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Victims, Villains and Hardly Any Heroes

SERIES: In Tables of Stone #9 of 11

2008-11-23

PRODUCTION #: 1128

SPEAKER: Shawn Boonstra

On January 25, 2005, Cliff quietly got out of bed, careful not to disturb his wife, who was sleeping soundly next to him in their huge suburban home outside of Houston, Texas. Staying quiet so as not to wake his two sleeping kids, he left the house and drove off in his brand new Mercedes S500.

Cliff was obviously rich. As a corporate executive in the oil industry, he had a fancy home and fancy cars, and even owned a 72-foot yacht called “The Tranquility Base.” This Long Island policeman’s son was a millionaire many times over, and most important of all, he did it honestly and fairly because Cliff was not a crook.

So how is it that Cliff suddenly found himself immersed in all sorts of legal investigations? The FBI and the SEC were involved; even the United States Congress, as he was dragged into a mass of securities fraud investigations. He was convinced that agents were tailing him and rummaging through his trash. Even though nobody thought that Cliff was involved in the criminal activities that led to the downfall of America’s seventh largest company, there was no way he could escape the stigma. No doubt Cliff was taking it pretty hard.

The sleeping pills and anti-depressants were supposed to help, but they only made matters worse. Even though no one will ever know for sure exactly what was in his mind that night, it couldn’t have been good. Because even though we’re reasonably certain he did nothing wrong, he parked his car in the middle of the street. He locked the doors, pulled out his .357 revolver and ended it all—at least for himself.

John Clifford Baxter, age 43, became another tragic victim in a case that has produced almost nothing but victims—victims, villains and hardly any heroes. And of course, we’re talking about the Enron collapse, the demise of a company that declared $111 billion in assets back in 2000, but declared bankruptcy by the end of 2001. It was the second largest bankruptcy in the history of America—a bankruptcy that ruined thousands of lives, sent some of America’s top corporate talent to jail, destroyed the famous Arthur Andersen auditing firm, and led to the demise of one of the nation’s most innovative and powerful companies.

So how did it happen? What can we learn from it? Well, for starters let me say that I’m not here to judge anybody, and I certainly don’t want to judge the men involved in the Enron fiasco. The courts have already done that. But the courts of law don’t really judge the human heart. The actions, yes; the perceived motives, yes; the results, yes; but the innermost thoughts and feelings, and reasons of the heart, no. The courts can’t do that, and neither can I.

Blaise Pascal, the famous philosopher, once said:

“The heart has reasons that reason can never know.”

You know, he’s absolutely right. I don’t know the hearts of the Enron executives. I don’t know the deepest reasons for their actions and really, I don’t have to. The Bible teaches that one day God will both bring to light the hidden things of darkness and reveal the counsels or motives of the hearts. And on that day, the real truth is going to surface for the Enron executives and all the rest of us, so we’ve got to be careful that we don’t sit as judges because Jesus, himself, once said (Luke 6:37):

“Judge not, and you shall not be judged...”

Nevertheless, if we ever needed an example of how our violation of God’s law can bring ruin upon ourselves and others, we have it right here in the sad story of Enron. Now, in recent programs I’ve been doing a study of the Ten Commandments and showing the importance of God’s moral standards for life in the 21st century. We’ve discovered that while keeping God’s commandments will never buy your way out of your sin and guilt or pay for your sins, God still expects us to live by them. The Bible’s teaching on the purpose of the law is crystal clear—it doesn’t make up for your sins and it doesn’t buy you a ticket to heaven.

Here is what it actually says in Galatians, chapter 2 (Galatians 2:16):

“Knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law but by faith in Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Christ Jesus, that we might be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the law; for by the works of the law no flesh shall be justified.”

It really couldn’t be any clearer than that. You just can’t keep enough of the law to buy yourself a spot in heaven and make up for the laws you’ve already broken. But the Bible is also clear that God gives us His love, because He loves us and wants the best for us. And on top of that, the Bible also teaches that keeping God’s law really isn’t much of a burden, not if you take to heart what it says in 1 John 5:3:

“For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments. And His commandments are not burdensome.”

