13. How Will God Deal with Sin?

How Will God Deal with Sin? The question can now come before us: How will a God with such a character deal with such a condition as sin? What does the nature of things demand of Him, which means, what does He demand of Himself (for the nature of things after all has its source in His nature), when He is confronted with that which ought not to be? This question cannot be answered until we first have an answer to another question. What is that which ought not to be? In other words, What is sin?

If sin is doing wrong, in what way is the wrong done, and by whom, and against whom? And if the wrong is done by man against God, as the universal conscience of mankind compels us to acknowledge, what is it in Him that has been wronged? A Being such as we have concluded God to be, will of course have such moral relations with other moral beings as will be the inescapable outflow of the nature He has. And those relations cannot be based on caprice, but on the inherent laws of moral being.

If the moral being of God has been wronged, then, in any phase of its expression, if we can discover how He has been wronged, that should define for us the nature of sin. But this can be discovered only as we get back to another question and get some clear idea of the nature of moral being. For only thus can the nature of moral action become clear, and so only thus can be defined that which ought not to be, and its opposite, that which ought to be. So we proceed to that inquiry.