Covenanter Witness Vol. 55 - Rparchives.org

ment."self-expression."sins"misery."err."SINRev. E. Clark Copeland"Sin is that abominable thing which God hates,"so we learned in the Children's Catechism. "Abominable"was a big word in our child vocabulary.Probably it was the jaw-breaking dimensions of theword that made the impression. No doubt the mostimportant word in the sentence is "God," because sinhas meaning only in the light He sheds upon it. Nextis "hates" ; that word tells us far more about the awfulnessof sin than "abominable." "For God is love."The terribleness of sin is manifest in the fact thatGod hates it. But that idea all came out of the past.Today sin is dressed up in good clothes and goesabout as a respectable, even desirable, member of so!"ciety. Parents smile at it, "Isn't it cute Educationalists praise it, "It'sJurys are inclined to excuse it, "He's a product of his environYouth insists on it, "Everybody does it." Theabominableness of sin is lost because God who hatesit has no place in the thinking of man.In spite of the outward bluff Society has builtup to avoid any sense of guilt for wrong doing, no.sane individual can look himself in the face withoutrecognizing that there is a lot in him that is, in hisown eyes, abominable, and must be so in the eyes ofeveryone else. God endowed man with a consciencefrom which he cannot escape. True, his conscienceis warped, shrunk, seared until it is no longer whollyreliable. It misses the mark; it fails to work; ithas lost sensitivity ; it is always a few inches short ;it can't "cut a straight line." But it leaves its ownerwretched without knowing why after it is too late.Esau, King Saul, and Judas are but a few examples.serpent,Sin began with Satan who in the form of theentered the world at the permission of oursovereign God, deceived man, and led him away captive, robbed of all good. However, man is responsiblefor his error, being a free moral agent. No amount ofhumanistic reasoning about the existence of God,nor of comparing himself with other men avails tominimize the weight of guilt and its awful consequences.Sin is a miserable estate in which man is completely cut off from God. Paul writes to the Ephesians, (2:1-3) reminding them that they had been"dead in trespasses and until God by His infinite mercy and grace made them alive through faithin Jesus'Christ. In Romans 5:12 we read that deathentered the world through the sin of Adam andthereby passed upon all men. Hence, the Westminster Catechism says "the fall brought mankind intoan estate of sin and Sin, therefore, is basically a condition of nature which all bear and whichbecomes the source of individual sins committedeither in ignorance or willfully.God revealed to Adam His will for man's life,which meant the way of eternal life in Eden. Ourfirst parents discredited God's wisdom,substitutedtheir own rather, the devil's. Hence, even the firstsin is not to be viewed as a simple act, but as a rebellious disposition of mind and heart set against196God. As the head and representative of the race(Rom. 5), Adam passed on to his descendants a corrupted nature, bearing the marks of his own rebellionagainst God. None escapes, for all are as uncleanthings. David was no exception, and he said, "I wasshapen in iniquity." He also bore witness to theiniquitous nature he bore in common with all men,when he said, describing the power of the Spiritupon him, "I kept myself from mine iniquity" (Ps.18:43.)This perverse nature reveals itself in all kinds oflawlessness rebellious acts against God's revealedwill. "Whosoever committeth sin transgressethalso the law: for sin is the transgression of the law"(1 John 3:4). The law is God's revealed will. All sinis either conscious or unconscious breaking of thelaw. Christ's definition of sin in the Sermon on theMount reveals the fact that thought, as well as act,constitutes sin.Inability to meet the righteous standard of thelaw is also sin. The words most commonly translated"sin"in both the Hebrew and the Greek mean "tomiss the mark, to Paul says that "all havesinned and come short of the glory of God" (Rom.3:23). Man's blindness, his ignorance, his inabilityto perform even what he knows to be right and desires to perform, are all natural limitations due tothe fall. They constitute his sinful state and are thesource of his sins, for which he is guilty before God.Though God has given man a conscience whichis stirred and uneasy at times, the complete abominableness of sin is not realized except as the HolySpirit stirs the heart through the Word. Conscienceoperates in relation to its enlightenment. Rom. 7 :8-14 shows the power of the Word upon the conscience.Through the Word the deadly disease of sin withinthe heart comes to consciousness. Regeneration doesnot remove the motions of sin. The battle goes on aslong as life remains. But thanks be to God that thereis deliverance from this bodyof death through JesusChrist !VINEYARD GLEANINGS . . . from page 194Russia half a million, together one and one-half millionmembers."In the twenties this number grew to three millionmembers. And now only one-sixth is left of the millions ofBaptists. The rest were shot, sent to Siberia and a greatnumber died in the great famine of the 30's in the Ukraine.And these 520,000 Baptists are found mostly in the placesof exileSiberia, Kazakhstan and others."Now a permission has been granted to print 25,000Bibles. Is that sufficient for the 220,000,000 population ofthe USSR? It is approximately one Bible for 10,000 people.This Bible will be a Russian Bible. That means that 50,000,-000 Ukrainians and 110,000,000 of the other 150 nationalitiesof the Soviet Union will be without a Bible."(Continued on page 199)COVENANTER WITNESS