What is Wrong with the World?

by Tim Keller

Sin as Mistrust

Jeremiah 17:5-14

We all have things we worry about—sociological, psychological, or otherwise. We may be fearful or hateful of certain people groups—a sociological issue. We may grapple with insecurity about our self-image—a psychological issue. We may worry about our finances or our reputation or our family. Whatever the worry is, we often try to fix these things on a surface level. But the Bible says we will never truly deal with them unless we look beneath the surface and see the real source of our problems.

This long passage to the people of Israel from the prophet Jeremiah helps us see the source. In the passage, Jeremiah denounces the people for their sin, and during the denunciation he makes a fascinating comparison of two types of trees that reveals another facet of sin’s nature and effects.

The Root of Sin

The metaphor of the two trees shows us that the essence of sin is putting our roots into something besides God.

The first tree in verse 6 is nothing more than a naked bush. The word arar is related to the Hebrew word for “naked,” drawing attention to its location in a bare and stripped land. By contrast, the other tree is flourishing by a river, large and full and green.

The difference between the two trees arises from where their roots are located. It’s not even so much that the roots are different; it’s the location of the roots that determines everything about the tree—its leaves, its branches, its trunk, everything.

Why is that? Because roots exist to do two things. First, they anchor the tree into the ground so neither the tree nor the soil blows away. Second, the roots draw nutrients and moisture from the soil and absorb them. The nutrients are important for growth, but the moisture, if the roots go deep enough to access it, allows the tree to survive during drought conditions. These two functions are extremely important to remember when we consider the concept of sin. Sin, this passage teaches us, is planting our roots in something other than God. We often think of sin as something different: a violation of rules. One of the problems with thinking of sin solely in that way is that it causes us to see both sin and godliness as lying on a spectrum. In that view, you could say that a person with fifty violations against God’s law is a sinner while a person with three violations is a godly person. And someone with twenty-five violations falls somewhere in the middle.

But Jeremiah tells us we can’t see sin this way. We can’t say, “Here’s a person who’s half as good as this other person.” Sin and godliness are two different orientations of the heart, two different locations of our roots. We either put our roots down in God or in something else, and where we place them determines everything else about us.

Faith in Something

Some will read this and think, “If faith is what it takes to get rid of sin, I don’t know if I’m up to that. I’m not a person of great faith like those other religious people.” This line of thinking is a deceit of the heart. Everyone has faith in something. To live our lives, we must place our trust somewhere, and the course of everything we do is determined by where we put that trust. Everybody has faith, just like every tree has roots. Everybody puts their roots down into something for support.

Do you want to find out where your roots are?

What do you worry about most?
What scares you most?
[endif]What, if you lost it, would make you feel like your life was crumbling? What would make you feel like you didn’t have any substance anymore, or that your life wouldn’t be worth living?

Everybody has answers to these questions. What are yours? Whatever they are, they should give you a good idea of what your faith is in, of where your roots lie.