Sin Brings a Type of Living Hell

“A trail of mutilated frogs lay along the edge of the island.” This is the sad result of sin. In C. S. Lewis’ book Perelandra, Weston, now the “unman,” leaves a trail of mutilated frogs. Weston is the epicenter of evil. He is whole-hearted evil, a predecessor to the Miserific Vision.

Yet, Weston, the “unman,” is just a concentrated picture of what we saw with Adolf Hitler and his regime. It is a picture from a different angle of the mutilation that lays in the wake of Planned Parenthood. When we anonymously try to create our own utopia we leave a trail of mutilation. Whether we listen to the Nazi idea or the Planned Parenthood idea that says, with our culture, “have it your way,” “listen to your heart,” “do what feels right.” When we “have it our way,” “listen to our heart,” and “do what feels right,” then “might will make right” because there will be no higher authority and we may just have a reincarnation of the atrocities of Dachau and Auschwitz. We might just have people “aborting” the “clump of cells” in their womb because that is just what they want to do, it is what is convenient; we might just have “doctors” sell that “clump of cells” as human organs.

Truly, as much as we think we can, we can’t “have our cake and eat it too.” We can’t indulge in sin and also think it won’t bring consequences. Sin since the beginning has been accompanied with consequences. We can’t, for example, indulge in pornography as individuals or as a society and not have an avalanche of abominations over take us. When we make humans sexual objects to be exploited that is sadly what they become, and so human sex trafficking and child abduction ensue.

To quote an unlikely source, Friedrich Nietzsche says in Beyond Good and Evil that philosophy always creates a world in it’s own image, it cannot do anything different. When we create a world where morality doesn’t exist then in a very real way morality doesn’t exist, at least that’s how people live. In this world each will do what is right in his own eyes, might will make right, and atrocities will flourish. Various attempts at the “Final Solution” will abound, and so will death and desolation.

We reap what we sow philosophically so right now we’re reaping a whole host of debauchery. Could it be that teachings have been tainted and thus a litany of death ensues. Maybe it’s time to re-explore worldviews and their corresponding idea of human flourishing and the ability that they have to match reality to their claims.

Human bodies ripped from the womb, mutilated, and sold, and the world doesn’t bat an eye. Sad; yet sadly not surprising in our naturalistic, hedonistic, secular day. Truly, “Moral decay doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It is supported by the idolatry of the society at any given time, and expressive of its worship, even if such be completely unarticulated.”[i] Moral decay happens when something other then God is our ultimate good, our summum bonum (cf. Rom. 1). Humanity spirals out of control and implodes in on itself whenever we make gods in our own image; whether infanticide in the Roman Empire, Auschwitz during the Nazi regime, or rampant abortion today. When we decipher and dictate anonymously and subjectively what is good and prospering for ourselves and society we damn ourselves and those around us. We, so to speak, eat again of the forbidden fruit and cast ourselves out of Eden. We fall into a pit we ourselves dug. We kill Abel, revel in Babel, and inculcate innumerable evils. We make life a sort of living hell; picture the living, walking, and tortured skeletons engraved in our memories from the horrors of concentration camps. 

O’ for the worlds that lay asunder,
for the shalom that is slain.

We ingrain habits of unrest,
we fester and pass on spoil.

O’ for the earth to break,
for all to be made anew.

For the habits in my heart to pour out,
and for living waters to ensue.

God this world is broken,
we are altogether damaged and damned.

“Destroy the destroyers of the earth”(Rev. 11:18),
destroy what in me destroys.

Shalom was slain
but through the slain Messiah (is/will be) renewed.

O’ God, Maranatha!

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[i] Noel Doe, Created for Worship: From Genesis to Revelation to You (Ross-shire, Scotland: Mentor, 2009), 236.