QUESTION CORNER

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jul 16, 1902

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 28, No. 29.

1256.—Origin of Sin.

Will you kindly explain where the once sinless being, Satan, obtained his immense stock of sin, in a sinless realm? And what reason have we to believe we will not meet the same fate under the same conditions? W. H. H.

1. To develop moral character, voluntary choice is absolutely necessary. A “good” man, if there could be such a thing, not from choice, would be an automaton. God made man and angels, and gave them the privilege of choice. Divinity will not take that away. For the creature’s highest good, He will not.

2. God wishes willing service. No other service is worthy of the God of love, and love can not be enforced. It is no pleasure to God that His creatures should appear to serve Him while their hearts are elsewhere. For His own perfect pleasure, man must choose.

3. This development of character involved, as it must, the awful risk of sin. But in infinite justice and kindness God forewarned of the evil and told man, not what the arbitrary punishment would be, but what would be its inevitable fruitage. “The wages of sin is death.” “The soul that sinneth, it shall die.” “Sin, when it is full-grown, bringeth forth death.”

4. For the perfect and best development of character, man must exercise faith in God the Infinite; that faith must depend upon God’s naked word of things which the character-developer has not seen as yet, about which he knows nothing only as God tells him. God is the personification of all the infinite verities, glories, beauties of the universe. To learn to trust Him is to love and obey Him. Faith turns the thoughts, the aspirations, the impulses of the creature from himself to the Infinite. It opens mind and heart to the great things of God. It constantly develops the faithful one, and continually opens before him new fields of everything worthy, wise, and good; and this also to all eternity, for the finite can never reach the infinite. He will therefore find his chief pleasure in doing good to others of God’s children, and he himself will be served by the whole universe.

5. Unbelief brings the opposite of all this. All that God made was good and only good, working in harmony with His great law of beneficent life. According to God’s Word, His children could choose this, and never know sin in experience. Many so continued. Lucifer, by what process of reasoning we know not, chose the way of unbelief, of self-centering, of perversion of right, persuading himself, of course, that his way would work out good. He corrupted his wisdom by reason of his brightness.

6. But he failed. The highest and first of all created beings (Eze. 28:12), when perverted he became the greatest power for evil. The most potent good perverted becomes the most potent evil. Love, the holiest of passions and affections, becomes, when perverted, selfishness, lust, and hatred. One of the most beneficent of all forces, rightly used and directed, is electricity; perverted, it is the most potent for destruction. So when Lucifer, the light-bearer, perverted his entire being by turning from God to self, from other’s good to his own advancement; when he utterly rejected all God’s offers to reform, he became Satan, the adversary, the prince of the powers of darkness, filled with evil, the mightiest agent of all evil. It is an eternal law that if “the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness.” Matt. 6:23. See Isa. 14:4-15; Eze. 28:11-19; John 8:44.

7. God in infinite wisdom has permitted Satan and sin to work out sin’s evil results, to bear its ripened fruitage—suffering, destruction, and death in all its appalling forms—that the universe may know that God is true, and that His laws of love are always for the good of all His children. Those who will believe Him, who will reject the sin and selfishness, will have learned the lesson. They will be willing, eternally willing, that God shall rule in heart and life forever. “Affliction shall not rise up the second time;” “there shall be no more curse.”