You know, if you ever wanted to see the value, the practical importance of keeping God’s commandments, you have it in the story of Enron. Maybe you’ve heard that old statement that a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged. Let me modify that just a little bit. A moral absolutist is a postmodernist who’s been robbed.

And what does that mean? Well, a postmodernist, at least in part, is someone who believes there is no such thing as absolute right and wrong. He believes that everybody has the right to determine what is right or wrong for themselves without outside interference.

They say everybody has his or her own set of moral values and nobody has the right to judge another person because nobody can see things clearly anyway. Now personally, I’ve met a lot of people who claim to believe this, but I suspect that if you press them hard, you’ll find out they don’t really believe it. And for sure I know that the thousands of folks at Enron who lost their incomes, their health insurance and their retirement savings—they don’t believe it either.

Somehow, when someone else breaks God’s law, we know it still applies. I won’t pretend to understand all of the sordid details in the Enron case—the shenanigans that led to the loss of an estimated $50 billion. It took federal and state investigators years to sort it all out, especially after Enron’s auditing firm started destroying documents.

But this much I do know: a violation of the eighth commandment led to a tragedy of gargantuan proportions. On the surface, Enron seemed like it would have been a great place to work. People like Henry Kissinger and former Secretary of State James Baker had served on the board. Nobel Laureate Nelson Mandela flew in from Africa to receive the Enron prize, and President George W. Bush famously referred to the Enron founder and chairman as “Kenny-boy.”

It was hailed in newspapers and magazines as a model company, a pioneer paving the way to a new millennium of business opportunities. On top of that, it seemed like a really honest place, too. I mean, just listen to these words from Enron’s 1998 Annual Report, just three years before the collapse. Here is what it says:

“We treat others as we would like to be treated ourselves. We will work with customers and prospects openly, honestly and sincerely.”

Now that sounds pretty good. But the truth is that as the company was going bust, its executives were telling investors and workers that everything was going great. There was no need to panic. Their investments were secure even though those same executives were selling their own shares and pocketing millions of dollars in the process.

Maybe the worst part was that almost every dollar was taken out of the retirement plans of the workers. It’s hardly treating others as they’d like to be treated themselves.

In fact, it’s more like this passage found in the book of James, chapter 5 (James 5:1-4):

“Come now, you rich, weep and howl for your miseries that are coming upon you! Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver are corroded, and their corrosion will be a witness against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have heaped up treasure in the last days. Indeed the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out...”

Through crooked accounting, insider trading, deceit and lies, the leaders of Enron were covering up the fact that the company was actually losing billions of dollars. They did this in order to keep the stock price high so they could reap their multi-million dollar bonuses every year, as well as sell their stocks at inflated prices. And what made matters worse was the fact that when stocks started falling, company executives didn’t allow workers to sell their shares, even though it’s what they were doing themselves. Let’s take a look at one striking example.

One of Enron’s two top executives, Jeffrey Skilling, was taking in tens of millions, at one point even selling $70 million worth of shares, while thousands of employees who believed Skilling’s words that the company was doing fine, watched their own pension plans crash when Enron stock collapsed from a high of $90 a share down to 61 cents.

Skilling was eventually sentenced to more than 24 years in prison, where he’ll make anywhere from about 12 cents an hour to, if he’s really lucky, maybe $1.25. He is going to have to make a lot more than that if he ever hopes to settle the millions of dollars in civil suits that have been filed against him. Andrew Fastow, the chief financial officer, and the brains behind some of Enron’s shadiest deals, got seven years, but that was only after he ratted out the others.

Then there was Kenneth Lay, who up until the end declared his innocence, even after selling stocks and pocketing tens of millions, and even after his conviction on 29 criminal counts, including conspiracy and fraud and facing up to 45 years in prison.

