Wages of Sin

Sin is an offense against God or moral law, an act that God strongly disapproves. Sin makes failure to be active in resisting success. Let us take a look at the biblical Samson, a God’s Nazarite who we remember as the judge in Israel who spent his last days grinding grain in an enemy prison; his obsession with Delilah made him a defenseless target and betrayed his special calling. Sin makes man invulnerable to enemy’s attack; it makes circumstances to bring about our downfall. Sin insults God. Today’s media is filled with horrors and tragedies that result as consequences of sin, cases of rape, violence, terrorist attack…all these show the unhelpful impacts of sin in our world; what about how it eats secretly into our minds and darkening our heart with guilt and shame? We may not realise how sinful we are until a light shines on it and shows us our faults. Sin poisons human heart and it brings one’s conscience into condemnation, thus bringing one closer to the doorstep of failure.

 Saul would have had his kingdom established but because of sin of disobedience, his kingdom was rent. Disobedience is the root and essence of sin. Simple obedience could mean a great failure, for example a student who chose not to follow the examination instruction and rather follow his instinct may get nothing but failure: answer all question, he chose to answer only one etc; there are instructions given to life by the Creator, a manual in which our destiny and success is written: when we choose to disobey God we choose to fail. Adam failed in his first battle in life when he chose disobedience, he advertently dragged not only himself but his posterity into sin and condemnation; disobedience to God is obedience to Satan i.e. you worship Satan. The success we want to achieve in disobedience can only be achieved negatively and injuriously in Satan and is never a lasting success.

 Devil’s strategy lures us into a sense of false immunity when we replace God’s instruction with our prevailing and frail notions—   that we can get along very well on our own; this can be inherently evil and offensive to God and can as well relate to success reversal. A tragic example of this type of success reversal is a man called Uzziah, who within the sight of victory was consumed gradually by pride—   he took on the role God had not meant for him; at the zenith of his greatest success, he dived to failure, he overestimated his importance and failed to recognize God’s part in his achievements. We move closer to failure when God is not getting the credit for our successes, we forget that all is of God and must be returned to Him; this occurs the moment we choose to act on our own and treat God’s instruction with indifference. Jehu also was a man who had the basic qualities that could have made him a great success; he took throne from Ahab’s family and destroyed his evil influence. He came close to becoming a success, a king God desired for his people, but he carelessly went beyond the limit and failed to follow on through disobedient.

There is no success without God; He is the centre of everything we do. A conquest is never an immunization against defeat—   that we have succeeded previously does not mean we cannot fail and failure as well is not an immunization against our prospective success; thus we must choose to live carefully, because the end may not always justify the means. Our greatest success in life lies in getting the approbation of God that ‘well done, good and faithful servant…’  From Adams Clarke’s Bible commentary on Matthew 25:15 I quote ‘Reader, if the careless virgin, and the unprofitable servant, against whom no flagrant iniquity is charged, be punished with an outer darkness, with a hell of fire: of what sorer punishment must he be judged worthy, who is a murderer, an adulterer, a fornicator, a blasphemer, a thief, a liar, or in any respect an open violator of the laws of God?  The careless virgins, and the unprofitable servants, were saints in comparison of millions, who are, notwithstanding, dreaming of an endless heaven, when fitted only for an endless hell!’ Sin is a willful act of rebellion against God and every form of rebellion is witchcraft; one of the realities of sin is that its consequences have an enduring influence, it speedily widens like a pollutant beyond yourself even to others around you. The sin of Reuben made him and his generation to lose their royal right, Judah’s sin made his sons even to the tenth generation unqualified to stand as kings before God, David brought calamity into his house because of sin. 

 Never take the disparaging power of sin too lightly, no sin will go unchecked; likewise God’s patience is never an approval for your wrong doing; you are safe when God points out your sins. Make correction and restitution where and when necessary and adjust your ways; sin no more.

Moreover sin can impose a self-rejecting attitude on man. Most of us in our spirituality always feel inundated by the negative feelings of our sinfulness: examination of one conscience is good, but our conscience must not be the type that reinforces our ego with fear, guilt and shame, rather the type that corrects and guilds us constructively. Under no circumstances should you also allow the guiltiness of your sin to draw you back from your race for the reason that God loves you and consequently Jesus died for you. All God’s generals we read about were certainly not saints, but sincere sinners. They faced their dark side without pious evasion, without repression; they accepted responsibility for what they did wrong; we call them ‘saints’ and they are. You as well can be a saint only if you are a sincere sinner, your attitude is your number one facilitator. If you see sin as a repressor, it gains control over you and swerves you from one place to another.

Excerpt from What Failure Does by the Author.

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