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Christian Network

Sin is deception. It is amazing how attractive it can appear, even to a believer, when he is in the throes of temptation. The dark seems like light. We are lulled into the notion that evil is somehow good. Satan is a master of disguise and he disguises death to appear as life. Why do we, who should know better, allow ourselves to be deceived?

The discomforting answer can be found in James 1:14 where the brother of our Lord declares that "each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed". Notice he does not pull any punches about who is ultimately responsible for transgression. It is not Satan. It is certainly not God. It is ourselves. So sin is also self-deception.

If Satan is a master of disguise then human beings are masters of excuse. If true repentance from habitual sin seems so hard for those of us caught up in it perhaps it is because we desperately want to avoid admitting our complicity. "The Devil made me do it" may be a hoary old cliché but it accurately describes a persistent lie of the soul. Someone else is responsible. He, she, it, they...anyone…anything… made me do it. Our parents in the flesh were the first to buy into this evasion of personnel responsibility. Eve blamed the Serpent, Adam blamed Eve. Our race has been addicted to blame ever since.

Of course God knows better and, deep down, so do we. Call it conscience or call it conviction; all human beings are aware, on some level, that they are capable of doing wrong that truly is wrong. Our culture likes to talk about sociopathic tendencies in especially wicked people. The Bible had this condition pegged 2000 years ago, the term it uses is "a seared conscience", and having such a conscience does not constitute any kind of excuse from judgement . The person with a seared conscience is ultimately responsible for that condition. Today we may say that some "Sociopaths" are blissfully unaware of any wrong in their crimes and therefore cannot be held responsible. The theory is that they are incapable of knowing that what they do is horribly wrong and so are somehow beyond just punishment. Combine that with the aforementioned modern therapeutic approach to sin, which tries to recast it as an understandable reaction to something perpetrated against us by someone else, and you have a culture that jumps from there to basically affirming the rightness of sin under many circumstances. Again, God knows better.

The reason for individual sin may indeed include some mitigating circumstances that will lessen the sting of divine discipline or punishment, but those circumstances never excuse it. Blessedly, we can ask for mercy and, more importantly, we can ask for forgiveness. But we must never ask God to call good, evil and evil, good by somehow affirming us in our sin. He will never do this, for to do so would be for God to believe our carefully crafted self-deceptions and the One who embodies all Truth knows our lies for exactly what they are.

Perhaps two of the greatest prayers we could ever utter towards Heaven are to ask our Lord, through the Holy Spirit, to give us an unvarnished view of what our personnel sin truly is and then to show us that we alone are responsible to turn from it.

Then, going forward with our self-serving illusions shattered, we can ask for His love for us to be our blessed help in entering the place of true repentance.