“Certainly, this is not the outcome we expected,” said Lay after his conviction. “I firmly believe I am innocent of the charges against me as I have said from day one.”

But of course, Lay never made it through sentencing. He died of a heart attack shortly after the conviction. Now, again, only God can sort out everything that really happened and who was really guilty. But if you need an example of how selfishness and sin can hurt a lot of people, the collapse of Enron paints a pretty clear picture.

Now, just try to picture the situation yourself. You’ve been working for years at a company. You give your life to it. Though you hear rumors that things are going poorly and your retirement portfolio is shrinking because the company stock is falling, the head honchos keep telling you everything is okay, not to worry, the company is in great shape, better than ever before. Before long things will be back to normal. To make matters worse, they won’t allow you to sell your stock.

Then you come to work only to be told to clear out your desk because you no longer have a job. Everything is gone: your paycheck, your company health insurance, and to make matters worse, your retirement portfolio—the one you built up for years—has dwindled down to nothing. Multiply that scenario by thousands and you’ll begin to understand the massive suffering and loss that happened at Enron. It all happened because somebody chose to break the eighth commandment, that one that says, “You shall not steal.”

You see, whether it’s robbing a bank at gunpoint, or cooking the books at Enron, in God’s eyes it is all the same thing. It is stealing. Now, of course, we know not all thieveries come with the vast consequences of Enron, but stealing doesn’t have to be in the millions of dollars to have terrible consequences. I have some friends who had a small generator sitting in their garage that they bought in anticipation of the Y2K crisis. One afternoon, they left the garage door open and someone came in and stole it.

Now, it was only a generator and insurance covered the theft, but worse than the material loss was this sense of having been violated. There is something sacred about ownership, about having some things that are yours that belong to you. And of course, more than a hundred years ago, Karl Marx ranted and raved about all the evils of private property, as if it was the cause of all our problems on earth. But we know first-hand how well his theory turned out, and that’s because there is something very basic, very human, about private ownership. It is just part of who we are as human beings, at least in this sinful world.

When you’re the victim of theft, whether it’s corporate fraud or a pickpocket, there is this sense that something basic to your humanity has been violated.

As anyone who has ever been robbed can tell you, that’s not a good feeling. But you know, there is another reason why we’ve been given the commandment against stealing. It might surprise you, but I think this commandment is just as much for the thief as it is for the victim. Let me try to tell you what I mean. Alexander grew up in a very dysfunctional home, a single mom, an absentee father, a rough group of friends, the whole spiel. At 17 years of age, Alexander, on a whim, saw a car idling in front of Starbucks, so he jumped in the car and he gunned it.

After a few minutes of driving the stolen car, when his heart stopped racing and the intensity of the actual theft started to wear off, he was horrified. “How could I have done this?” he thought. More than once, he was ready to pull over, jump out and run. But he kept on driving, and with each mile the sense of the seriousness of his crime became less and less acute. The longer he drove, the less guilty he felt. After about two hours, he said that he no longer thought he’d done anything wrong. On the contrary, he actually started thinking the car was his.

You know, I see this as a vivid example of what happens to us when we commit any kind of sin, but especially something as blatant as stealing. After all, who really needs a commandment to know that stealing is wrong? It’s all but written on the walls of our hearts, and then add to that what society says, and what God’s law says—people just have no excuse. If they’re going to steal, they have to violate their conscience to do it, but each time they do it, it gets easier and easier, as if the writing on the wall gets a little more blurred with each successive theft.

They learn to ignore the cries of their conscience until those cries become nothing but a whisper. Then they start ignoring their conscience in other areas, too, and before long, they find themselves doing things that would have horrified them a couple of years ago.

There is a text in the Bible where the author is talking about the difference between a mature Christian as someone who can eat meat as opposed to someone who is immature who can only consume milk. Here it is in the book of Hebrews (Hebrews 5:12-14):

“For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the first principles of the oracles of God; and you have come to need milk and not solid food. For everyone who partakes only of milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, for he is a babe. But solid food belongs to those who are of full age, that is, those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil.”

