The Nature of Degeneration

I have been reading My Utmost For His Highest during my quiet time lately. I have been struck by the clear, convicting messages from the devotionals and I wanted to share the one for today.

The Nature of Degeneration

The Bible does not say that God punished the human race for one man's sin, but that the nature of sin, namely, my claim to my right to myself, entered into the human race through one man. But it also says that another Man took upon Himself the sin of the human race and put it away - an infinitely more profound revelation. The nature of sin is not immortality and wrongdoing, but the nature of self-realisation which leads us to say, "I am my own God." This nature may exhibit itself in proper morality, but it always has a common basis - my claim to my right to myself. When our Lord faced either people with all the forces of evil in them, or people who were clean-living, moral, and upright, He paid no attention to the moral degradation or one, nor any attention to the moral attainment of the other. He looked at something we do not see, namely, the nature of man.

Sin is something I am born with and cannot touch - only God touches sin through redemption. It is through the Cross of Christ that God redeemed the entire human race from the possibility of damnation through the heredity of sin. God nowhere holds a person responsible for having the heredity of sin, and does not condemn anyone because of it. Condemnation comes when I realise that Jesus Christ came to deliver me from this heredity of sin, and yet I refuse to let Him do so. From that moment I begin to get the seal of damnation. "This is the condemnation [and the critical moment], that the light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness right than light because their deeds were evil."