He was there with camera ready. Imagine accompanying the Dallas police to the Texas Theater on November 22, 1963, and you're the one and only person who's able to take the footage of the capture of presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. You're the only one with camera ready to record for history how the police had the manager point out the man who entered the theater without paying; you're there to point your camera at the police as they proceed row by row, until finally coming to the man they want as he sits, awaiting their arrival.

Imagine being able to record the fight that ensued as Oswald draws his gun, tries to fire it point blank into a policeman, but the weapon misfires. Just think, it's your camera and, no doubt, your journalistic coup for the entire world to see.

But wait a minute. We haven't seen the film. No nightly news has ever broadcast it. Why not? Because the film does not exist. And why not? He was there, camera ready. He was filming it all, every tense and glorious bit of it. At least he thought he was.

Although the camera was dutifully running and the film was winding its way through its inner labyrinth, the man had forgotten to click the switch that would cause the camera to adjust to the darkened conditions of the theater. Result: no discernable images doing anything on the developed film. The visual record of what transpired inside the Texas Theater on November 22, 1963, is lost forever. Our only knowledge of those events must forever be oral.

There's a camera that's moving inside the mind of man. Every waking moment, the film is moving, giving him images of the world around him. But since the fall of man in Genesis 3, he's unable to develop the film correctly. The camera records his ordered and complex environment. It shows him that something is there outside himself, rather than nothing is there. He develops the film, but it's darkened; he views it all as the product of time + chance + the impersonal.

The camera photographs other people in this environment. He can even point it at himself. But again, the footage comes up darkened. Instead of seeing himself for the magnificent creation he is in the image and likeness of God (Psalm 8), he classifies himself as one more accidental species of animal on the lonely and accidental third rock from the sun.

With every developed piece of film, the results are always the same – he sees the darkened images, images with no meaning. But why?

Enter the explanation: the statement of Romans 1:21, "but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened." That's it! Man's reasoning is darkened as of the fall.

Enter Ephesians 4:18: "They are darkened in their understanding . . . due to the hardening of their hearts." The problem is, that as the Dallas cameraman filmed and filmed away, he had no idea that the camera was all fouled up. He thought he was getting everything and recording it correctly. We can almost see his journalistic giddiness as he thinks of all the awards he's going to win for what he's doing.

The film in the flawed mind of man rolls on and comes to contemplate living forever. He concludes that he can get it if he's good enough, behaves enough, and just doesn't sin any more than the next person. His flawed mind tells him to find some code, inner (his own morality) or outer (the 10 Commandments or the Golden Rule or maybe both together for added punch) and do his best to live up to it.

His mind would never, in a million years, come up with the developed footage that records Jesus saying, "For My Father's will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in Him shall have eternal life, and I will raise him up in the last day" (John 6:40).