May 8 – Sin, The Intruder (Proverbs 8)

“I was the craftsman at his side.”(Proverbs 8:30)

IN WORD:
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” begins the Bible. We can scarcely imagine a creation ex nihilo — something out of nothing. From the fingertips of God came things that did not previously exist. Emptiness was filled with substance. Life was spoken into a lifeless, formless cosmos.
That thought is staggering to our finite minds, but we must also remember that this was not only a material creation. The character of God lay under it all. The things that the voice of the Almighty spoke into being were placed on a pre-existent foundation — wisdom. That was “the craftsman at his side,” as this verse tells us. There is order and purpose there. All that we see that doesn’t make sense to us — the violence of a self-obsessed world, the mayhem and madness, the death and disease — came into this creation as a virulent intruder through sin. It was not invited by wisdom’s voice. It has no legitimate foundation, no legal right to be here except through the human rebellion that introduced it. God’s creation was founded on inviolable principles; our sin is a vicious criminal trespassing on the Creator’s property.
We have grown comfortable with this alien element, this sin pathology, but it has no place in a world built on wisdom. The very wisdom that underlaid the creation of the world now calls to us. We can build our lives on the same principle that formed the foundation when God spoke in the beginning. But we have to forsake the intrusion of sin.

IN DEED:
Do you understand how violent sin is? Do you see it as an invasive cancer, the antithesis of life and a violation of the created order? Or do you see it sympathetically, as a series of understandable human flaws? Those who come to understand sin as the ultimate contradiction of the Creator’s voice suffer genuine pain, but they become wise — and cleansed — in the process. They align themselves with the first foundation. They finally fit in a world based on wisdom.

“With the Fall, all became abnormal.” -Francis Schaeffer-