Until a man’s earthly life finishes its course, up to the very departure of the soul from the body, the struggle between sin and righteousness continues within him. However, high a spiritual and moral state one might achieve, a gradual or even headlong and deep fall into the abyss of sin is always possible.
St. John the Wonderworker of Shanghai and San Francisco
If [the disease of sin] is natural, then it cannot be cured. Thus it would remain always, no matter how hard you worked to rid yourself of it. If you accept this thought, you will lose heart, and say to yourself: this is how it is. For this is that woeful despair, which, once it has been introduced into people, they have given themselves over to lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness (Ephesians 4: 19).
St. Theophan the Recluse
…a cold self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute.
C.S. Lewis
We tend to underestimate the incredible power that sin has within us. It is a disease that is more akin to a stage four fulminating cancer than it is to simple contamination. Because we have such trouble acknowledging the rampaging damage of sin within us, we try to externalize that damage by blaming it on external forces. For those who are Christian, the most common external force is the devil. One of Flip Wilson’s most beloved characters back in the late 1960s comedy circuit was Geraldine Jones, who popularized the phrase, “The Devil made me do it!”
But, everyone who watched Flip’s skits (in Geraldine’s character) knew that she was just fooling herself. We all knew that she was blaming the devil for the bad choices within herself. In the same way, we love to blame external forces for those faults of personality and behavior that are due to the ravages of the sin that infects us.
So, it is the fault of the person who supposedly triggered us. It is the fault of the unbalanced system. It is the fault of the current party in power. We do everything but acknowledge that which is within us which is pressing us to behave in ways of which we do not approve.
If we are really subtle, we begin to blame our genetics or our upbringing or the damage that was dealt to us during our childhood. Here I need to carefully state that there is some reality to these arguments. There are people with profound genetic damage, or with profoundly horrid childhood experiences who have sequelae that are the result of the damage or of the experiences. That is NOT what I am writing about here. I am writing about a self-deception common to humans that keeps us from admitting that we fight a battle within ourselves to live the type of life we want to live.
As Hobbes pointed out in the comic above, we do not really need to look outside ourselves to understand that the main source of our behaviors (with some exceptions outlined above) is our own self. Satan need not be a supreme evil being at all. We give that being credit far above anything that is needed to explain the majority of human evil. What he is good at is tempting us, but supremacy is not really one of his attributes. If anything, as with Flip Wilson’s comedy skit, he becomes merely a handy excuse for why we have behaved in the ways in which we did not mean to behave.
It is only as we acknowledge the spiritual damage of sin within ourselves that there comes hope for change. Alcoholics Anonymous had a point back when they decided to have people introduce themselves by saying their name and then stating that they are an alcoholic. In that phrase was an acknowledgment of both of the changes that they had experienced and the fight that was still ongoing. And, that is a summary of the Christian experience. We are not what we were. We are not what we shall be. And, until that day comes, we need to self-identify as sinners regardless of how well we behave because the infection is not yet cured.
And, so, we are in a war. But it is a war with ourselves first. Only after that is it a war with the world and the devil. First, we must fight ourselves. Then, yes, this world-system does indeed have many triggers that entice us to sin. And, finally, there are indeed devils who try to push us over the edge. But, the war must begin by fighting ourselves, and not by blaming the world or the devil.
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