This came up on a Protestant online forum, but I’ve seen the same statement all my life. The topic was eternal security, and the answer was “If someone is truly a Christian, they would NEVER want to abandon Jesus and fall away.”
Is that true?
I say that people who make this statement are not fully aware of the reality of sin and its dreadful power to hurt and destroy those who allow themselves to yield to temptation.
So what do you all think?
(Hope it’s OK to start some new threads. My husband is on call all weekend and it looks like it’s going to be a long, boring weekend!)
It’s most helpful to view sin in terms of The Fall.
Many people misunderstand Original Sin. Adam and Eve, possessed of God-given free will, could have remained in Eden with God, thereby given the gift of the Presence to their children (whom then would have the same free will and decide to stay or leave), or they could choose to defy God, and thus leave Him. They chose the latter, and the consequence is that their descendants—all of us—lost the opportunity to live in the presence of God as they did.
Sin is therefore a turning away from God and a corrosion of the conscience simultaneously. Once out of Eden, how much easier was it for them to fall further and further away from God? As Cain demonstrated, much easier indeed.
I am a big fan of the show “Intervention”. If one wants to see what the damned are truly like, you need only see the harrowing depiction of those addicts so deep into sin and so hating truth that they will not allow themselves to be rescued by those who love them. Yet those who love them remember when they were not the hollowed-out husks revealed on the show—that is the tragedy of the situation. They chose to kill off the living, human parts of their being in order to more fully embrace a parasitic half-life. Some, thank God, turn around and come back. Many do not.
There is no more riveting depiction of sin and its consequences for self and community than this show, in my opinion.
We fall away because we we decide we know better than God does what is good. That is the universal wellspring of sin—that hideous pride which prompted Eve to pluck the apple, Adam to justify her, Cain to slay Abel, and every sin ever indulged down to the present day.
Those who believe Man incapable of sin need to consult their history books if their conscience is no guide. It is enough for me that even the saints did not believe their salvation was assured, and that the holier they became, the more wary of sin, even comparitively minor sin, they became.
That, my friends, is how you know you’re getting closer to God: when your conscience is so finely-tuned an instrument that it protects you from sins our brothers and sisters cannot even notice.
I am a long way from such a place myself, but thank God I can at least feel the path and have guides to help me along the way.
