As a father loves his children and guides them, so God loves us. He knows what is best for us, and gives us wise directions. Both spirit and flesh do well when we follow God’s will.
However, you see in your own life that all is not well. The human spirit hurts. The human body suffers. Sooner or later we all feel like Job.
“My spirit is broken; my days are extinct; the graveyard is ready for me (Job 17:1).
Satan has brought sin and suffering into our world.
Sin is, first of all, directed against God. Whether planned or not, it challenges His rule.
“Everyone who makes a practice of sinning also practices lawlessness; sin is lawlessness” (1 John 3:4).
Sin rejects God as King. Sin insults God by denying His vast knowledge and wisdom. Sin dishonors God by turning elsewhere to meet needs. As God says in Jeremiah 2:13,
… for my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water.
Sin turns against us, ruining our lives and families. Conflict and crime spread.
“Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.” (Proverbs 14:34).
Newspapers are full of reports about sin’s harm. Yet news tells only part of the story. Reporters cannot see inside the human spirit. There, evil eats away secretly at our minds, darkening our hearts with guilt and shame.
The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it? (Jeremiah 17:9).
Also, the hearts of the children of man are full of evil, and madness is in their hearts while they live, and after that they go to the dead (Ecclesiastes 9:3).
Jesus is “the Light.” He exposes those who claim to be good children of Abraham and of God. He charges,
You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies (John 8:44).
Whoever makes a practice of sinning is of the devil, for the devil has been sinning from the beginning (1 John 3:8).
We learn sin from Satan. By joining his rebellion we become “children of the devil” (I John 3:10). All who sin are in the wrong family – which belong to “that ancient serpent” (Revelation 20:2). Jesus is right. We need to be born into a better family!