28. XXVI. Sin as a Force and Power over Man

XXVI. Sin as a Force and Power over Man As regards the relation between God and man we are always encountered by the difficulty — one might well say, the impossibility — of expressing and even of understanding its nature. This relation is, obviously and necessarily, a unique thing in the universe of our knowledge. There is not, and there cannot be, any other relation similar to it; we cannot aid understanding by comparing it with anything else: and all metaphors fail to fit the conditions fully, however useful they may often be.

Like everything else that concerns God, this relation of man to Him has to be perceived by direct intuition, or, as Paul would put it, through the power of faith, which is for us “a conviction of things not seen”. (Hebrews 11:1.) Just as we recognise and know through faith that God is and that God is good, without being able to demonstrate by logical argument that either axiom is true, so we recognise and know that, as was pointed out in the previous Sections, mere increase in the distance that separates man from God, or (to use our other form of ex;pression) increasing unlikeness of man to God, does not remain a mere abstract proposition, but becomes a force or power acting on the will in such a way as to weaken the sympathy of the human for the Divine nature, to lessen in man the power of recognising the Divine character and purpose, and to enfeeble the desire of man for reunion with God.

If we are challenged to prove this assertion that increase of distance from God becomes a power of evil, we cannot demonstrate it. It is involved in the nature of our relation to God. We feel it and we know it. It is an ultimate or primary fact from which we have to start. In Pauline language, we live by faith alone. This truth, however, is simply another form of the axiom that God is good: He is good because He draws man to Him naturally. Like seeks to like through a sort of attractive power which the one exerts on the other; and the lesser, i.e. man, moves towards the greater, i.e. God. Such is the natural fact, or the purpose of God, which acts and is so long as man has not lost his simple and natural character. Yet even this metaphorical expression that “like draws to like” is utterly inadequate as a statement of the relation: it is only a figurative description which in some degree helps comprehension, but it is both incomplete and positively inaccurate in some important respects. The term “attractive force,” then, is merely another metaphor by which we attempt to express the relation between the Creator and the created. The righteous action is the actualising of this force; and the performance of such an action makes the power stronger, so that we feel righteousness as a force in us, in which the force of faith is merged. The two become indistinguishable in fact, though distinguishable in language. Such is the nature of this force and the law of its action.

It is only another side of the same law and nature, which rules and constitutes righteousness, that the failure to perform the righteous act — which is tantamount to the performance of the unrighteous act in the supposed situation — not merely weakens the force attracting the individual to God, but actually brings into existence a counter-force, the power of evil, which tends to draw the individual away from God, to intensify his unlikeness towards God, to increase continuously his distance from God.

These various ways in which we have attempted to state the nature of sin are merely metaphors drawn from human experience to aid comprehension, and not philosophical definitions. Sin, therefore, is a force and a power, not simply a fact. When we speak of sin widening the distance from God, that metaphor is insufficient to suggest that sin thereby strengthens itself and establishes its hold on the man’s will. Such, however, is the law according to which this failure to act righteously works; it is not a mere negation, it is more than simple non-righteousness. It is, or it becomes, the power of evil ruling the will of man.

Yet for this we have no more proof than there was for the two previously stated axioms (or rather the two forms of the same axiom). Such we know: such we perceive: the experience of the world in past history and in contemporary life is inexplicable otherwise.

Hence arose the intensity of Paul’s hatred for sin. This hatred is his heritage from his Hebrew ancestry, from the past history of his people, from the dealings of God with the forefathers. It was a flame burning more intensely in him than in other Jews, because his native power was stronger; but it was a purely Jewish force, and utterly unlike any feeling that was characteristic of pure Hellenism. His hatred of idolatry, one special class or form of sin, was natural to a typical Jew brought up in a pagan city. The Jews in Paul’s time began life on a higher moral platform than the Gentiles. The Law had been a stern and salutary master (paidagogos), forcing them onwards in some degree, but unable to force them beyond a certain point; they could not obey it completely: it was a yoke imposed as an external thing: it was not able to produce real righteousness, but only the semblance of righteousness, because the acts which it enforced did not spring from the free will of the individual, i.e. from the Divine element in him seeking of its own initiative towards the Divine end. Hence the act, which was outwardly right, did not result in sufificiently vitalising and strengthening within the man that force which is righteousness.

