While the author speaks of sin at work in the unbeliever, the same soul struggle takes place with the believer as his old man and Satan attempt to him take control of his sin and guilt.
“Whoever isolates himself seeks his own desire; he breaks out against all sound judgment.” Proverbs 18:1 (ESV) According to this text, a person first becomes estranged or “isolated” – that is, a close relationship is broken, so that love is replaced by hatred or indifference.
The person who is estranged then looks for “pretexts” – excuses, rationalizations, arguments, and other masks that cover up the real problem. The person uses the “pretexts” to “break out” against the truth.
When friends hurt our feelings, their objective faults, which never bothered us before, stand out in glaring clarity.
It is true in our relationship with God. When we become “estranged” from God (that is, when we sin), we often start to manufacture a whole range of excuses by which we can “break out” against the truth of His Word. In fact, there seems to be a pattern of unbelief, a cycle that can be seen in the lives of many unbelievers. It goes something like this:
A young man is raised in a Christian home and has some measure of belief in Christ. He then becomes involved in some overt sin. This can be any sin-pride, covetousness, addiction, dishonoring of parents, worldliness. It is often a sexual sin. He has the honesty and presence of mind to realize that his favorite sin is incompatible with the Christian faith. He has the moral sensitivity to experience guilt.
There are two ways he can respond. He may repent of the sin and turn to Christ to receive full and free forgiveness. Or he may hold on to the sin, treasure it, and refuse to give it up either overtly or emotionally. He starts to center his life around the sin, to seek from it consolation, help, and escape, to find in it, in effect, the meaning of his life.
But what about the guilt? If he is not interested in repenting and being forgiven, then there is only one way to end the torment: To reject whatever it is that brands his life as evil. If what I am doing is not really wrong, then I can “feel good about myself.” If there is no objective standard of right and wrong, I can do as I please. If there is no God, then I am not a sinner.
At this point, the “pretexts are discovered. There are many reasons not to believe in God. They become extremely persuasive to someone who does not want God to exist. The arguments with the most force become those that turn one’s own moral failures against the Judge, so that the person’s own sinfulness is projected onto God Himself: “I can never believe in God because He allows so much evil in the world.”
God becomes imagined not as the source of good, but as the source of evil.
The moral crusade becomes directed against Christians in general – a narrow mined, intolerant, hypocritical lost – and against the Church in particular. The moral zeal creates a feeling of self-righteousness, a precious feeling to someone who has been tormented by guilt.
But his confidence is not totally secure. The very smell of Christianity or the very mention of Jesus Christ triggers his defenses. He lashes out at anything or anyone that represents the old belief that is still so accusing him. He “breaks out” with startling emotion and aggressiveness against something that, supposedly, he does not even believe exists. He may lose himself in humanitarian causes. He may develop new theologies. He may become one of those professors in a university who delights in tearing down his students’ faith. But there is a presence that will not go away, something looming in the background that he must always either fight against or give in to.
This psychological pattern can be broken at any point by the Word of God, by the devastating truth of God’s Law and the penetrating grace that is offered in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, who died to save sinners.
The unbeliever is not playing an intellectual game but is caught up in the complex spiritual dynamics of sin at war with the love of God. For a Christian, this pattern illustrates the slippery slope of unrepentant and rationalized sin.
pp. 78-80
LOVING GOD WITH ALL YOUR MIND
Thinking as a Christian in a Postmodern World.
Gene Edward Veith, Jr.
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