The Terrible and Spiraling Punishment for Sin: More Sin.

The early church father, St. Augustine of Hippo, argued in his work, “On Grace and Nature,” that the punishment for sin is a surrender to even more sin. Any person who has truly wrestled with their sinful desires and honestly allowed God to crucify those sins, knows this truth. The commission of one sin leads to an imperceptible ease in the commission of others. Then, as those other sins mount in both number and severity, there comes a blindness to the family of sins to which those now easy sins belong.  Finally, there grows a deadening of conscience and a grim loss of responsiveness to the presence of God, which includes a lack of any desire to have him around at all. 

Paul shows us the slippery steps of this tragic downward spiral in Romans 1:18-32. He outlines how this fall begins with the willful ignorance of an obvious and knowable God, but quickly stumbles into an awful plunge that ends in a reprobate mind which no longer has the ability to discern the difference between good and evil (Romans 1:28). This kind of mind spawns when God gives people over to their own sinful desires. He basically says to them, “have it your way.” Such people then are free to pursue ungodly desires with no restraining force from God to stop them – even though they may have a knowledge of God and his ways (Titus 1:16). This kind of mind is to be avoided at all costs because it creates a situation like that described by C.S. Lewis in which the sinner develops “an ever increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure.”  They become caught in a trap in which they are repulsed by the good, and attracted to evil as it beats them to death with less and less to show for their bruises. God’s anger burns against these people because he has clearly revealed himself in such a way that they cannot deny his existence. Even though his divinity and power are apparent to everyone, some suppress this truth (Romans 1:18-19). In fact, Paul states that some of these people actually even “know” God (Romans 1:21). Yet, despite knowing God, they exchange truth for a lie, life for death, and glory for corruption. They then worship things that are not worthy of worship because they love pleasure more than what is good (Romans 1:21-25, Philippians 3:18-19)! This constant tendency toward poor choices blackens the very creation that men and women are intended to steward. It disfigures the image of God in the created world.

Imagine knowing the eternal God and pursuing something other than God.  As strange as that foolishness may sound, the evidence of this kind of sin litters all of human history.  This is the sin of Adam and Eve who exchanged a relationship with God for a promise of forbidden knowledge; it is the sin of Esau who exchanged inheritance for soup; it is the sin of Judas who exchanged loyal discipleship for corruptible silver; it is the sin of the Pharisees who exchanged true service in God’s earthly courts for human power and status. Every time we willfully sin we are doing the same thing! We are ignoring a powerful God who loves us and instead of loving him back, we are trading a piece of our relationship with him so that we can pursue a momentary and cheap pleasure, or the fulfillment of a twisted desire. In so doing, we risk losing our sensitivity to what is good, and deadening our revulsion to what isn’t. Our punishment will be more sins, more chains, and if you're not saved, the permanent loss of relationship with a good God.