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The deceitfulness of sin

by Jacob Ninan

"Take care, brethren, that there not be in any one of you an evil, unbelieving heart that falls away from the living God. But encourage one another day after day, as long as it is still called 'Today,' so that none of you will be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin" (Heb.3:12,13). If you look at the first verse of this chapter, you can see that this passage is addressed to 'holy brethren, partakers of a heavenly calling'. These are warnings for people who have become brothers and sisters in Christ and who are actually participants of the heavenly calling. The warning comes because it is really possible for such people to 'fall away from the living God'. This is not even talking about making some mistakes or falling into sins, but actually about falling away from God. Another way to look at this is to understand that one cannot fall away from God unless one was with God in the first place. So it is possible to fall away from God. Please take this seriously and don't just assume that since you have received 'eternal life' you cannot fall away from God! Let us look at this in more detail.

How do we become born again children of God, and receive eternal life? "But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God" (Jn.1:12,13). God will give the blessing of being born again to everyone who will believe in Jesus and receive Him as their Saviour. Jesus died for the whole world, but most of them are getting lost, because they reject Jesus, and only those who receive Jesus will get saved (Jn.3:17,18). As we read and understand the Bible, we can see that this 'believing' is not merely to intellectually accept facts about Jesus, but also to submit one's life to Him and the Gospel He brought. It includes recognising and admitting before God how we have sinned and disobeyed God, and asking God for forgiveness, because Jesus has died in our place on the cross and taken our punishment. It also means deciding that we don't want to go on sinning, and that we want to learn more from Jesus and get help from Him in order to overcome sinning. This is repentance which is an inseparable part of believing in Jesus and following Him.

When we are born again, God gives us eternal life. This has two aspects. One is that we will live forever and ever with Jesus, while those who choose not to believe in Jesus will live forever in hell, eternally away from God. The second part is that eternal life is another way of describing the life of God, because He is the only One who is truly eternal, having no beginning or end. For us created beings, to receive eternal life is to partake of His character. Now, the argument that many produce is that if God promises us eternal life, there is no chance that we can lose that salvation. And then they cannot really understand the meaning of the above warning to take care that we do not fall away from God. But it is like this. We receive our relationship with God when we choose to put our trust in Jesus. What will happen if we decide some time later that we do not want Him? This is a real possibility, and we can actually see this happening all around us, even from people whom we have known for many years and those who have been our leaders. We cannot brush this aside by saying that such people were never really born again when we thought so. Remember, even those who have partaken of the heavenly calling can still fall away. That is because God does not take away our free will, when we choose to follow Jesus and also if we choose to leave Him, God forbid. Take a lesson from the example of Israel with whom God made an eternal covenant, but who broke that covenant and fell away. That made God to move over to the Gentiles and give them a chance. But then He warns the Gentiles that what happened to Israel earlier can happen to them also (Rom.11:20). If we give up our faith, we too can lose our salvation. (I know some people may want to shut me down now when they hear about losing one's salvation, because they have been taught that it cannot happen. But I am just following up on what God has warned us in many places in His word. Do continue to the end of this message!)

There are innumerable ways in which we can be deceived when it comes to the choices we make. None of us knows all that we need to be aware of when we make a decision. Because of the corruption in our sinful nature, we are sometimes unable to realise that we are being deceived. Our feelings are not the best guides for us to follow when we have to make choices because many times they are based on wrong assumptions. This is why the world's motto of 'following our heart' is very dangerous! In all this, we can see, as we saw right at the beginning, that one major reason we can lose our faith is because of the deceitfulness of sin. Let us look at some of the common ways in which we can get deceived or deceive ourselves.

Disappointment with God
When we first come to Jesus, we may have a lot of ideas about God and expectations from Him, many of which may be coming from ignorance or a partial knowledge of God. Some wrong assumptions about what God is going to do for us may have come from preachers who try to attract as many people as possible. And then, of course, sooner or later we find that we are not getting what we expected. For example, if we expect that God has to give us whatever we ask, or that He will not allow us to get into any problems in this world, we will get disappointed. As our Heavenly Father, He knows what is good and bad for us and so He cannot give us whatever we ask for. He also knows that in order to test and develop our spiritual strength it will be necessary for us to sometimes go through challenging situations. He will watch over things so that they will not be strong enough to crush us and He will cause all things to work towards making us more like Jesus. When we understand more and more about God in this way, we can avoid getting disappointed with Him. We can also get help from more experienced brothers and sisters to learn how to deal with different situations.

Offended with God
Nowadays many preachers give people the impression that God is so loving and forgiving that they can always go to Him for forgiveness. They do not know about how God is also holy, righteous, just and impartial. God wants us to stop sinning after He has forgiven us (Psa.130:4;1Jn.2:1). God sometimes allows us to go through pain in order to teach us some spiritual values, and sometimes He corrects us if we do not humble ourselves and learn our lessons. But if people imagine that God must always be nice to them, they will get offended with Him. If God does not do what they want Him to do, then they get upset with God and stop following Him.

Offended with people
Some people say that they like Christ but it is the Christians they find difficult. This is because people expect Christians to be like Christ, not realising that we are imperfect people who are only slowly being transformed to become like Christ. So people cannot help seeing flaws in us. But they get upset when they see some Christian who did not meet their expectation and jump to the conclusion that if Christians are like that, they do not want that Christianity. This is not fair on Christ.

