Sin and Sinner

The rule-of-thumb we always hear seems a good one: "Hate the sin, but love the sinner." I'd take that as the governing attitude of Christian practice: possibly even an absolute for Christians' relationship to other people.

I've been musing on a related question: not our relationship to a sinner, but a sinner's relationship to his sin. Wondering especially if sin and sinner can always be regarded as discrete entities.

This wisdom of God's power in free will being as sovereign as He IS, I'd hesitate to say that any human being...even a Nero or Hitler...is ever completely unable to turn away from, and separate himself from, his sin. I'm convinced deathbed conversions do happen.

At the same time, we know that anyone who devotes his life completely to a sin has so ingrained it in his being, in all his patterns of thought and behavior, that it is almost impossible for him to think of, much less act, any other kind of life. The fact that a rare few do is only by the mercy of God...Who rules over near-, as well as absolute, impossibilities.

But there does seem to be a line that can be crossed. Scripture is very clear, for example, that God hates pride...a sin. At the same time, scripture denotes some people as "the proud:" as if their behavior (and it's always a matter of what people do) so manifests pride that the sin virtually becomes the identity of the sinner.

It's a frightening fact of the freedom of free will. As C. S. Lewis wrote in The Great Divorce, "All that are in Hell, choose it." I see that frightening freedom as well in what II Thessalonians 2:10b says of those who follow the end-time's man of lawlessness, calling them "...those who perish, because they did not receive the love of the truth so as to be saved." Love of truth can be received: it can also be rejected.

That verse sends me back again to the matter of identity. When I read in scripture the words "the truth," I have to understand it as meaning "Jesus:" since He so identified Himself. Here, then, those who perish, perish because they choose not to receive the love of Jesus' Person. By His "I AM...The Truth," He claims that "The Truth" is His identity.

The enemy in this passage also has an identity, "the man of lawlessness;" as if so completely of that character that it is the sum of who he is. That identity makes sense in this context: lawlessness is rebelliousness, and satan has constituted himself the great cosmic rebel against God's authority and rule. Who else could the end-time's deceiver be ?

We all sin, and have sins to our (dis-)credit. But I think most of us can ask God forgive our sins with the wise words a friend of mine prays: "Father, please forgive me my sin. You know my heart, and you know that's not me." (my emphasis) We pray as if we fear so identifying with our sin that it becomes our very being.