Sinfulness

Imagine a savvy organization that does a leveraged buyout and buys a company, and the company is losing money. It's awash in red ink. What does the company do? The takeover buyer knows that this company that it's bought is just full of incompetent management. Management stinks from top to bottom.

So, what do you do? Fire them all? Block them out? Put in new people? Is that illegal? No, the buyers have that right. Is that impractical? No, they have the power. It's smart.

In the biblical story God comes to us. Because he's powerful, he's got the right to blot us out. Why? Because look at the world. It's incompetent. Morally incompetent from top to bottom. He's got the power, so it's not impractical. He's got the holiness. He's got the right, but thank goodness he's also got the mercy, because if he was just powerful and holy, he would do what any good company would do who has just bought out another company that's incompetent. Every head rolls. Fire them all! They have the right; they have the power. It's the smart thing to do. But God's also merciful, so he will restore us. He will redeem us. He'll cut the head off of our sin instead of cutting the head off of our bodies and that's the reason…the hymnwriter said, “for his mercies endure, ever faithful, ever sure.”

In an almost unbelievable turn of events, a man already facing legal proceedings for fare evasion was caught trying to avoid paying for a train ticket yet again—this time while on his way to court for the original offense. The individual, who owes more than £30,000 in unpaid fines (about $37,500 in USD), attempted to board a train without a valid ticket, only to be stopped by vigilant railway staff during a routine ticket inspection.

Despite facing mounting legal consequences, this man continued a pattern of behavior that authorities described as “prolific fare evasion.” His repeated attempts to dodge payment laid bare the ongoing struggles faced by transportation services to enforce fare collection and deter habitual offenders.

The incident took place in London, where public transportation relies heavily on trust and compliance with fare policies to maintain its operation and funding. Transport officials have expressed frustration but also underscore the importance of fairness for all passengers who pay their way. Authorities must balance enforcement with opportunities for rehabilitation, hoping offenders will recognize the value of integrity and lawfulness.

This man’s actions serve as a sobering reminder of the consequences of unrepentant behavior. Instead of facing his charges and seeking to make amends, he chose to continue evading responsibility, compounding the legal challenges he already faced.

Possible Preaching Angle:

There comes a time when we must stop and ask ourselves—How long can I keep repeating the same sin, expecting to escape the consequences?

London's metropolitan police force has seen just about everything in terms of crime, and they've saved much of the evidence. A forward-thinking officer in 1874 began saving items from historic cases to show new recruits. The museum includes items like: Letters from the Jack the Ripper case, an oil drum used to dissolve murder victims in acid; Cannibal Dennis Nilsen's cooking pots; The umbrella-fired ricin bullet that the KGB used to kill a Bulgarian dissident in London during the Cold War; Items that once belonged to Charles Black, the most prolific counterfeiter in the Western Hemisphere, including a set of printing plates, forged banknotes, and a cunningly hollowed-out kitchen door once used to conceal them.

The museum houses evidence from some of the most twisted, barbaric criminal cases of recent history. It is not open to the public, as some people think it's just too gruesome for public viewing, but it is used as a teaching collection for police recruits. It also may show the monstrous side of humanity, what we have been and still are capable of doing to each other.

As a prisoner in Nazi death camps during World War II, Lily Engelman vowed that—if she survived—she would one day bear witness to the systematic slaughter of Jewish people. After the war, she emigrated from Hungary to Israel, where she found sewing work in a mattress factory. She married another Hungarian-speaking Jew, Shmuel Ebert, who had fled Europe before the war.

Despite her vow, however, she found herself rarely even mentioning the Holocaust after the war. People noticed the number tattooed on her left forearm but didn’t ask questions. They could never fathom the horrors she had endured, she thought. As for her own children, she preferred not to terrify them.

Only in the late 1980s, spurred partly by questions from one of her daughters, did she begin to open up. Resettled in London, she told her story in schools, in gatherings of other survivors and even in the British Parliament. Once she sat in a London train station and talked about the Holocaust with anyone who stopped to listen. In one video recounting her experiences, she says the Holocaust was the first time factories were built to kill people.

Lily Ebert, who died October 9, 2024 at the age of 100, once summed up her mission as trying “to explain the unexplainable.” But one of her obituaries noted that according to Ebert, words really matter. As she explained, “The Holocaust didn’t start with actions. It started with words.”

Jana Monroe had a distinguished 22-year career in the FBI, including in the FBI Behavioral Science Unit. She knows in depth the disturbing depths of human depravity that FBI agents must cope with. In her book, "Hearts of Darkness,” Monroe covers a variety of topics and issues, including her dismay over the often-light sentences given to guilty lawyers, judges, and cops.