Yet this action according to the Law, although it could not make the individual man righteous, did produce an effect on the nation, and so ultimately on the individual through the nation. It produced a national righteousness, in other words, a national standard of judgment according to the knowledge of moral principle, which was embodied in the law. It developed conscience and the consciousness of sin through the fact that the prohibition of sin stood always placarded before the nation in the law. (“I had not known sin except through the law,”Romans 7:7. “Through the law cometh the knowledge of sin,”Romans 3:20. CompareRomans 7:13.) It is a true fact of psychology that such a national standard of judgment about sin, and such a national conscience, may be developed by generations of contemplation of a moral law; and the modern phrase “the Nonconformist conscience” attests the result as a historical fact in a living instance. This national conscience, and this national standard of judgment about righteousness, produces a powerful effect on the individual member of the nation. He commonly has the national righteousness, being pushed forward to it by the compulsion of social requirements. This national or racial righteousness in a person, for which social compulsion and not the will and character of that person is responsible, may be described metaphorically as static, not dynamic righteousness. It does not remake the individual. It does not recreate and reinvigorate his nature. He is not born again. Commonly, its effect is to make him more self-satisfied, more complacent, less conscious of the Divine. (Romans 10:3, “Being ignorant of God’s righteousness, and seeking to establish their own, they (i.e. the Jews living according to the law and the national righteousness) did not subject themselves to the righteousness of God”.) Only dynamic righteousness, which springs from the individual striving towards reunion with God, can make him a new man; and such righteousness cannot come except through the force of faith, which is a possession of the individual soul. The national righteousness, of which we have been speaking, has many advantages. When the individual falls short of it, he is conscious that he is untrue to the national character. This consciousness that one is falling below the national standard continues so long as the law remains a living force in the race or in the individual. If the law comes to be felt only as a dead prescription of works, it ceases to be a master that forces the nation on towards its standard; and yet even then it has not lost all its power and usefulness.

Paul always felt that the Jews, even though they were not gaining true righteousness through the law, were starting on a higher standard of judgment and knowledge than the ordinary Gentiles. “I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not according to a right intuition.” (Romans 10:2.) It is much to have this zeal for God; but the zeal requires to be guided by a right perception of His nature and of man’s relation to Him through Christ. Without that perception the Jews, in the issue, set up their own instead of the righteousness of God. (Romans 10:3, quoted in the last note but one.)

Accordingly, Paul, like other Jews of his time, started with the immense advantage of this strong hatred for sin and zeal for God. Sin kept him from God. He regarded the force and power of sin almost as a personal enemy: it was to him Satan.

Sin, even more than righteousness, can be national and racial. As we have just seen, the national righteousness, though in itself a good thing, never attained to be the true dynamic righteousness in the highest sense of the term; but sin that is national and inculcated through the national standard of judgment can be just as harmful, as dangerous, and as hostile to right, as when it proceeds from the individual initiative. Satan, the power of evil, can rule in a nation and set up his throne in its capital, and be all the more powerful and terrible in consequence. Thus, in Paul’s estimation, the political and social conditions, whether Imperial or municipal, which impeded his work of spreading the Gospel, were hindrances put in his way by Satan, the enemy.

Whether, or how far, Paul considered Satan as literally and strictly a personal being, must remain uncertain. He had not entirely freed himself from a lingering belief in “principalities and powers” intermediate between God and man; and thus, on the one hand, it was easy for him to believe in such a purely evil power, subordinate to God, while on the other hand, through the stimulus of his intense hatred for sin, it was always easy for him to fall into the use of metaphorical or half metaphorical language, picturing the power of sin as a personal being whom he could abominate, and against whom he could more easily rouse in his pagan correspondents the same intense hatred that he himself cherished.

Strong emphasis is in Paul often due rather to emotion than to intellect, even in cases where the subject and the purpose seem to be properly intellectual. The emphasis is not so much intended to ensure attention on the part of his readers, as forced out of him by the intense passion of his own convictions, which were not matter of cool intellectual assent, but ruled his whole emotions and the depths of his nature. Thus, however much his language about Satan in some cases may suggest that Paul regarded him as a personal enemy, I would not venture to assert that this implies an intellectual belief in the existence of such a personal power.

After all, Paul was before everything a preacher and a missionary. To him the first and supreme duty was to make his converts hate sin and love righteousness; and it was far more important to make them dread and detest a personal Satan than to lead them into philosophical speculation about the purpose of God in permitting sin and about the whole problem of evil. If they began to theorise about the purpose of God in a creation of which evil forms a part, and about the necessity which imposed itself on the Creator, as a condition of creative action, to leave open the possibility of evil, i.e. separation from God, such vague and profitless theorising, and the logomachies which would arise therefrom, could only distract them from the first business of their life, viz., to be good; and that danger was already apparent to Paul, incipient in the Corinthians, more advanced in the Colossians, and fully developed in the Asian churches when he wrote to Timothy.