By Augustus Henry (PhD)
The story is told of a man named John who wanted to get time away from his wife. So, he said he was going to fish. Instead, He left and went to play dominoes with his friends for four hours. When the game was over, the scoundrel wondered what devious excuse he would give to his wife who was waiting to eat some fish. As he walked home, he met a young man coming from the seaside with a bunch of fresh fish. He bought four of the nicest snappers from the bunch. As the young man began to leave, John gave the fish back to him and said, throw them to me. As the young man threw the snappers back to John, he caught them and said, now I can tell my wife I caught some fish. Did he catch fish?
Remember that famous incident from Bill Clinton, “I had the marijuana in my mouth but did not inhale and therefore did not smoke.” We are sometimes tempted into believing that compromising or blurring moral principles may be a standard way of living.
Some have gone as far to argue against the evil of sin – saying that there is nothing such as sin – that morality is a figment of the imagination – that there is no guaranteed penalty for sin. This is nothing new. It has been an old trick since creation. These ill-fated dogmas are peddled by the devil himself and are designed to confuse and convolute our mind, obstructing people from standing on the side of right.
Sin as an ambiguous idea
In the garden of Eden: (Genesis 2: 16) And the Lord God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; (17) but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.”
There was a clear moral choice to be made: This is what you may eat, that is what you must not eat. But Lucifer always sought to provide a counterfeit argument to circumvent God’s truth. He sneaks a forged and unsuspecting way to navigate around obedience to God. Therefore, the devil said in Genesis 3: 4, “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. (5) “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” Even the devil in the process of deception establishes a demarcating line between ‘good and evil’. So, there is a clear and unclear standard. There is no misconstruing God’s statement, “you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” If you eat of that tree, “you will surely die.” Which do you choose; The clear standard or the made-up one?
Irrespective of the choice you make, some things are still wrong whether you accept it or not. Sleeping with someone who is not your wife or husband is still wrong. There is no such thing as a fib. Lying remains wrong. Stealing time from your employer or receiving without permission anything that does not belong to you is still wrong. Envying your neighbor’s house or car, or job remains a moral violation. Disrespecting your parents is egregious to God. Being resentful and hateful is murderous in the eyes of God. And the pastors and church leaders that cannot keep their eyes and fingers off the young girls in church, that is still sin – pedophilia is still abhorrent in the sight of God. Some people tell me that advocating for adherence to the Ten Commandments is unscientific, backwards, and closeminded. In that case, I will always have a closed mind. My mind will be closed to anything that ambiguates or waters-down the commands of God.
Sin is real – The scientist says
Orval Hobart Mowrer on His regret of Rejecting Moral Accountability; saying it Was a Big Mistake: For several years we psychologists have looked upon the whole matter of sin and moral accountability as a great incubus and have claimed our liberation from sin as epoch-making. But at length we have discovered that to be free from sin and to have the excuse of being sick rather than sinful, is to quote the danger of being lost. This danger, I believe is betoken by the wide-spread interest in existentialism which we are presently witnessing. In becoming amoral, ethically mutual and free, we cut the very roots of our being and our deepest sense of selfhood and identity and with neurotics have found ourselves asking, who am I? What is my deepest destiny? What does living really mean?
Looking back over his life, over is opposition to God’s moral code; realizing that God was right, and he was wrong, Mowrer committed suicide. Are we human beings if there are no standards of right and wrong?
Mowrer’s point is that he spent his entire life opposing the idea of sin and made sickness and mental instability a scapegoat for it. He refuted the notion that men needed cleansing from sin. He came to realize at the end of his life however, that while physical disease needed healing, the soul needed a different type of therapy – that sin was real, and it came with a cost.
The consequence of sin – you shall surely die
There is consequence to sin, and it leads to death. Some are advocating that young people today can choose their own values and determine their own standards of right and wrong as they see fit. But I say no to this devil-concocted scheme. The bible says that there is wrong and right – choose you this day who you will serve. There is a way that seems right to a man, but at the end of it, are the ways of death. The bible says the soul that sins, it shall die. Believe it or not there is consequence to sin.
Moral accountability is all around us. You steal and kill; the courts are waiting. After that prison might be calling your name. Fornication and adultery breed emotional pain, broken families, and wayward children. And after all that comes death. Ezekiel 3:19: “Yet if you have warned the wicked and he does not turn from his wickedness or from his wicked way, he shall die in his iniquity.” When God said to the couple in Eden “you will certainly die”, it came to pass.
The Call:
Now that we have learnt clearly that sin is a thing, that it is real and consequential, what shall we do?
Joshua 24: 14 Now therefore fear the Lord and serve him in sincerity and in truth …(15) And if it seems evil unto you to serve the Lord, choose you this day whom ye will serve; … but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. In another place the scripture says, “Fear God and keep his commandments for this is the whole duty of man.”
My call is to be obedient to God and the teachings of Jesus Christ.