For a brief period of her time, Monroe was placed in charge of the FBI’s Financial Institution Fraud department in San Diego. They had received reliable information that there was blatant public corruption in the local courts. After two years, the tireless work of FBI agents and federal prosecutors resulted in the indictments of two local Superior Court judges and a prominent local attorney.

However, Monroe was deeply disappointed by the lenient punishments. One judge and the lawyer received 41 months in prison, and the second judge received 33 months. Monroe writes:

When those sentences were handed down, I immediately thought of all the people doing hard time in serious prisons for being stupid enough or otherwise desperate enough to rob at gunpoint a convenience store where a good haul might be a hundred bucks.

No matter how the money gets stolen - at the point of a gun or by cooking the books - there are repercussions that the law is too ready to ignore when the crook works in a paneled corner office and belongs to all the right clubs.

I strongly believe in ethics. Those to whom law enforcement and justice have been entrusted - police officers, FBI agents, district attorneys, especially judges - are obligated (serve) with integrity and honesty. When they don't, they deserve no better treatment than a guy who tries to knock over a 7-Eleven.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Monroe is right. Lawyers, judges, and law enforcement officers represent government, law and order, righteousness, and indirectly God (Rom. 13:1-7), and must therefore be held to high standards when they blatantly disobey laws and are guilty of crimes.

Since 1953, when Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the summit, over 4,000 people have successfully climbed Mount Everest. Unfortunately, the climbers have also littered the mountainside with garbage, such as used oxygen bottles, ropes, and tents. Today, Everest is so overcrowded and full of trash that it has been called the “world’s highest garbage dump.”

No one knows exactly how much waste is on the mountain, but it is in the tons. Litter is spilling out of glaciers, and camps are overflowing with piles of human waste. Climate change is causing snow and ice to melt, exposing even more garbage that has been covered for decades. All that waste is trashing the natural environment, and it poses a serious health risk to everyone who lives in the Everest watershed.

Both governments and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have attempted—and are attempting—to clean up the mess on Mount Everest. In 2019, the Nepali government launched a campaign to clear 10,000 kilograms (22,000 pounds) of trash from the mountain. They also started a deposit initiative. Anyone visiting Mount Everest has to pay a $4,000 deposit, and the money is refunded if the person returns with eight kilograms (18 pounds) of garbage—the average amount that a single person produces during the climb.

Possible Preaching Angle:

1) Legacy - We should all pause for a moment and think, “In my climb up the ladder of success, what am I leaving behind? Will others have to pick through my "garbage"?2) Sinfulness; Cleansing – We all have a filthy old nature which is desperately in need of the deep cleaning and spiritual renewal that only God’s Spirit can perform. “He saved us by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit” (Titus 3:5).

Diamonds are the hardest substance on Earth, they rate a perfect 10 on the Mohs scale of mineral hardness. But on other carbon-rich planets, the jury is still out. That’s because for some 40 years, scientists have theorized that diamond can squeeze into an even harder mineral known as an eight-atom body-centered cubic, or BC8. If true, this ultra-dense form of carbon would likely be found on carbon-rich exoplanets and would have both a higher compressive strength and thermal conductivity than diamond.

As a result of their exceptional toughness and resistance to wear, diamonds have found a wide range of services in various fields and daily life. Saw blades and drill bits with diamond tips may easily slice through stone, concrete, and metal. Diamonds are also essential in the electrical industry because of their resilience and resistance to heat and chemicals. Another use for diamonds is their high electrical insulation which makes it a promising material for improving the reliability of semiconductors. And let’s not forget the romantic side of diamonds. Because of their extreme hardness and brilliance diamonds are prized as jewelry which can last forever.

Simply put, the discovery of a way to make this “super-hard diamond” could be a game changer for a variety of industries. And scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the University of South Florida using the Frontier supercomputer are researching just such a possible pathway toward creating BC8.

Possible Preaching Angle:

While a diamond is remarkable for its incredible hardness, there is something on earth that is even harder – the human heart. The Bible warns that a hardened heart is a serious spiritual condition that can develop through unrepentant sin, pride, ingratitude, or disappointment. Only God can truly soften a hardened heart, which requires recognizing the problem, repenting of sin, and submitting to God's work in one's life.

Paul Ford writes in an article on Wired, what happened when he switched his weight loss meds and found a miracle cure. Decades of struggle with an insatiable desire for food, gone in an instant. But his reflection on the experience is less of an advertisement as it is a probing of human nature amid advances in pharmacology. He writes:

This is a technology that will reorder society. I have been the living embodiment of the deadly sin of gluttony, judged as greedy and weak since I was 10 years old — and now the sin is washed away. Baptism by injection. But I have no more virtue than I did a few months ago. I just prefer broccoli to gloopy chicken. Is this who I am?

