Category Archives: Sin

Ryle on sin

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It was no accident that J.C. Ryle (1816-1900) gave the first chapter of his celebrated book on Holiness the simple title, ‘Sin’.  ‘I make no apology,’ he writes, ‘for beginning this volume of papers about holiness by making some plain statements about sin.’

Here are some of the rather striking things he has to say on this subject:-

1.  Wanted: clear thinking about sin

‘Dim or indistinct views of sin are the origin of most of the errors, heresies and false doctrines of the present day.…

Free agency and free will

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Clear thinking about humankind’s fallen nature requires a careful distinction to be made between ‘free agency’ and ‘free will’.

Free agency is part of what it means to be human.  We all make decisions as to what we will do and how we will behave, based on our personal inclinations and our sense of what is right and wrong.  We are moral agents, accountable to God and to one another for our voluntary choices.

Free will, on the other hand, has been defined as the ability to choose from all the moral options that may be available in a given situation. …

Is the self to be affirmed, or repudiated?

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Christians, no less than many of their critics, can get in an awful muddle about the question of whether we are supposed to have a positive or a negative view of human nature; whether we are to affirm or repudiate it.

John Stott clarifies by noting that what we are is partly the result of our creation by God in his image, and partly the result of the defacing of that image in the Fall.  Stott explains:-

Whatever we are by creation we must affirm: our rationality, our sense of moral obligation, our sexuality (whether masculinity or femininity), our family life, our gifts of aesthetic appreciation and artistic creativity, our stewardship of the fruitful earth, our hunger for love and experience of community, our awareness of the transcendent majesty of God, and our inbuilt urge to fall down and worship him. …

Celebrating the Cross

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Reflection on the death of Christ and its achievement, so far from being a sombre experience, actually leads to a type and degree of celebration that can be found nowhere else.

For the cross brings us into a new relationship with God.  This relationship is marked by boldness, love and joy.  And these do not belong merely in the interior experience of the individual believers, but are to distinguish our public worship.

As W.M. Clow points out:-

‘There is no forgiveness in this world, or in that which is to come, except through the cross of Christ. …

Mortification

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Paul writes in Romans 8:13, ‘if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live.’

This introduces the important but neglected subject of ‘mortification’.

’Mortification,’ says J.I Packer in God’s Words, ‘is war.’ Four steps are involved in this warfare:-

1. We must know our enemy

We fight, not just sins, but the sinful nature which lies behind all instances of sinful actions. The unbeliever is a slave to sin, Rom 6:16-23.…

Human nature has not changed

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With reference to the Ten Commandments, J. John asks,

Why should we burden modern men and women with the primitive code of a nomadic tribe that lived under skin tents in a desert? Yet the answer is that even amid vast changes, some things remain stubbornly unalterable. Switch the tents to flats and houses, transform the nomadic tribes to executives in business suits, alter the desert into a modern city and you will find that human nature stays exactly what it always was.
…

Rom 5:12-21 – Adam and Christ – sermon notes

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There are many different kinds of people in the world: big ones, small ones, fat ones, thin ones, tall ones, shorts ones, bright ones, dull ones, happy ones, sad ones, rich ones, poor ones, old ones, young ones, black ones, white ones, Jewish ones, Gentile ones. And so we could go. But for the apostle Paul, it comes down in the end to just two kinds. There are two humanities.

At the head of each of these two humanities stands a representative.…

Sin

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‘If you have not learned about sin,’ writes J.I. Packer, ‘you cannot understand yourself, or your fellowmen, or the world you live in, or the Christian faith.’

The Bible (apart from the first two chapters) is about God’s answer to sin.

It is not easy to have clear views about sin, because

  • the biblical doctrine of sin is uncomplimentary to us
  • the biblical doctrine of sin emerges from the biblical doctrine of God’s holiness, and there is little understanding of that
  • the biblical doctrine of sin has been secularised; the word has ceased to convey the tought of an offence against God

The nature of sin. …

Satisfaction for sin

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The notions of ‘satisfaction’ and ‘substitution’ in relation to atonement are often seen as crude and primitive.  Indeed, the idea that God would need to be appeased by the cruel sacrifice of his Son is frequently thought to be inconsistent with the character and teaching of Jesus himself.

But, in fact, such ideas, carefully stated, lie at the heart of the church’s worship and witness.  Cranmer, for example, at the beginning of his Prayer of Consecration in 1549 described Jesus as having made on the cross, by his ‘one oblation of himself once offered’, ‘a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world’.…

Calvin on ‘common grace’

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Calvinist theology is beset by some unfortunate terminology, which turns many would-be visitors away at the door.

One of those bits of unfortunate terminology is the expression ‘total depravity’.  It is too readily taken to mean that humankind is completely and utterly wicked, and that no good at all can be found in an unregenerate heart, mind or behaviour.

In order to correct this misunderstanding, we can turn to Calvin himself, and his teaching on ‘common grace’. …