All sin. How so?
Sin is irrational in its break away from God. If God is the source of supreme pleasure, beauty, love, and goodness—and He is—then turning away from God makes no sense. It’s irrational.
Sin is irrational in its short-sightedness. If there’s a way that seems right to man but the end is death and we choose that sinful way, then we think, feel, and act irrationally. It’s irrational to refuse eternal life in order to make a mess of this mortal life. That’s sin.
Sin is irrational in its undervaluing of the soul. What will a man give in exchange for his soul? If you could gain the entire world and lose your soul what profit would you have? Sin says there’s something worth losing your soul for. That’s irrational.
Sin is irrational in its choice of the temporary and fleeting over the permanent and immovable. We all face the allure of the “temporary pleasures of sin.” However, those pleasures seek to distract us from an inheritance kept by the power of God through faith and a city whose foundations will never be shaken or destroyed. To choose what only lasts for a moment over what lasts forever is to act without rationality.
Sin is irrational in its tendency to distort our view of the world from the view God establishes. Sin crafts a worldview. It’s a false worldview wherein things act or ought to act in keeping with the desires of the sinner. The sinner feels a kind of invincibility even though his/her plans come to nothing and all around them people perish. We are meant to see the world as God sees it, to call black “black” and white “white,” to call up “up” and down “down,” in agreement with God. Sin flips the world upside down and inside out as we break ourselves into a million irrational pieces.
In all of this, sin deceives and destroys.
Every opting for sin reduces us below the beasts of the field. Though they do not have the faculties of thought and reason, the beasts do what they were made to do. But man, God’s apex creation, made in his image and likeness, uses all the wonder and grace of being human to defile and distort that image and his purpose. In this way sin is not only irrational, it’s a tremendous violence committed toward our very being.
Perhaps the most rational thing we can do, then, is quit our love affair with sin, turn back to God in repentance, and trust in Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior. In Christ the image so disfigured by sin is being renewed in true holiness and righteousness and in the knowledge of its Creator. Though the cross is foolishness to the world, to those of us being saved it is sanity, power, and love from God. Faith in Jesus and the life that conforms to the sound doctrine of the gospel returns us to God, fixes our nearsightedness, rightly values the soul, opts for the permanent and immovable, and helps us see the world the way God does. Nothing else could be so rational. Christ Jesus clothes us in our right mind, the mind of Christ.
