A Powerful Force Affecting Everything

We live in a world that has been bent and twisted by a force so fundamental, so powerful, that it literally impacts every human thought, every human intention, every situation, every experience of society and every moment of history. This force is the inescapable pathology of the created universe. It is sin. One syllable, three letters in English, yet a concept without which it is impossible to every understand your life or mine.

Paul David Tripp, Lost in the Middle, pg.16-17

Temptations are NOT God-given

Child molesters, rapists, and others can and often do believe that God made them the way they are, with the desires and compulsions that they have. Bible believing Christians would consider such desires and compulsions to be old fashioned “temptations,” which do not come from God. All human beings are tempted to do wrong, though not in all the same ways, certainly. We are all battling something. Calling one’s temptations natural or God given does not make them so. Temptations to engage in behaviors that God condemns are to be resisted, not accepted as normal.

Don & Joy Veinot, “Seasoned with salt…” 

Without God's Law, Nothing is Ultimately Wrong

Sin has little meaning as an abstract concept.  It has meaning only relative to God’s eternal and unchanging standards of holiness as revealed in Scripture, and it consists of rebellion against those standards.  Without God’s law, nothing is finally and ultimately wrong—everything is only relative.  One man thinks slaughtering Jews is right and proper, another thinks it is evil—who can say which is right?  Conscience is inadequate.  We need standards and we need rules.  Those rules are derived from God, and sin resists them, rejects them, and puts false concepts of good and evil in their place.

It is this sin that underlies all of the various manifestations of evil in the entire history of the human race.  Walking in darkness, enslaved to sin, wicked men imagine that their evil deeds are right, and in some cases even pleasing to God.  In reality, however, far from pleasing God, they are treasuring up unto themselves wrath “against the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God; who will render to every man accruing to his deeds…” (Romans 2:5-11).

Joseph Keysor, “Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Bible,” pg.19

Sin Becomes Master

At first, sin is like an occasional visitor, then like a guest who stays for a while, and finally like the master of the house.

Rabbi Yetzhak, Genesis Rabbah 22:6.  Cited by Jeffrey Satinover, M.D., Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth, pg. 146