1.29.10 MAY YOU LIVE FOREVER!

victorious faith by richard wurmbrand p. 38

'you are a sinner. you are not guilty of this.

i may be born ugly or misshapen or with a low i.q.. this can be a terrible burden on me, which i have to face and deal with, though i have no guilt in my estate.

i was born a sinner. my parents and all my forefathers were sinners. it was not my choice. the hebrew word for 'sin' means 'to miss the mark'. we all fall short of the glory which would be ours without the innate sinfulness. it is there without my personal guilt.

the old testament tells the story of how joseph, a jew who had become ruler of egypt, arraigned his brother benjamin because in his sack had been found joseph's silver cup. this cup had really been found in benjamin's sack. but it is also true that joseph had ordered his slaves to hide it there without the knowledge of benjamin or of his many brothers. the purpose of joseph in so doing was to develop a sentiment of solidarity in his brothers, who had shown themselves in times past to be very selfish men, even going so far as to sell their brother as a slave. joseph wished to see if they would abandon benjamin to his fate of suffering innocently as a thief or if they would stand behind him in his extremity. fortunately, they stood the test of loyalty and they were able to return to their father with great honor and an abundance of gifts.

sin is a fact of life. it is due to some ancient happenings in which you had no personal part. it is a tragedy in which we all are involved and which is too deep to delve into. it is a tragedy somehow similar to being deformed or liable to so many painful and deadly sicknesses. we do not shrug the shoulder about being in the hospital, saying, 'i have not created the virus'. we fight it. a sickness may have its spiritual significance and value for us. our sinfulness has its meaning in the universe. it makes us one with all other sinners all mutual judgment disappears.

dostoievsky tells the story of an angel who had no peace in heaven because of the torments through which the inhabitants of hell passed. again and again he would descend to them asking them to remember at least some good deed which he then would bring before God as a plea to obtain their release. but these had done no good deeds. in the end, a lady remembered, 'i gave and onion to a beggar. is this not a good deed?'

'it surely is,' replied the angel. he flew to the archives of heaven and found in her file a note about the onion. he then took an onion to hell and told her, 'hold it with your hand. i also will hold it at the other end, and we will fly upwards. thus you will arrive in heaven'. they did so. the onion held well the weight of the woman's body did not break it. she flew upward. when the others in hell saw this, they took hold of her garments, arms, feet. others took hold of the feet of those who clug to the woman. multitudes clustered beneath her, and the onion resisted. they all began to fly toward heaven. but the woman, looking down, saw them all and was afraid that the skin would be torn and she would fall. so she pushed the others away with her elbows, telling them, 'remain in hell, you sinners, who have never done anything good'. in that moment, the onion broke. a sinner herself, she had judged others. this was the end of all her hopes. because we are all sinners, we should love one another and not judge.

do not seek the cause of your innate sinfulness.it is told in the story of adam and eve. accept the fact that you are a sinner. there is a purpose in your sinfulness. and there is the possibility of being saved from sin. Jesus offers salvation. get rid of the most deadly sickness of the world: sin!

president coolidge of the united states was a man of few words. when he returned from church one sunday, his wife asked him, 'what did the pastor preach about?' he answered, 'about sin.' she asked again, 'and what did he say?' coolidge replied, 'he's against it.'



Jesus loves His whole creation. i learn this from His disciples. st. isaac prayed every day for the whole creation. so do i. Jesus must be at least as good as i am. nobody is excluded from His love.

now, in this creation, there is the human race, to which a great catastrophe has happened. the race has fallen into sin. the life of every one of us has been marred by it. no one has quite escaped the stain of sin upon his name.

the remembrance of past sins makes us torment ourselves and others. there are today countless trouble-makers in the world. nobody is a trouble-maker unless he is troubled himself. what troubles him are deeply rooted complexes, which very often are the result of past sins.

now, how can sin be dealt with?

in times past, people would put their hands upon an animal so that atonement might be made for their sins. with some people, the ritual sacrifice was not an animal but another man, uisually a slave. such ritual mureders exist even today among primitive peoples.

the bible tells us in hebrews 10.6 that God has no pleasure in burnt offerings and sacrifices. our past sins should not be allowed to torm3ent anybody in the world. they should not torment our fellow men. neither should we torment ourselves with endless remorses. past sins must not be a motive for you to fill the pockets of clergy in order to receive absolution. sin must not be a motive for squandering energy. quietly accept the fact that we are sinners!

we have not become sinners by sinning. you sinned because you were a sinner. you will not become a thief by stealing. you steal because you are a thief. sinfulness is your very nature, as it is the nature of every man. except for Jesus, nobody who has ever lived on earth in human form has been anything other than a sinner. you must accept that you have a nose, and hair, and lungs. these are part of being human. accept also the fact that you are a sinner! sin is part of being human.

