The mystery of iniquity
There is no place for redemption in the market place. There is no place for redemption in the secular world. This is the sentiment of man.
Yet God says, “For every beast of the forest is Mine, and the cattle upon a thousand hills. I know all the fowls of the mountains: and the wild beasts of the field are Mine. If I were hungry, I would not tell thee: for the world is Mine, and the fulness thereof.” (Ps. 50:10-12).
How do we get to the condition where we usurp our Maker’s dominion for ourselves and discount even His existence? How can the Creator regain His place as owner and governor of creation in the mind of fallen man?
Sin—the mystery of iniquity usurps everything God has and is—sin, that mysterious principle, locked away for eons of time before Lucifer opened its container and freed it to poison the whole universe of intelligent life.
What is sin? Often its definition has been “separation from God.” But really separation from God is its result, the fruit of sin. What is sin? Sin is turning from serving a selfless Father to serving self.
Serving our God of self-sacrificing love leads the servant to be like Him. It attracts the whole being to the beauty of holiness; it involves the whole being in a self-forgetfulness like His—soul, mind, and body. Only in unselfish service to the only true and unselfish God can His creatures find their greatest happiness. This we see from the few glimpses of heaven, “And the four beasts … rest not day and night, saying, Holy, holy, holy, LORD God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come. And when those beasts give glory and honour and thanks to Him that sat on the throne, who liveth for ever and ever, The four and twenty elders fall down before Him that sat on the throne, and worship Him that liveth for ever and ever, and cast their crowns before the throne, saying, Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for Thou hast created all things, and for Thy pleasure they are and were created.”
“And I beheld, and I heard the voice of many angels round about the throne and the beasts and the elders: and the number of them was ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands; Saying with a loud voice, Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing. And every creature which is in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them, heard I saying, Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power, be unto Him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever. And the four beasts said, Amen. And the four and twenty elders fell down and worshipped Him that liveth for ever and ever.” (Rev. 4:8-11;5:1-14).
But sin, or the service of self, puts self and its wants on the throne. It intoxicates reason and distorts its judgment of reality. It immediately provides instant, amplified gratification, overpowering the mild, slow, quiet pleasures that holiness bring to the mind. It grabs hold of the brain and mind, and titillates them. Instantly God disappears in the flush of excitement, and His peace disappears with Him.
Self-service and self-forgetfulness are diametrically opposed and cannot for a moment co-exist. Sin, under the masterful hand of Satan, gains new territory—new adherents and new depths and fields of wickedness—on an efficient and accelerating and continual basis. Once introduced to an intelligent being of free moral choice, it spreads uncontrollably until it is all-pervasive. The mystery of sin lies in the very nature of freedom and power of choice. A huge potential for happiness comes at the creation of an intelligent life born in freedom; and an equally large potential for unhappiness comes with existence as well.
Now that sin has been opened to this fallen race, its intoxicating effect has utterly blinded the human mind to the need to the wholesale forgetfulness of self. Self-denial is a most noxious idea to man. Life must go on just for the sake of going on; I must exist just for the sake of existence. No higher purpose need be entertained. Therefore, if you get in my way, I can appropriately remove you either by destroying you psychologically, socially, or physically through murdering you.
Self has taken the throne and has become the object of full worship. Love of self is the engineer driving the locomotive of the will, and every ounce of power is leveraged to do the will of self. Its urges are unbounded, especially under the influence of Satan’s agent who stands on hand to inspire a multiplied force that upends reality and reason and results in wasting and destruction until its end is satisfied. Like the game of using a stick to keep a hoop rolling, satanic hosts continually add inertia to the principle of sin imbedded in the human makeup.
What can stop such a force for evil? What can reverse the momentum gained by the accumulated effects of six millennia of inherited wickedness in our natures? Only one thing can do what needs to be done. It must be invasive and bold. It must shake the soul to its foundation, break it down, and arrest its willfulness. It must harness our loyalty and rein us around with an all-powerful arm.
