Hardness

Mark 3:5 (NLT)

He looked around at them angrily, deeply saddened by their hard hearts.

There is a version of Christianity that refuses to acknowledge the hardness of the human heart. The callousness, greed, hypocrisy, and arrogance of the human heart is such that a man might witness someone being murdered or raped in front of them and choose to do nothing because it doesn't affect them. What do we call such people? Are they human beings, or are they worse than animals?

 In this verse, the Pharisees and the crowd gathered around the Lord, trying to find a way to accuse the Lord. They would instead let the cripple die in agony than let the Lord heal him. Do such deserve God's love? Certainly not. But God loves such hardened hearts as well. However, unlike the humanist preachers who have compromised the purity of the gospel and refrain from rebuking sin, callousness, and hypocrisy, we are supposed to confront such hardness in the average folks and lead them to repentance.