28. Sin's Wreckage beyond Telling

Sin’s Wreckage beyond Telling

1. Sin is alie.

It lies to man about his true state of heart, and deceives him into believing he can get along without God.

2. Sin is adelusion.

It leads men to reject God’s Word by accepting man’s pronouncement on the eternal things of which he knows nothing, and deludes him into believing he can qualify himself, or at least help God to qualify him, for a happy eternity in heaven.

3. Sin is a thing ofdarkness.

It causes man to hide his sins and cover up his wrong doings, while at the same time he tries to keep up appearances.

4. Sin is a crooked, perverse, distorted thing.

It twists the life and character out of uprightness and integrity into crooked ways of living, and perverse, distorted ways of thinking.

5. Sin is asnareto the soul.

It is crafty, cunning, covered, subtle, and so powerful that none can ever escape from its toils by anything less than a miracle worked by divine omnipotence.

6. Sin is grievous, unsatisfyingtoil.

It keeps man laboring for that which is not bread, and spending his life for that which satisfies not, giving him in return nothing but insufferable unrest of soul.

7. Sin is a loss, an emptiness, a hollowness, a nothing.

It turns God out of the soul and keeps Him out, leaving it an aching, yearning, unsatisfied, empty capacity for God which sin can never fill, for sin only empties.

8. Sin is arottennessto the soul.

It so ruins, defiles, and corrupts the soul as to cause it to rot. In Psalms 14:1—“Corrupt are they, and they have done abominable works”—the word “corrupt” is literally “rotten.”

Neither these words nor any others exaggerate the effect of sin on the sinner, for it is impossible to overstate a ruin that is total. Language staggers under the attempt to describe man’s condition in sin, for the wreck is so terrible as really to be beyond telling. One of sin’s chief effects has been to involve all sinners in a loss of all true conception of its enormity, and of our unspeakable deformity by nature from its effects upon us. At the end of the first chapter, it will be recalled that the question was asked, If wrong has been done against God by man, what is it in Him that has been wronged? It becomes possible to say something here in answer to that question, since sin has also a personal relation to God, as well as to the sinner himself, and through Him to the whole universe.