God as self-existent and self-sufficient (Exodus 3:14), holy (Revelation 15:4), sovereign (Daniel 4:35) and completely unlike us in thought or action (Isaiah 55:8-9). All of His attributes, including His goodness, knowledge, justice, power, mercy, love and wrath are all perfect and without limit.
Man is born spiritually dead (Ephesians 2:1), a child of wrath (Ephesians 2:3), a slave to sin (Romans 6:17, 20) and hostile toward God (Romans 8:7). By nature he does not seek the revealed God of the Scriptures (Psalm 10:4, 14:2) and will not submit to Him (Psalm 8:7). He is completely under the rule of sin.
In the Bible, we see that even the slightest sin is an offense deserving eternal condemnation. Just as offenses against men of varying levels of authority deserve different degrees of punishment, so an offense against an eternal God warrants eternal judgment. We can see that man is in a truly hopeless situation. His only hope is in the substitutionary death of the One who would perfectly fulfill God’s righteous requirement in our place and become our sin bearer before God.
When we see the holiness of God, the helplessness of man and the severity of sin, biblical salvation becomes far greater than anything we could ever imagine. A true Christian is one who, through faith in Christ and repentance, has been counted righteous before God (2 Corinthians 5:17), a partaker of the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4), in possession of the Spirit of God (1 Corinthians 6:19), a slave of righteousness (Romans 6:18), an heir of God and co-heir with Christ (Romans 8:17), having access to God through Christ (Romans 5:2). All this and more is true of the Christian because he has been taken “out of Adam” and “united with Christ” (1 Corinthians 15:22, Romans 6:11).
In the end, if we don’t re-examine our views of God, man, sin and salvation, we will continue to slide into more and more absurd methods of marketing, evangelism and pragmatism – ironically becoming more irrelevant than ever. All because we’ve chosen to play marbles with diamonds. 
