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[Note: This MS is available in larger font on our Brief Articles 2 page.]
The very appearance of Christ on earth was predicated on the reality of sin in all men, its destructive consequences, and man’s helplessness to overcome it without a Savior. This fact answers certain blasphemous babblers.
First, it is blasphemy to deny the existence of sin or to seek to mitigate its awfulness by calling it less than sin. It’s hard to find a drunkard anymore, but we have millions of “alcoholics” who are merely unfortunate victims of “disease.” The fornicator and adulterer are not so bad; they are merely “swingers having an affair.” The abominable homosexual and lesbian practitioners are merely “Gay people” who have opted for an “alternate lifestyle.” People who rob, kill, and rape can’t be blamed, for they are poor victims of deprived childhood environments—”society” is to blame.
Maybe worse, we now have elders and preachers who practically deny sin’s existence. They are ignoring sin and false doctrine in the church while it eats away as does a cancer in the vitals of the body of Christ, refusing to expose and condemn either it or its proponents (they might lose some of their wealthy and worldly members). To deny, laugh at, or ignore sin is to make a mockery of Christ’s death to free us from it. I must be just as serious about sin as Christ was and face its reality in my life and in the lives of others.
Second, it is blasphemy to carelessly say that God could have solved the grave problem of sin in some other way besides sending Christ. Such usually allege that He merely chose to do it through the death of His Son upon the cross for reasons unknown to us, but that He could have done it some other way. Such a doctrine depicts God as a Divine sadist who inertly sat by and let His Son suffer unutterable agony on the cross unnecessarily. If sin could have been conquered any other way, then God must be judged a cruel and unfeeling being to have allowed it to happen, despite the thrice-repeated plea of His Son to redeem man by some other means. The prayers of Gethsemane, followed by the crucifixion, are fully convincing to the objective and reasonable mind that there was no other way to accomplish man’s redemption.
Not only is sin a reality, but the destiny of unforgiven sin is likewise: “The wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23). Let us keep ourselves from its contamination (Jam. 1:27) and let us help others to escape its corruption and damnation (Jam. 5:20).
[Note: I wrote this article for and it was published in The Edifier, weekly bulletin of Pearl Street Church of Christ, Denton, TX, July 7, 1988, of which I was editor.]
Attribution: From thescripturecache.com; Dub McClish, owner and administrator.
