Monday, February 12, 2007
Suffer, Little Children
Here's an article from CNN about children being abducted and brainwashed to become soldiers and killers. Honestly this is such a difficult thing for me to read about - especially as a new father. I first became aware of stuff like this through the documentary Invisible Children. I know sin is sin, but when I see things like this, I am amazed that God does not immediately obliterate us off the face of the earth.
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5 comments:
J,
Got the new treo pda phone so i can read your blog on the road. Good stuff. One question that i wonder and need to look into is "sin is sin" Just last week a man hit his 2 yr old daughter and thought he killed her (for not staying in bed). He dumped her body out side in the freezing snow in the woods. She was found the next morning dead and investigators believe she got up and walk around for a while before freezing to death. Now, i know i'm a sinner and i know i derserve eternal seperation from God but I wonder if my sin offends God like this sin?
bradda j
brudder j!!! c'mon! oh mercy.
your question is a good one, and here is my stab at an answer: heck yes our sin offends God like this does. what separates a man from God? sin. not degrees of sin. just sin. i pray that you and i never do such a thing to our children. i think we'd both say we could never even think of it. but do we, apart from the grace and leading of the holy spirit, have the potential of such evil? oh yes. the heart of natural man is dead, friend. all dead. there are no degrees of deadness. no one is "more dead" or "less dead" than dead. is one man "more saved" than another since he was a "worse sinner"? not if all men have the same potential to sin.
that sounds harsh, but it serves a purpose. you've heard me say this before - we cannot understand the depth of the grace extended us in salvation until we understand what it is we are saved from.
yes, deadness is deadness, and I agree we are all evil. But that expression of evil can affect the degree to witch God is pleased or displeased, shows favor or not and has a close relationship with. Not to metion the degree of our sin has a direct affect on our degree to witch we can be in fellowship with God and others. John 19:11, Jesus talks of a "greater sin". I agree that by the grace of God i have not expressed some of the potential evil in my heart, but if i ever do, God will be more saddend, and more angry than my daily sin against His will.
j
J - yessir. I'm tracking with you. I think we are looking at sin from two different vantages - both equally true and equally valid.
Sin is a verb, as you are saying - something we deal with on a daily basis that affects our actions, thoughts, etc. by which God is either glorified or not. I think it is accurate to say God is pleased when daily sins are overcome (He is glorified), displeased when we falter (He is mocked).
Sin is also, as I was saying, a state of being in relation to one's nature. This is in the ultimate sense, that filters out into one's daily thoughts, actions, etc. God's stance toward sin in this sense - the ultimate sense of one's unchanged nature - never wavers. Thus our lives must be hid with Christ to know the pleasures of God at all.
I think it is true that God is saddened when we sin of any calibre and also pleased when we obey Him. I think he is more pleased when we strive to obey Him trying so hard to put to death our sin nature and not to act on the resident potential evil living in our fallen hearts. But it doesn't necessarily mean that He withholds blessings nor that He grants blessings depending on how good or bad we have been. That is all up to His sovereignty and He decides who He blesses or not - we have no influence in that at all.
Evil tends to be man's description on the different levels of sin and hence our criminal justice system follows suit on the different grades of crimes. Some are more serious than each other but all of the same substance - infractions of criminal;social and moral law.
In this life it is impossible not to sin or do evil and hence the only antidote is death.
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