God’s Definition of Crime

God’s Definition of Crime
“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it? (Jeremiah 17:9)

All around us we find the unsaved world with its laws and codes of conduct based on a philosophy far removed from God’s concept of sin.  Human law does not hold man to be a thief until he has actually stolen something.  A policeman might find a man loitering in a dark alley near the open window of a house, but the man could not be charged with robbery unless he had reached through the window and extracted some article that did not belong to him.  In other words, the world says that a man is not a criminal until he has committed some crime.

God’s declaration is of a quite different order.  Let the world say that men are not sinners until they have sinned; God declares that men sin because they are sinners.  The world looks only at the eruption of the boils and gives no consideration whatever to the poison virus of sin that is within.  Whenever unsaved people philosophize about the origin of crime, the best they can do is to call it a disease and attribute it to some organic maladjustments in the personality, or of the body.  One eminent psychologist has gone so far as to state that all of man’s actions are a result of certain glandular disturbances.  He said further that if he could take full control of the glands of any child, he could make of him a criminal or a virtuous man according to his will.

But God has declared all men to be sinners by nature and by choice.  He has written over them the divine decree that they are estranged from Him because of their sin.  Anyone who forms any other estimate of the nature of sin brings a serious charge against God, who declares what man is through the prophet Jeremiah.  To take any other opinion of sin is to call God’s solemn Word into question.

It can readily be seen therefore, that we must consider both sin and sins if we are to know true victory in Christ. And it should be remarked and admitted by all that every human being is on the same level so far as the existence and the potentialities of sin are concerned.