Only One Crime
There is only one real crime in heaven, and all other offences are but misdemeanours. There is only one unforgivable sin, and it is not blasphemy, as the Catholics would assert. The only crime which attracts unfettered condemnation and a peremptory backlash of holy malice is the refusal to love Jesus. That crime ranks the most heinous and the most truly disturbing, the most genuinely hideous in God’s eyes. Withholding the adoration of Jesus is the real mark of wickedness, the telltale sign of a perverted soul, and the only enduring litmus test of a spiritual allegiance given to darkness. The abjuration of the cross of Christ is the only brand of comportment that God finds truly suspicious, because it betrays the most abhorrent of crimes, the disavowal of Jesus.
Sure, the artful accuser might rage and boil with the multivarious deadly sins perpetrated by fallen men, brandishing evidence of malpractice and behavioural insufficiency in fury, naming murder and fraud and avarice and various other sins in high dudgeon. And admittedly, the laws of men might be revealed to have been torn asunder by some culpable wight in condemnable oversight, and in great offence to good society. But the servants of God’s interrogation are always pressed on that most delicate and precipitous point; does the accused individual love Christ nonetheless? Does the perpetrator of these indiscretions keep an abiding affection for Christ and the supremacy of the cross?
What is the real instigator and basis of offence? What truly warrants the reaction we name “offence”? It is uncleanness or an unkempt home? Is it the absence of a home? Is it wanton greed? Is it fraudulent political machinations? Is it sexual immorality? Is it the love of rebellion? Is it the determination to accumulate wealth with miserly gloating? Is it the explicit envy of another person’s standing and the expression of ill will? Is it a perverted satisfaction in another person’s downfall? It it the mark of any prideful bent whatsoever? While this list should attract censure, it is only the individual that has abandoned the cross who has offended and angered God. That fact is what is genuinely offensive.
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