The world has divided men into
two classes, the stupid good people and the clever wicked ones.
This false classification runs
through much of the literature of the last centuries from the classics to the
comic strip, from Shakespeare’s Polomus, who furnished his son with a set of
good but dull moral platitudes, to Capp’s Li’l Abner, who would never knowingly
do a wrong act but who would rather fall on his head than on his feet because
there is more feeling in his feet than in his head.
In the Holy Scriptures things are
quite the opposite. There righteousness is always associated with wisdom and
evil with folly. Whatever other factors may be present in an act of wrongdoing,
folly is one that is never absent. To do a wrong act a man must for the moment
think wrong; he must exercise bad judgment.
If this is true then the devil is
creation’s prime fool, for when he gambled on his ability to unseat the
Almighty he was guilty of an act of judgment so bad as to be imbecilic, He is
said to have had a great amount of wisdom, but his wisdom must have deserted
him at the time of his first sin, for surely he grossly underestimated the
power of God and as grossly overestimated his own. The devil is not now
pictured in the Scriptures as wise, only as shrewd. We are warned not against
his wisdom but against his wiles, something very different.
Sin, I repeat, in addition to
anything else it may be, is always an act of wrong judgment. To commit a sin a
man must for the moment believe that things are different from what they really
are; he must confound values; he must see the moral universe out of focus; he
must accept a lie as truth and see truth as a lie; he must ignore the signs on
the highway and drive with his eyes shut; he must act as if he had no soul and
was not accountable for his moral choices.
Sin is never a thing to be proud of. No act is wise that ignores remote
consequences, and sin always does. Sin sees only today, or at most
tomorrow; never the day after tomorrow, next month or next year. Death and
judgment are pushed aside as if they did not exist and the sinner becomes for
the time a practical atheist who by his act denies not only the existence of
God but the concept of life after death.
History is replete with examples
of men whose intellectual powers were great but whose practical judgment was
almost nil: Einstein, for instance, who was a mathematical genius but who could
not look after his own bank account and who absent-mindedly ran his little
motorboat aground with the excuse that he “must have been thinking about
something else.” We can smile at this, but there is nothing humorous about that
other class of men who had brilliant minds but whose moral judgment was sadly
awry. To this class belong such men as Lucretius, Voltaire, Shelley, Oscar
Wilde, Walt Whitman and thousands of others whose names are less widely known.
The notion that the careless
sinner is the smart fellow and the serious-minded Christian, though
well-intentioned, is a stupid dolt altogether out of touch with life will not
stand up under scrutiny. Sin is basically an act of moral folly, and the
greater the folly the greater the fool.
It is time the young people of this generation learnt that there is
nothing smart about wrongdoing (sin) and nothing stupid about righteousness. We must stop negotiating with evil. We
Christians must stop apologizing for our moral position and start making our
voices heard, exposing sin for the enemy of the human race which it surely is,
and setting forth righteousness and true holiness as the only worthy pursuits
for moral beings.
The idea that sin is modern is
false. There has not been a new sin invented since the beginning of recorded
history. That new vice breaks out to horrify decent citizens and worry the
police is not really new. Flip open that book written centuries ago and you
will find it described there. The reckless sinner trying to think of some new
way to express his love of iniquity can do no more than imitate others like
himself, now long dead. He is not the bright rebel he fancies himself to be but
a weak and stupid fellow who must follow along in the long parade of death
toward the point of no return.
If the hoary head is a crown of
glory when it is found in the way of righteousness, it is a fool’s cap when it
is found in the way of sin. An old sinner is an awesome and frightening
spectacle. One feels about him much as one feels about the condemned man on his
way to the gallows. A sense of numb terror and shock fills the heart. The
knowledge that the condemned man was once a red-cheeked boy only heightens the
feeling, and the knowledge that the aged rebel now beyond reclamation once went
up to the house of God on a Sunday morning to the sweet sound of church bells
makes even the trusting Christian humble and a little bit scared. There but for
the grace of God goes he.
I am among those who believe that
Western civilization is on its way to perishing. It has many commendable
qualities, most of which it has borrowed from the Christian ethic, but it lacks
the element of moral wisdom that would give it permanence. Future historians
will record that we of the ‘twenty-first’ century had intelligence enough to
create a great civilization but not the moral wisdom to preserve it.
** Written by Aiden Wilson Tozer (A.W. Tozer) **
*** From the Book - "Man: The Dwelling Place of God" ***
THE TRUTH MEDIA
...building the body of Christ.