Inability to understand God
The cleverest of us are only created beings with finite abilities and experience. It is not easy for us to know God. We make a huge mistake if we assume that we can rely on our reasoning to tell us what is right and wrong. With that assumption, if we try to understand God or why He does or does not do certain things, we may come to the conclusion that God must be wrong or bad. But it is just that we don't know enough to be able to understand everything about God. God is perfect, and if we cannot understand something about Him, the fault is on our side. But many people leave God under such circumstances.

I can handle this
We are only finite beings with huge limitations in every direction. Wisdom tells us that if we want to do right and live life to the full, we need to be dependent on God for everything in life. But the deceitfulness of our pride tempts us to think that we know what we need to know and that we can handle how we want to run our life. We can think we are right when we are far from the truth. Obviously this self-assurance is going to lead to many failures. We can then either learn from our mistakes and learn to walk humbly before God, or turn around and blame God for not protecting us.

This is a special situation
This is one of those excuses which we think justify our doing something wrong. We may tell ourselves that actually we want to do the right thing, but that this particular situation requires us to take some special action just to be able to survive. Does the end justify the means, or does God want us to do wrong things in order to achieve something good? No. Difficult situations are tests for us to see what we will choose to do. There cannot be any excuse for doing wrong.

If we have to live in this world
It is true that the world has become so corrupt that it is extremely difficult for those who want to do right. The Living Bible paraphrase says, "You may as well know this too, Timothy, that in the last days it is going to be very difficult to be a Christian" (2Tim.3:1). If we insist on avoiding wrong and doing only what is pleasing to God, that may involve losing certain privileges that we could have received otherwise. This may cause us some suffering which we may consider to be unfair and unreasonable. The devil may come to us just as he did to Jesus, saying that if we would bow down to him he will give us what we desire. Can we see that every wrong thing we do is in effect like bowing down to him?

We mustn't be legalistic
This is a temptation that comes especially for Christians. When we know the right thing we ought to do in some situation and we know there are going to be negative consequences in this world if we insist on doing that, there will be people who tell us that we should not legalistic. What they imply is that wanting to keep every law is to be legalistic. But when God gives us laws, they are for our good, aren't they? If we disobey them we will suffer the consequences. But what many people want us to do is to join them in their compromise, by calling us legalistic when we just want to obey God and follow Jesus (Heb.1:9). The meaning of legalistic is to excessively follow laws, like the Pharisees who tithed even mint and cummin and neglected the real laws of godliness.

We must be pragmatic
This is another way of saying that we must adapt to the circumstances we are in. In one sense this is correct because culture changes and we have to learn to move with the times. For example, older people must adjust to the change in technology and churches must adapt to some of the changing styles in music. But this does not mean that when moral values have declined in society we must accept the new situation as normal. What is right and wrong goes above society and culture, because God is the One who defines right and wrong, and God wants us to be the light and salt in the world so that the people in the world can see from us what is right and wrong.

Everybody does it
It is a very sad fact that many people who call themselves Christians behave in ways just like the people in the world. As a result, when we are tempted to do wrong in practical situations in life, there are people around us who point to leading Christians who are compromising and say that if they can do it, we must not think too much of ourselves. Does their compromise justify our doing wrong? When we stand finally before the judgment seat of God can we point to those Christians as a way of justifying us?

Nothing happens
Calamity does not fall on us immediately if we sin. We can thank the patience of God for that because God is giving us time to repent and change. But we would be thoroughly mistaken if we assume that because we have not been caught or nothing bad has happened to us therefore nothing will happen to us! No. We are only accumulating our judgment towards the future and not really escaping it (Eccl.8:11). Even in this life itself, we will have to suffer the consequences (Gal.6:7,8).

God understands
If we are fooled into thinking that God will be forever patient with us or that forgiveness will be always available for us, we do not know God well. Certainly God is patient and forgiving, but He cannot stop being also holy, righteous, just and impartial. Even a Moses will be treated without partiality if he chooses to take God for granted. God sees through everyone who tries to take unfair advantage of His love and goodness and He will not allow them to escape (Psa.18:26).

The blood of Jesus covers me
Some people who have not heard the gospel properly imagine that once they have come under the blood of Jesus God will overlook their sins, just as the angel of death passed over the children of Israel who spread the blood of the Passover lamb over their doorposts. Yes and no. God does forgive our past sins when we take hold of the blood of Jesus as the price for us. But we must not forget that the whole purpose of Jesus coming to earth and dying on the cross was to offer us a way back to God from our life of sin (Matt.1:21). Once our sins are forgiven, God wants to learn to overcome temptations and stop sinning (1Jn.2:1). We cannot expect God to go on forgiving us if we are not learning to walk in the light (1Jn.1:7).

Conclusion
Let us all be aware that sin is deceitful and that unless we are watching out for it we can deceive ourselves by finding excuses for any wrong thing we may want to do. It is by paying deeper and deeper attention to what God tells us through His word that we receive 'light' that exposes the deception and shows us the way forward (Psa.119:105). May we all be willing to learn and change from our past ways.