How sinful is sin? Sin blinds the mind so it can’t see the glory of Christ. It stops the ears preventing the hearing of God’s life-giving words; hardens the heart so it cannot feel the warmth of God’s grace. Sin smothers the conscience extinguishing any spark of the convicting power of the law. The feet are numbed hampering the ability to walk on the path of righteousness; the hands become withered making good works impossible. The judgment is corrupted by sin resulting in the discernment acting treasonously. Sin severs the tongue undoing the instrument of praise, sieges the understanding deceiving the heart and making falsehoods believable, stifles the image of God in man making him like the devils, deadens any desire for God and revels in lifeless and damning pursuits, defaces the affections so the inglorious and profane vanities are sought and cherished. Sin is indeed evil.
How sinful is sin? It led to the Fall. Calvin wrote,
the first man revolted from God’s authority, not only because he was seized by Satan’s blandishments, but also because, contemptuous of truth, he turned aside to falsehood. And surely, once we hold God’s Word in contempt, we shake off all reverence for him. For, unless we listen attentively to him, his majesty will not dwell among us, nor his worship remain perfect. Unfaithfulness then, was the root of the Fall. But thereafter ambition and pride, together with ungratefulness, arose, because Adam by seeking more than was granted him shamefully spurned God’s great bounty, which had been lavished upon him.[1]
The Westminster Confession states,
By this sin they [Adam and Eve] fell from their original righteousness and communion, with God, and so became dead in sin, and wholly defiled in all the parts and faculties of soul and body. From this original corruption, whereby we are utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good, and wholly inclined to all evil, do proceed all actual transgressions. Every sin, both original and actual, being a transgression of the righteous law of God, and contrary thereunto, doth, in its own nature, bring guilt upon the sinner, whereby he is bound over to the wrath of God, and curse of the law, and so made subject to death, with all miseries spiritual, temporal, and eternal (Chap. 6. 2, 4, 6).
DEPRAVITY
Human kind is depraved. That means that we are corrupt and destitute of all holiness, righteousness and goodness. As a result, man is prone to all manner of sin and evil. We are spiritually dead incarnate devils who merit God’s just indignation. We are also completely selfish, placing ourselves at the nexus of the universe. Paul, in Romans 1:29-32, goes through a litany of sins. This catalogue is both humbling and frightening. He wrote,
They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God’s decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.
Humanity is so desperately corrupt that they invent ways to be evil and approve of that evil being practiced. All this is done knowing that sin deserves punishment. How brash and stupid! Sin is indeed abhorrent and unlogical in a universe ruled by a perfect and hallowed God.
Herman Bavinck wrote,
The first sin, the sin for which our original human ancestors are responsible, has had calamitous consequences for them as well as all their descendants and unleashed a flood of misery on the human race. In consequence, humanity as a whole, and every person in particular, is burdened with guilt, defiled, and subject to ruin and death.[2]
Roger Nicole has written,
This evil [depravity] does not corrupt merely one or two or certain particular avenues of the life of man but is pervasive in that it spreads into all aspects of his life. It darkens the mind, corrupts his feelings, warps his will, moves his affections in wrong directions, blinds his conscience, burdens his subconscious, afflicts his body.[3]
[1]John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), 2.1.4.
[2]Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 4 vols. ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006), 3:78.
[3]Roger Nicole, Our Sovereign Saviour: The Essence of the Reformed Faith (Christian Focus, 2002), 30.
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