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One Problem – Death Through Sin

Years ago, an apocalyptic group threatened to kill thousands in Japan.  They were going to use just a few drops of Sarin gas.  Imagine if I offered you a glass of water and told you that there was only one drop of sarin in it; otherwise, the water was perfectly pure.  Oh, sarin is not pleasant, but what could one drop do?  Would you accept my logic?  Of course not.  Yet we argue that a few drops of sin in our lives don’t make us sinful.  The Bible shows sin to be as deadly and toxic on a spiritual level as sarin is on a physical level.  A few drops are enough to take down humanity.

The monists call for us to wake up.  So does the Bible.  “Wake up, O sleeper, rise from the dead” (Eph. 5: 14).  The Bible wakes us not from ignorance but “from the dead.”  The day humans rebelled against God’s authority at the beginning of time, the poison of sin entered the fountain of life and turned its water toxic.  The natural state of man is not the circle of life but the circle of death.  We are alienated from God, enemies - blind, foolish and evil.  The human heart is desperately wicked, full of corruption, and only evil continually (see Gen. 6:5).  This is not the picture of an innocent lion cub, like Simba, asleep to his real nature.

Our hearts need conversion, not awakening. If we stir the human heart to life without the transformation of God’s Holy Spirit, it will only spew forth evil, hatred and deception.  Even our best efforts at humanitarian good are about as attractive as dirty laundry (Isa. 64:6)!  No act of love is acceptable to God unless it is done by his power and for his glory.

Pagans believe that making distinctions is sin.  The Bible teaches the very opposite.  The original sin is the refusal of divine distinctions, in particular, the first distinction of all, the absolute distinction between the Creator and the creature.  Here is how it goes. The clever serpent insinuates that the Creator’s word is ambiguous (“Did God really say?”) and therefore hardly dependable.  Eve falls for the lie in order that in order to be free, she must make her own, independent choices, and create her own world.  Eve chooses to believe the pagan/diabolical lie that if she relies on herself, if she goes within, she can be divine.

Only the creator knows what creation should look like.  Only God knows what true purity is. He places all the distinctions in the creation he made in order to remind us of the first great distinction which should bring us humble to our knees before him.  All other sins are consequences of the refusal of that first distinction.

To destroy the distinction between sin and goodness allows us to ease our consciences. But somewhere underneath, we still recognize objective evil.  We know that two eleven-year-olds dropping a five-year-old from a fourth-floor window is evil. We know that cruel dictators who gas their own citizens are evil.  Even more important, we recognize as evil the rage and selfishness we see when we look honestly into our own hearts.

But how do we deal with this evil?  Do we embrace it, accept it, come to love it? Or do we fall on our knees and recognize our need for God’s grace, confessing with the church “grace alone?”