THE PERVASIVE NATURE OF SINOriginal sin produces a permanent legacy of sinfulness that begets more sinfulness. We see in the tapestry of the Old Testament an ongoing rebellion against God, interspersed with His wrath, and continuous forgiveness. Things get so bad that we see the selection of Noah and the flood, the selection of Abraham to start a holy nation, the punishment of exile, the deliverance through Moses, the Law, the continuous failure of Israel, and the broadscale rejection of Christ by the Jews. We are continuously trapped in our sinfulness (Rom 7:5) and we are by our nature objects of wrath (Eph. 2:3).

This depravity is so well hidden by our ability for self-deception. However, it is exposed excellently by Plantinga in A Breviary of Sin:

“…sin is the missing of a target, a wandering from the path, a straying from the fold. Sin is a hard heart, and a stiff neck. Sin is blindness and deafness. It is both the overstepping of a line and the failure to it - both transgression and shortcoming. Sin is a beast crouching at the door. In sin, people attack or evade or neglect their divine calling. These and other images suggest defiance: even when it is familiar, sin is never normal. Sin is disruption of created harmony and then resistance to divine restoration of that harmony. Above all, sin disrupts and resists the vital human relation to God, and it does all this disrupting and resisting in a number of intertwined ways.” (Page 5)

Plantinga goes on to define 10 categories of sin, with examples that are so specific and comprehensive that we are left with a sense of our overwhelming depravity - we are left with no place to hide. Obvious and sensational examples include:

1. a father’s pollution of his marriage and devastation of his daughter’s life by the sin of incest (Page 47);
2. Cellini’s forgiveness by the Pope for murder in the cause of the advancement of the church (Page 43); 
3. Lutherans joining Hitler’s cause for national greatness (Page 76);
4. the sin of great church leaders -- Luther’s anti-semitic hatred and Martin Luther King’s plagiarism and adultery (Page 80), and the obvious events like Watergate, My Lai, where group thinking followers performed atrocious sin in the name of ‘following orders’ (Page 178). Others, like Os Guinness, have captured the tendency for national groupthink to corrupt and weaken character, to suck out vitality (Page 4).

However, lest we try to take group cover from these major problems, Plantinga goes into great detail on a dizzying range of sin including sexism, racism, self-righteousness, and even air pollution, covering categories which include vandalism of shalom, corruption, perversion, parasite, masquerade, folly, addiction, attack, and flight. In just the last chapter, he lays out eight categories of sins of flight, including conforming, to peer pressure, conniving or pretending not to see evil, escaping responsibility, specializing on one neutral element of an action to avoid the wrong of something general with it, minimizing, doing nothing when action is needed, cocooning (some others call this the ‘holy huddle’) and amusing ourselves to death (note the death of the WWF wrestler last week and the urging of the crowd to take him away so the bouts could continue!). These deep dives into the nature of human evil make us so aware of our ability to cover our sins in a veil of acceptability which deny the righteousness of God.

Plantinga elaborates nicely on this talent for self-deception:

“Self-deception is a shadowy phenomenon by which we pull the wool over some part of our own psyche. We put a move on ourselves. We deny, suppress, or minimize what we know to be true. We assert, adorn, and elevate what we know to be false. We prettify ugly realities and sell ourselves the prettified versions. Thus a liar might transform “I tell a lot of lies to shore up my pride” to “Occasionally, I finesse the truth in order to spare other people’s feelings”. We become our own dupes, playing the role of both perpetrator and victim. We know the truth - and yet we do not know it, because we persuade ourselves of its opposite. We actually forget that certain things are wrong and that we have done them. To the extent that we are self-deceived, we occupy a twilight zone in which we make up reality as we go along, a twilight zone in which the shortest distance between two points is a labyrinth.” (Page 105)

The paralyzing effects of sin are total and all-consuming. Sin captures the very center of our freedom - our will - and in the name of freedom our willfulness corrupts us. M. Scott Peck articulates this well:

Yet I think it is characteristic of all “great” people that they are extremely strong-willed - whether their greatness be for good or evil. The strong will - the power and authority - of Jesus radiates from the Gospels, just as Hitler’s did from “Mein Kampf”. But Jesus’ will was that of His Father’s, and Hitler’s was that of his own. The crucial distinction is between willingness and willfulness. (People of the Lie, page 79)

The pervasive nature of sin means it penetrates and affects our entire beings. Paul summarized this condition of universal sinfulness by saying we are all under sin (Rom. 3:9-18). R.C. Sproul writes that this condition is a total, or radical depravity: “Sin affects every aspect of our being: the body, the soul, the mind, the will, and so forth. The total or whole person is corrupted by sin. No vestigial ‘island of righteousness’ escapes the influence of the fall. Sin reaches into every aspect of our lives, finding no shelter of isolated virtue…….We are not sinners because we sin: we sin because we are sinners”. (The Holiness of God, page 118-119).

As we consider the universality of sin, we recognize mankind’s inability to obey God and to please Him in our state of sinfulness. Even kind acts done in absence of faith are considered sin by God (Rom. 14:23). This understanding should drive us to the point of despair and deeply convict us of our need for His mercy. What do we deserve? Death! But God has another plan for us.