What are the mechanics of such a work? How does it operate? One element remains in every captive in the thralldom of sin. That element is love—the need to love and to be loved. Our Creator Father has not allowed Satan to rob us of that one vestige of God’s image in the human race. And here is where God works.
Through love He provokes us to righteousness and calls us away from our service to Satan and self. Self-sacrificing love, self-denying love, self-forgetting love has imbedded within it righteousness and the principle the dissolves the effects of sin and self-pleasing upon the will of fallen man. Through the beholding and study of this love, the call of sin and the desire for it slowly and completely disappear. Like the constant flow of rushing spring waters wear away the hardened stone, the majestic self-renouncing love washes away the confirmed petulance. Self-indulgence yields to self-denial. Self surrenders to service; pride bows in humility.
How does the God of love initiate such an amazing turnabout? The sacrificial victim. The innocent baby lamb or kid or calf or sparrow or dove which fell at the hand of the sinner gave the force of truth concerning sin. Their death shook sin off the throne of the evildoer, and broke his will toward destroying. The pained look in their eyes, their helpless cry of woe, the absence of hatred and recrimination toward the perpetrator of their death, knocked the pride and resistance from the transgressor as he saw the criminal nature of his act. All this our wise Elder Brother designed to redeem our lost loyalty toward holiness.
More than that, those animal sacrifices were only vague silhouettes of His own sacrifice, the true Sacrifice. In the purity and innocence of One with whom we can identify infinitely more readily than with a lamb or kid, we see Him in whom was a powerhouse of love toward the whole human race and its animal kingdom, and One who was perfectly self-denying and sinless.
Christ is the perfect object to regain our affection from sin. His cries of woe, His helpless look on the cross under His Father’s displeasure, His broken and bleeding body redeem us from self-destruction. Nothing else short of His suffering and death at our hand, nothing less than beholding what sin has cost, can peel off our fingers from their death-grip on self-pleasure and resolve the disease and death it spreads all around us. Only the burnt offering of the Son of God can redeem us from sin, when He poured out His soul unto death and laid down His own eternal existence to restore us to the eternal life we had lost to sin.
Yet God says, “For every beast of the forest is Mine, and the cattle upon a thousand hills. I know all the fowls of the mountains: and the wild beasts of the field are Mine. If I were hungry, I would not tell thee: for the world is Mine, and the fulness thereof.” (Ps. 50:10-12).
How do we get to the condition where we usurp our Maker’s dominion for ourselves and discount even His existence? How can the Creator regain His place as owner and governor of creation in the mind of fallen man?
Sin—the mystery of iniquity usurps everything God has and is—sin, that mysterious principle, locked away for eons of time before Lucifer opened its container and freed it to poison the whole universe of intelligent life.
What is sin? Often its definition has been “separation from God.” But really separation from God is its result, the fruit of sin. What is sin? Sin is turning from serving a selfless Father to serving self.
Serving our God of self-sacrificing love leads the servant to be like Him. It attracts the whole being to the beauty of holiness; it involves the whole being in a self-forgetfulness like His—soul, mind, and body. Only in unselfish service to the only true and unselfish God can His creatures find their greatest happiness. This we see from the few glimpses of heaven, “And the four beasts … rest not day and night, saying, Holy, holy, holy, LORD God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come. And when those beasts give glory and honour and thanks to Him that sat on the throne, who liveth for ever and ever, The four and twenty elders fall down before Him that sat on the throne, and worship Him that liveth for ever and ever, and cast their crowns before the throne, saying, Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for Thou hast created all things, and for Thy pleasure they are and were created.”
“And I beheld, and I heard the voice of many angels round about the throne and the beasts and the elders: and the number of them was ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands; Saying with a loud voice, Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing. And every creature which is in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them, heard I saying, Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power, be unto Him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever. And the four beasts said, Amen. And the four and twenty elders fell down and worshipped Him that liveth for ever and ever.” (Rev. 4:8-11;5:1-14).
