Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

Indeed, there is no one on earth who is righteous,
    no one who does what is right and never sins.

• Ecclesiastes 7:20

This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.

• Romans 3:22-24

“Man is now a horror to God and to himself and a creature ill-adapted to the universe not because God made him so but because he has made himself so by the abuse of his free will.
Evil comes from the abuse of free will.”

• C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

If C.S. Lewis is accurate here, it says that we were made good.  In fact God created everything, ending with the creation of mankind, and God said it was very good.

But God gave us free will.  When Adam and Eve abused that free will in the Garden, evil came into the world and broke it.

But God had a plan, knowing that Adam and Eve would succumb to Satan’s temptations sooner or later.

In fact, what we have now is a beautiful system of redemption.  God does not just get people who freely love Him and choose Him.  God gets people who could not come to God without being redeemed.  We freely choose God as our Savior.

But, do we still sin?  Yes, sadly, and that sin comes from the further abuse of free will.

We are a work in progress.  The construction is not complete, but as we learn to look toward Jesus more and at this fallen, broken world less, we can learn to not abuse that free will.

And one of the things that is tossed into the lake of fire will be sin itself.  We will not have to ever go down that road again.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.