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#11

"SIN IS THE ELEMENT OF
SELF-DESTRUCTION"*

What is sin?

Think about it for a minute!

Is sin all the fun stuff that God forbids us to do because He doesn’t want us to have a good time? You know, the fun stuff like killing, stealing, cheating, and giving our lives to dead images that have no substance to them?

C’mon. Get real. Sin is not the fun stuff. Sin is the self-destructive stuff. Whatever harms and hurts instead of helps and heals—is bad stuff. God calls it sinful. Nothing too tricky in that definition is there?

Spirit’s warning against whatever is self-destructive is the most natural thing in the world. It springs from God’s nature, which is Love. “Don’t do that!” Love says. “It will hurt you!” God’s ultimate gift to all of us is one loud, incessant: NO! It cries out against our undiscerning inclinations which go through the world saying (to anything and most everything) : “Sure, why not? Sounds like a good idea to me!”

Even we, who have only a little love in our hearts, would cry out to a stranger throwing himself off a high bridge, for example: NO! We would grab them by the collar, or the hair or whatever, and hang on to him for dear life. Likewise, when we see someone struggling with alcohol or drug addiction, we want to say: STOP! Or when we see an anorexic, we want to cry out and say EAT! Would we expect God to do less?

So why do we think of the Ten Commandments, for example, as archaic and outdated? When did lying, stealing, cheating and working seven days a week become a good thing? Why do we think of these words as cold and judicial? Just because they are brief and to the point?

Love’s instinctive response to all sin (i.e. self-destruction) isn’t cold and judicial. It is passionate. It doesn’t take our freedom from us. Rather, it reminds us to choose sanely. God’s NO cries out in these ten statements not with a stoic rigidity, but with the same passion that we would to someone who is hurting themselves--the suicidal, the anorexic, or the addict. The Commandments plead on behalf of Life not against it.

And God’s love is insistent. Every day of our lives—hell bent as we are on destroying ourselves—God pleadingly, insistently calls out to us. He doesn’t have much to say, actually. When you see someone jumping off a bridge, there is no time for lectures. One word is usually all you can come up with. But that one word says it all: NO!

God’s NO isn’t cold. It’s on fire with divine Love, offering us the alternative to self-destruction: namely, sanity, and wholeness. Grab hold.

* Mary Baker Eddy—Science and Health, With Key to the Scriptures, p. 310:24

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 Susan Dane
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