even saints sin. the apostles were sinners. Jesus told them in mark 13.3 that jerusalem and the jewish state would be so utterly destroyed that stone would not remain upon stone. they did not pray for its preservation. they were not moved by the impending tragedy. they wished just to satisfy their curiosity when this would happen, although the happening had to mean death and slavery to millions of innocent people. they reacted to the words of Jesus like sinners.

as long as we dwell on earth, we will always have sins, as we will always have noses. they belong to human nature. but we can come to the point of having 'no more conscience of sin'. heb. 10.2

the lives of many of us are like a car which has lights only in the back, so that the driver can see through the rearview mirror how many chickens or dogs he has killed in his driving. the lights should be in the front to prevent one from killing people! there is the possibility of leading a life which is not burdened by yesterday's sins. we should be careful not to neglect today's duties or make wrong plans for the future.

the past is erased by the fact that Jesus gave for our salvation His blood, about which justin the martyr writes that 'it was not of human seed, but from divine power'. Christ's blood was different from ours in that it could cleanse from sin.
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Jesus purposely used the psychological mechanism of transfer, one of the powerful drives of the human soul.

it is part of sinful human nature to seek a scapegoat for everything that goes wrong. if you have mislaid something in your house and cannot find it, you feel better if you can blame your wife or your child. you still miss the object, but you feel relieved by the presumption that somebody else is the culprit.

a child hurts himself on a stool or table. if the mother beats the bad stood which has hurt the child, the child does not feel any more pain and begins to laugh.

unscrupulous politicians often use this mechanism of transfer, putting the whole blame for everything wrong in the world on the jews. the blacks, the whites, the communists, the bourgeoisie, the king, the opposition party.

'american imperialists' are the scapegoats for the poverty of the world. but american imperialism is only 60 years old! there was poverty long before its rise. there was poverty before the very discovery of america, there was poverty before the first capitalist made his appearance, there was poverty under feudalism, under slavery and under primitive communism. there is posverty under socialism, but we all need scapegoats!

now, Jesus has also used this mechanism of transfer, which is so often misused, but in a good sense. men seek a scapegoat, but there is something in man which makes him realize at least in part that his own convictions about the guilt of his scapegoats is illogical. anti-semitism existed before hitler, tyranny before the bolsheviks. one person or one institution cannot be blamed for social problems as old as humanity. but men need a scapegoat.

therefore, god the creator became man, and He tells us, 'I take the full responsibility for everything that happens in My creation. I knew when I created man that man would fall into sin, but notwithstanding I created him. so I take upon Myself the responsibility for your sins, too. instead of seeking other scapegoats, put all your sins upon Me! I will gladly expiate them. I will bear the punishment of your sins'. this satisfies the human mind. now we have found the real Lamb on which the sins of the whole world can be placed. He des for our sins and we no longer bear a guilty conscience.

we have in heaven a powerful intercessor with the Father who has been tempted in all thing like us.

i happened to be a prisoner for a long period of time in a communist country. i had as fellow prisoners a multitude of former judges and prosecutors, sentenced because they had, at one time, tried communists. when these judges and prosecutors who had formerly administered the law were themselves forced to endure the hardships of prison life, they all said that if they were ever judges again, they would never hand down the harsh sentences they had given before. they had never realized before that five years of prison written as a sentence on a sheet of paper is not the same as five years spent behind bars. nobody spends five years in prison. you make every day of prison separately and each minute of each day is a pain apart. the experience of suffering changes a man's outlook on the question of punishment.

the incarnation of Jesus Christ and His death on the cross not only offered salvation to all who shold believe on Him, but also enriched the Godhead! therefore, it is written in solomon's song, chapter 3.11, 'go forth, o ye daughters of zion and behold king solomon with the crown, wherewith his mother crowned him in the day of his espousals'. solomon is here a type of Jesus Christ.

from eternity Jesus Christ has had many crowns, but the most beautiful was given to Him by His blessed mother, mary, when He, as God, espoused human nature. God had always judged men righteously, but He had judged them from the divine perspective. but when God became man, He saw human life from a human perspective. He knew by experience what it meant to be a poor child belonging to a despised race, to be hungry, to have nowhere to lay His head, to be tempted by woman, to be scourged, to be unjustly sentenced. God has been enriched through the experience of Jesus Christ. not only does he save, but - as it is written in the greek of colossians 2.1 - 'he graces our offences'. God adds to our offences the grace of His own experience of human life. He has full understanding of our offences and forgives them wholeheartedly.