Now don’t miss this important point. We’re supposed to learn to distinguish between good and evil. How? Well, the Bible says by reason of use, by the constant practice of discerning between right and wrong, between good and evil, by constantly making the choice to do what is right as opposed to what is wrong. That’s how we better understand the difference between the two. And so in contrast, what surer way to get hardened in evil than to keep doing evil?

I’m pretty sure you’ve heard the story of putting a frog in a pot of steaming water and it very quickly jumps out—that just makes sense. So what do you do if you want to boil that frog alive? You place him in a pot of cold water and then you slowly warm it. The frog gets acclimated to the water. As it gets warmer and warmer, it just sits there enjoying its bath until it’s boiled alive. The point, of course, is obvious. Sin does the same thing to our hearts—the more you do it the more you like it, and the more you like it, the less wrong it feels.

Now here is the good news. No matter what you’ve done, you can still find forgiveness with God. Two thousand years ago, Jesus himself bore the penalty for our sins. They’ve already been paid for, at least as far as God is concerned. Maybe you’ve been a thief. Remember, not all thieves wear masks, climb walls at night or hold up convenience stores with shotguns. Not all thieves cook the books at Enron.

Thievery can be a lot more subtle than that. There are a thousand ways to be a thief, a thousand ways to steal, but there’s only one way to find peace and forgiveness with God, and that is through Jesus. No matter what you’ve done, you can at this moment be forgiven by God, you can go to Jesus and have your sins wiped away.

You can also go to Jesus and claim the promise of a new life and a new heart. You can claim the promise that in Jesus you can have the power to resist temptation. You see, the gospel isn’t just about forgiveness, it’s also about restoration. You can be free from this sin, this crime. You really can. Jesus has promised us (John 8:36):

“Therefore, if the Son makes you free, you shall be free indeed.”

Folks, I don’t have to tell you that stealing is wrong, because it’s not just a sin—it is a crime. You don’t even need the Bible to tell you that. What you do need to know, however, is where you can find forgiveness, healing and a chance to start over. You can find that at the foot of the cross.

You can find that with Jesus. I’m willing to bet that a lot of people at Enron wish some folks had done that a long time ago. Listen to me now. What keeps you from doing the right thing right at this moment? Why don’t you do it while you can still hear Jesus loud and clear, saying to you (Revelation 3:20):

“Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and dine with him, and he with Me.”

Let me put it this way, it would be better to have Jesus knocking at the door than the police, wouldn’t you say? Try to imagine a world without deadbolts and padlocks. I mean, a world where you didn’t even need them. That’s the desire that God has for our lives, and it can begin with you. Why don’t we bow our heads in prayer?

PRAYER:
Our Father in heaven, give us honest hearts. Teach us to be more like Jesus, to do more to walk the way He does, to show love the way He does. It’s our desire that today you would give us new hearts, that the world could see You in our lives, for we pray it in Jesus’ name, Amen.

Scriptures Used in “Victims, Villains and Hardly Any Heroes”

“Judge not, and you shall not be judged...”
—Luke 6:37

“Knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law but by faith in Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Christ Jesus, that we might be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the law; for by the works of the law no flesh shall be justified.”
—Galatians 2:16

“For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments. And His commandments are not burdensome.”
—1 John 5:3

 “Come now, you rich, weep and howl for your miseries that are coming upon you! Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver are corroded, and their corrosion will be a witness against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have heaped up treasure in the last days. Indeed the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out...”
—James 5:1-4

“For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the first principles of the oracles of God; and you have come to need milk and not solid food. For everyone who partakes only of milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, for he is a babe. But solid food belongs to those who are of full age, that is, those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil.”
—Hebrews 5:12-14

“Therefore, if the Son makes you free, you shall be free indeed.”
—John 8:36

“Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and dine with him, and he with Me.”
—Revelation 3:20