But sin, or the service of self, puts self and its wants on the throne. It intoxicates reason and distorts its judgment of reality. It immediately provides instant, amplified gratification, overpowering the mild, slow, quiet pleasures that holiness bring to the mind. It grabs hold of the brain and mind, and titillates them. Instantly God disappears in the flush of excitement, and His peace disappears with Him.
Self-service and self-forgetfulness are diametrically opposed and cannot for a moment co-exist. Sin, under the masterful hand of Satan, gains new territory—new adherents and new depths and fields of wickedness—on an efficient and accelerating and continual basis. Once introduced to an intelligent being of free moral choice, it spreads uncontrollably until it is all-pervasive. The mystery of sin lies in the very nature of freedom and power of choice. A huge potential for happiness comes at the creation of an intelligent life born in freedom; and an equally large potential for unhappiness comes with existence as well.
Now that sin has been opened to this fallen race, its intoxicating effect has utterly blinded the human mind to the need to the wholesale forgetfulness of self. Self-denial is a most noxious idea to man. Life must go on just for the sake of going on; I must exist just for the sake of existence. No higher purpose need be entertained. Therefore, if you get in my way, I can appropriately remove you either by destroying you psychologically, socially, or physically through murdering you.
Self has taken the throne and has become the object of full worship. Love of self is the engineer driving the locomotive of the will, and every ounce of power is leveraged to do the will of self. Its urges are unbounded, especially under the influence of Satan’s agent who stands on hand to inspire a multiplied force that upends reality and reason and results in wasting and destruction until its end is satisfied. Like the game of using a stick to keep a hoop rolling, satanic hosts continually add inertia to the principle of sin imbedded in the human makeup.
What can stop such a force for evil? What can reverse the momentum gained by the accumulated effects of six millennia of inherited wickedness in our natures? Only one thing can do what needs to be done. It must be invasive and bold. It must shake the soul to its foundation, break it down, and arrest its willfulness. It must harness our loyalty and rein us around with an all-powerful arm.
What are the mechanics of such a work? How does it operate? One element remains in every captive in the thralldom of sin. That element is love—the need to love and to be loved. Our Creator Father has not allowed Satan to rob us of that one vestige of God’s image in the human race. And here is where God works.
Through love He provokes us to righteousness and calls us away from our service to Satan and self. Self-sacrificing love, self-denying love, self-forgetting love has imbedded within it righteousness and the principle the dissolves the effects of sin and self-pleasing upon the will of fallen man. Through the beholding and study of this love, the call of sin and the desire for it slowly and completely disappear. Like the constant flow of rushing spring waters wear away the hardened stone, the majestic self-renouncing love washes away the confirmed petulance. Self-indulgence yields to self-denial. Self surrenders to service; pride bows in humility.
How does the God of love initiate such an amazing turnabout? The sacrificial victim. The innocent baby lamb or kid or calf or sparrow or dove which fell at the hand of the sinner gave the force of truth concerning sin. Their death shook sin off the throne of the evildoer, and broke his will toward destroying. The pained look in their eyes, their helpless cry of woe, the absence of hatred and recrimination toward the perpetrator of their death, knocked the pride and resistance from the transgressor as he saw the criminal nature of his act. All this our wise Elder Brother designed to redeem our lost loyalty toward holiness.
More than that, those animal sacrifices were only vague silhouettes of His own sacrifice, the true Sacrifice. In the purity and innocence of One with whom we can identify infinitely more readily than with a lamb or kid, we see Him in whom was a powerhouse of love toward the whole human race and its animal kingdom, and One who was perfectly self-denying and sinless.
Christ is the perfect object to regain our affection from sin. His cries of woe, His helpless look on the cross under His Father’s displeasure, His broken and bleeding body redeem us from self-destruction. Nothing else short of His suffering and death at our hand, nothing less than beholding what sin has cost, can peel off our fingers from their death-grip on self-pleasure and resolve the disease and death it spreads all around us. Only the burnt offering of the Son of God can redeem us from sin, when He poured out His soul unto death and laid down His own eternal existence to restore us to the eternal life we had lost to sin.
posted by David | 6:33 AM
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