I'm Not So Bad: A Lesson in Depravity

I do not know if you have yet heard of Josef Fritzl, and if you haven't, you might do well to walk away from this post. Fritzl is an Austrian man who decided twenty-four years ago to lock his daughter in a basement and rape her repeatedly. Indeed, over the course of that time she was never allowed out of her basement prison once, and she bore seven children in that dungeon. One of them died, and Fritzl disposed of the body by incinerating it. Such abuse is absolutely horrific and so utterly depraved that one would feel hard pressed to even dream up such a wicked scenario. Yet, look at the response that Fritzl gives to the community so shocked by his evil:

I could have killed them all. Then there would have been no trace. No-one would have found me out.

He goes on to insist that he is no monster because if he had not taken the oldest daughter of his daughter to the hospital to save her life, then he would not have gotten caught. Basically, all of the internal organs of the young girl of 19 were shutting down, probably due to her imprisonment. But Fritzl is no monster, he says. He is, in fact, a life saver. He could have just killed them all, right?

There is no depth to which the depraved heart will not sink in order to justify itself. After all the evil that he has perpetuated, Fritzl can still come up with an excuse as to why he is no monster. Should it then be any surprise that our moral neighbor has difficulty seeing himself as a sinner in need of grace? How we need the Spirit of God to awaken us from our depravity and shine the spotlight of truth into our hearts! Truly, the heart is a deceitful, self-justifying, God-denying, self-exalting thing that will make monsters of us all if not for God's mercy.

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