Why We Are Responsible
But how can we be responsible for being sinners if God gave us a hopeless start in life? How can He then condemn us? The answer is twofold. First, we share Adam’s sin. But beyond that, God has made full provision, though the sacrifice of Christ, for us to escape judgment. Scripture emphasis’s man’s ability to receive Christ if he wants to. As Jesus told Nicodemus, “This is the judgment: that light is come into the world, and man loved darkness rather than light” (John 3:19). It has been said that the entrance to hell is guarded by a cross. No one comes into hell without walking past it. In other words, at Calvary God did everything necessary to keep man from judgment. If he refuses God’s provision, man must himself bear responsibility for judgment.

But isn’t it true, many people ask, that men are not all equally bad? Of course this is true. That “all have sinned” does not imply that all are as bad as they might be. But in relation to God’s standard of holiness, all come short. You probably know honest, kind, and upright people who are not to be compared with the derelicts of Skid Row or with vicious criminals behind bars. Humanly, there are great differences.
But suppose we were to put one person in Death Valley, 280 feet below sea level; one in Denver, the mile-high city; and one on the peak of Mount Everest, altitude 29,000 feet. Let’s suppose that the person in Death Valley represents the dregs of society and the kind of life such people live. The person in Denver is the average man, and the one on Mount Everest is the best person you can imagine. The enormous differences in their altitude, or elevation, are apparent. But let’s suppose God’s standard of holiness is represented by the distance to the moon. Recently we have had an opportunity to see how Mount Everest, Denver, and Death Valley look from the moon. They’re all the same!

From our human standpoint, there are great differences in men’s sinfulness, but— contrasted with the infinite holiness of God-all men are equally lost.

Sin Is Against God

Sin is always primarily directed against God. It is more than mere self-centeredness. David, though he had wronged Bathsheba in adultery, and had murdered Uriah, cried out, “Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in Thy sight” (Ps. 51:4).

The Bible defines sin variously as “transgression of the Law”(1 John 3:4), as falling short of the mark (Rom. 3:23), and as failure to do the good we know we should do (James 4:17). Sin has both an active, overt aspect (transgression of the Law) and a passive aspect (failure to do good).

There are sins of commission and sins of omission. The Book of Common Prayer adequately summ- arises, in its General Confession, “We have done those things we ought not to have done, and we have left undone those things we ought to have done.” The first sin was the prototype of all other sins. The seriousness of the first sin lies in the fact that Adam and Eve broke a commandment of God that showed

His authority, goodness, wisdom, justice, faithfulness, and grace.

In their transgression, they rejected His authority, doubted His goodness, disputed His wisdom, repudiated His justice, contradicted His truthfulness, and spurned His grace. Then and now, sin is the opposite of God’s perfection. The seriousness of sin is based on man’s alienation from and broken fellowship with God. It brought disastrous consequences to Adam, and to humanity and society in general. The root problem in the world today is not ignorance or poverty, as great as these are.

The root problem is sin. Man is alienated from God, and hence is self-centered. The tensions between racial groups, economic classes, and nations are nothing more than the self-centeredness of the individual blown up on a wide canvas to include all men.