Envision a war-torn battlefield. Guerrilla warfare lurks at the edges. Entrenched battle lines struggle toward one another. Tactics of deception and distraction are everywhere. This is an epic battle between good and evil! And yet, in the fog of war, murky motivations and flimsy justifications abound.

I am describing the terrain of the human heart. As Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago: “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but through every human heart…. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years.” The heart, for ancient peoples, is the deep seat of being. Out of the heart, we think, feel, and do. Inside the heart, we struggle.

Designed to depend upon God and to love God with all of our heart, we assert our autonomy and say, “Who needs God anyway? I’m doing just fine all by myself!” The repercussions are a littered topography of lies told and bodies buried. The good, true, and beautiful get warped and distorted, mangled into evil, falsehood, and ugliness.

We long to be redeemed, to be rescued from the battle and carried into peace and safety. Yet, the guilt over what we’ve done and the shame in who we’ve become is a thicket impossible to escape in our own power. Christians believe that only Jesus rescues us from ourselves, delivers us from the waging war of sin and death, and brings us back to God, granting us peace.

And yet, even in the new hope of a truce forged by our surrender to Christ, we often sink back into what lies beneath. We lurk in the shadows under the surface, unable to fully embrace the faith, hope, and love that God has bestowed upon us. And in this subterranean world, we succumb to the lies that lie beneath, falsehoods coaxing us into the belief we can never be forgiven, cleansed, healed, and made whole again. And other bundles of lies that suggest we can find our healing and wholeness by clasping, possessing, attacking, or abusing.

Lent is a season of introspection where we, through God’s love and truth, explore what lies beneath in the underworld of our own hearts, and expose the lies that distort and deceive. This year we will do so in light of seven historical narratives found in the Hebrew Scriptures (what Christians call the “Old Testament”), each a depiction of one of the seven deadly sins.