“…they are constantly completing the number of their sins, and wrath has overtaken them at last.”

1 Thessalonians 2:16

The major lie of the world and of the one who has been given a measure of power over the world is that pursuing the lusts and appetites of the flesh is freeing. Chasing my own happiness is my choice. What feels right is right. I can do whatever I want to do.

The truth is that in our own autonomy, we will always ever choose sin, and in choosing any participation in sin, we will always ever work that sin to completion. The chief end of sin is death. Think about that. The punishment of sin is death, according to the Bible, but more than that, the goal of sin is death, to kill, physically and spiritually, the sinner. If you are already spiritually dead, your sin will keep you there, sedate, until you’ve drunk every last drop.

Re-read the verse from 1 Thessalonians. What a sobering thought: that there is a determined amount of sinning Holy God will forebear in a person until His wrath comes upon them.

A few lines of argument bristle against this thinking. The first is the most fundamental, that God, or at least the Judeo-Christian God in which we believe, does not exist, and therefore, neither absolute truth nor judgment of sin is real. (Some might even say sin itself does not exist, but most rational people believe in a basic morality and the presence of evil in the world.) 

The answer to that is so multifaceted and wide-ranging and has little power to make a person who does not believe suddenly see the light. Only God can do that. But one thing to note for people who deny the reality of God and His perfect judgment of evil is that aside from faith in karma or faith in some self-actualizing universe recognizing and further caring for the tiny speck of dust that is an individual human, both of which are forms of spirituality absolutely requiring as much if not more faith than faith in God, there is no hope of justice for rape, for harming children, for genocide, or for any amount of evil in between. There is an essential ethos in me that is not sated by a life sentence, a death sentence, or the countless horde that bypasses the justice system altogether. I pity people who cannot be sure everything is and will be perfectly accounted for and repaid.

Another argument against sin’s certain trajectory toward death is more personal: I am not that bad, not destined to always be sinning, and not commiting those grievous sins which make a person “evil.” The best answers to these can be found in Scripture, for example, James 2:10, “For whoever keeps the entire law, yet fails in one point, is guilty of breaking it all,” and Romans 3:23, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

But if the Bible is not a shared source of truth, logic can be another way to approach the argument. We can come up with several warrants. 1) If people do not have to be taught ways to sin, then sinning is human nature. 2) If permissable sins and flagrant sins are distinguished by a sliding scale, then they are essentially the same sin. 3) If hate and murder are the same, then we are all capable of both. 4) If we are all capable of all sin, even if we have not (yet) commited them, we are guilty of them, by whatever kernel of evil in us that brings forth any sin. 5) If sin has an observed tendency to grow — as we become callous, as permissable sins are no longer enough to get what we want, as “happenstance” allows — then the foreseeable, natural conclusion of that sin is death.

Take the sin of gluttony for example. In the western world, gluttony is rampant, though its beginnings are innocuous enough. We eat a little more after we’ve already had enough. We get a little too specific or particular about making every meal and snack the best it can possibly be. No one will really fault you for that, and most don’t see it as a sin. But every day, when gluttony is unchecked, “too much” gets to be a little more and a little more. Unchecked, most people will march directly toward death chasing and choosing gluttony. Not only their physical bodies, but their souls will also die, not because they were living in freedom choosing exactly how and how much they wanted to eat, but because they were a slave to food instead of a slave to God. If you don’t believe gluttony is slavery, not freedom, feel the excruciating pain of self-denial and you will know exactly what was calling the shots all along.

Gluttony is easy enough to understand, but what about a sin like pride? Pride can be so inconspicuous, and we can do a lot of good things even when pride is our main motivator. I can even be the most humble person in the room all for my pride. Still, it’s permissable. It’s not hurting anyone, right? We all know the verse, “Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall” (Proverbs 16:18). I usually think of that verse when I’ve done something self-assured and either physically fallen or dropped something or anything else clumsy, or embarrassed myself in some way. But I think this verse digs a bit deeper about the danger of pride. I don’t think it’s mainly saying you’ll embarrass yourself if you do or say something haughty. I think it’s getting at pride’s life-debilitating way of making us “double down” on our mistakes or our unlove. 

We all know of situations when a person feels cornered about a path they have chosen, but instead of admit wrong or ask for help or apologize, they gird themselves with their decision, find more people who will agree with them and ostracize the ones who don’t, get louder or more passive aggressive especially on social media, and make inventories of reasons they weren’t wrong. We have all done this at one time or another, but for a lot of people, doubling down becomes tripling down, quadrupling, etc etc etc. Someone can make a very small mistake or perpetrate a relatively small hurt, but because of pride, it can change the entire course of their life, and the course that’s been decided by pride doesn’t usually point toward God.

A lot could have been avoided in the Karmelo Anthony case, even from the moment of the crime, were it not for pride. Pride made him stay in that tent. Pride made him double down with a knife when at most it was going to be a fist fight. Pride was tripling down with the decision to plead not guilty. Pride has morphed a murder case into a nation-wide debacle about race that has a state representative saying the Metcalf family doesn’t know what suffering is compared to black women in America. It’s like she isn’t living in reality. What on earth do all black women in America have to do with a 17-year-old boy stabbing another 17-year-old boy to death? It is a heartbreaking situation that has been made into a carnival of street-japing and ignorant sound bytes…all because of pride.

Sin is not satisfied where you left it. That there is an unknown completeness to sin that can be reached in this lifetime should terrify us. Moreover, the fact that we will all stand before God on the day of judgment should bring us to our senses in admitting wrongdoing now while we still have a chance at mercy. The scariest possibility of all is that God has left us to our own devices. The mentality of the lost and dying world is to live like this is your last chance to do whatsoever you wish in the name of free will. They are on to something, but it is not what they think. 

Just remember, sin is not freedom though it can feel that way, but it may very well be the last time.