The all-pervasiveness and persistence of sin

It is easy to recognise the widespread nature of moral failure around us, but avoid facing up to our own failures. In fact, most of us are pretty good at that! In the second volume of Gulag in which he describes his experiences in Soviet prison camps, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn tells how he first began to be aware of the universal nature of sin. He writes:

It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually, it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes, not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all humans hearts. So, bless you, prison, for having been in my life.

Neither should we think that because we are a little better than some other people, then we will make it with God. The Bible is quite clear on this point. "There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23). "Whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it" (James 2:10). After all, it depends on who we compare ourselves with. Jesus is God's measure of what humans are meant to be. Anyone who thoughtfully reads through the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew, chapters five, six and seven, must realise that he or she comes well short of God's requirements. Imagine someone standing on the world's highest building, looking at a person on the street below and exclaiming, "Poor fellow! What chance has he got of reaching the stars?" S. D. Gordon, in Quiet Talks on Prayer, makes the following comment:

Sin is slapping God in the face. It may be polished, cultured sin. Sin seems capable of taking quite a high polish, or it may be the common gutter stuff. A man is not concerned about the grain of a club that strikes him a blow.

And we don't need to get the idea that human nature is gradually improving. War, according to humanists at the beginning of the twentieth century, was to have been abolished, but during the next 40 years it wiped out as many lives as had perished in wars during the previous 800 years. D. R. Davies, in The Art of Dodging Repentance, puts it like this:

Of all the men who have lived and died since Calvary, we men of today can least pretend to the possession of superior virtue, or a deeper, finer, more responsible morality. The unnumbered millions done to death and the millions condemned to a living death in remote spaces scream denial of any such pretension. No century has more clearly recrucified Christ than the twentieth.

Theologians have spoken of the 'total depravity' of human nature. This does not mean that we are all as bad as we could be (though we are none as good as we should be), but it means that every part of our nature has been infected by this moral disease. John Stott, in Christ the Controversialist, says:

Whatever some Protestant theologians may have written, no biblical Christian can deny that man is still 'made in the likeness of God', since James says he is [James 3:9]. The divine image in man is marred but not destroyed. Nevertheless it is marred at every point. This is the meaning of 'total depravity'—the totality referring to extent rather than degree. We do not therefore deny that man still bears the image of God, though defaced, nor that in the new birth the image is restored.

It is not particularly flattering to read that the Bible, in describing human beings, declares that their head is sick (Isaiah 1:5), their eyes are evil (Mark 7:22), their mouth is deceitful (Psalm 36:3), their tongue is full of deadly poison (James 3:8), their throat is an open sepulchre (Romans 3:13), their neck is stiff (Jeremiah 17:23), their ears are dull (Matthew 13:15), their feet are swift in running into mischief (Proverbs 6:18), their bones are full of sin (Job 20:11) and their thoughts are vain (Psalm 94:11)! (As in the Authorised Version).