24. The Nature of Sin

The Nature of Sin

Chapter III The whole race is now committed, through Adam, to that which ought not to be. Love has gone astray, abandoned God, and come under the control of self. The sacrificial principle has been repudiated, the selfish principle adopted, and the heart of man now searches for happiness in vain; for it is sought in the will of man, and it can be found only in the will of God.

Moreover, man is by nature, because of the inescapable effect of sin on the whole race, wholly blind to the cause of his unhappiness, and so is forever blaming others for his misery. He is conscious of some sort of strain between himself and his environment, and so in seeking to overcome the tension, he is always trying to change his environment. And since environment always has personalities behind it, he is on the lookout for those who have any influence on his surroundings and circumstances, that through them he may prevent or modify the conditions he believes are to blame for the strain he feels.

It is little wonder, then, that men are so quick to heap blame on others for the things they do not like. It began with Adam and Eve. When God confronted Adam for an accounting on his condition and the conduct that brought it to pass, he blamed it all on the woman, saying in effect: “If You had not given me the woman, I would not have sinned.” And when He asked Eve: “What is this that thou hast done?” she said: “The serpent beguiled me,” as if she meant, “If You had not allowed Satan to tempt me, I would not have sinned.”

Thus they both blamed God for their sin, and their children, from then until now, have been doing the same thing, as their alibis for their sins show when they are fully analyzed. The spirit of this, which more or less possesses the hearts of all under the control of sin, had startling demonstration only recently, when a company of atheists countered our annual Thanksgiving Day services in what they called a “blamegiving” gathering, and in which the went to the blasphemous length of singing to the notes of our Christian Doxology:

“Blame God from whom all cyclones blow;

Blame him when rivers overflow;

Blame him who swirls down house and steeple, Who sinks the ships and drowns the people.” The strain that all men feel, however, does not arise from their environment, but from within their own hearts. Causes which they think are external and physical are really internal and ethical, and discords which they lay to an economic system or a moral order are really caused by personal antagonism to a personal God. But the very egotism of sin and the self-conceit of self-love cause a total blindness that must prove fatal, unless removed by a power entirely outside the human race.

Man is blind also to the effect of sin on the race. Being a dependent being, and having declared his independence of God, there is no one left to depend on but man. And since it is impossible to depend on one in whom there is no confidence, the lengths to which humanity goes in its efforts to build up confidence in the dependability of man would be ridiculous to the last degree, if such efforts were not so tragic in their destructive power.

It is because of man’s independence of God through sin that Satan so easily leads him to rely on himself, even when he imagines he is relying on God. Sensing intuitively, as all men are compelled to do, that he is a dependent being, no man can escape the instinct to look to and depend on some supreme being. Only this instinct ever makes it possible to bring any man to true dependence on the true God.

Such dependence, with a view to a happy destiny, is a man’s acknowledgement of the worthship of the being, real or imaginary, on whom he relies, and we have shortened the word into worship. Man will worship. No one on earth can stop him, for no power can remove from him the sense of dependence. The coming of sin into the race had no effect on that universal instinct. God created it within man with the precise and loving purpose of leading men to depend on Him forever, and this sense of dependence cannot be touched by sin, even though sin may breed the spirit of independence of the true God. To the depths of our inmost being we know we are dependent creatures.