How long is it before there’s an injection for your appetites, your vices? Maybe they’re not as visible as mine. Would you self-administer a weekly anti-avarice shot? Can Big Pharma cure your sloth, lust, wrath, envy, pride?

On this front, the parallels between Ford’s weight loss drug and every other drug are almost obvious (whether they be coffee, THC, or any fill-in-the-blank name brand). The alluring promise that frailty is simply a matter of chemistry. More interesting is what happens to Ford himself after the one signal pathway is silenced — his brain averts its gaze elsewhere:

Where before my brain had been screaming, screaming, at air-raid volume — there was sudden silence. It was confusing. […] “I urgently need, I thought … Something to fill the silence where food used to be. Every night for weeks I spent four, five hours twisting Moog knobs. Not making music. Just droning, looping, and beep-booping. I needed something to obsess over, to watch YouTube videos about. I needed something to fail at every night to feel normal.

Possible Preaching Angle:

The flesh is never satisfied and cannot be conquered by human will or science. Impeding one of the desires of the flesh simply ignites another. The church of big pharma might provide a kind of cure, but there is no panacea for human nature, except “the washing of new birth and renewal by the Holy Spirit” (Titus 3:5).

In the popular, BBC murder mystery series Broadchurch, the mystery is who in this lovely little seaside town could have murdered a child. The local detective, Eli Miller, is dubious that anyone from the town could’ve done it. This is a tight knit community of good people. She says, “We don’t have these problems.” In response, Detective Inspector, Alec Hardy argues with her.

Hardy: Anybody’s capable of murder, given the right circumstances.

Miller: Most people have moral compasses.

Hardy: Compasses break.

Tim Keller adds: “The fictional detective inspector is telling us exactly what the Bible says. You must not be in denial about your capacity for evil. You will do some really bad things in your life that will utterly shock you, unless you get ahold of this particular truth from the Bible. Blame shifting is therefore one of the most dangerous things that you can do.”

According to a 2022 poll, most Americans believe the United States Congress is morally corrupt. Sixty-three percent of Americans, including a majority of Republicans, Democrats, and Independents, told pollsters they believe the House and Senate are immoral.

Nearly 9 out of 10 said morality is important to them, but at the same time, only a few people prefer a moral candidate to an effective one. The poll asked Americans:

Would You Prefer a Candidate Who Is More Moral but Less Effective?

26% More moral

19% More effective

40% Neither

15% Don’t know

When people refer to political corruption in American politics as a cesspool, it’s usually just a metaphor. But in one recent case, the term could be taken literally.

In early April, former Hawaii state representative Ty Cullen was sentenced to two years in prison for taking bribes in order to influence legislation restricting the use of toxic cesspools in properties around the state.

Industry analysts believe that cesspools proliferated in Hawaii during the latter half of the twentieth century. This was when infrastructure investments in things like sewer lines were outpaced by the money to be made through rapid development. New cesspools have been banned since 2016.

Cullen was charged because of his involvement in legislation that affected cesspool conversions, which are costly construction upgrades. The news has caused consternation among political players, but rejoicing from environmental advocates. Stuart Coleman, director of Wastewater Alternatives said, “We were joking that, ‘Oh, now these politicians have given cesspools a bad name.’”

Possible Preaching Angle:

When public servants behave dishonorably, they confer dishonor on the offices that they hold, and people lose faith in local authorities. In the same way, servants of God cause a loss of trust when they behave dishonestly.

Eight-year-old Aryanna Schneeberg was playing in her backyard near Milwaukee, Wisconsin, when she was struck in the back with an arrow. A neighbor was attempting to shoot a squirrel, but his weapon missed its intended target and instead penetrated the child’s lung, spleen, stomach, and liver. She bears the scars that come with surviving such an injury.

We ought to think of Aryanna every time we hear a preacher explaining the Greek word for sin, hamartia, as “missing the mark.” Like most pulpit clichés, this one points to something that’s partly right. The problem, though, is that … we think of a bucolic setting where we are shooting our arrows toward a target on a bale of hay. The metaphor is almost comforting: We see ourselves not as criminals or rebels but as being off our game now and then. We reach into our quiver for one more chance to get it right.

That’s not how the Bible describes sin. The Bible says sin is lawlessness (1 John 3:4). When it categorizes sins, it consistently does so in terms that imply both perpetrators and victims: enmity, dissension, oppression of orphans and widows, adultery, covetousness. In that light, sin is less like target practice on some isolated piece of countryside and more like loosing arrows on a city sidewalk in the midst of a pressing crowd. All around us are bodies, writhing or dead, struck down by our errant arrows.

Possible Preaching Angle:

In a sermon on sin, a preacher might also quote the Puritan John Owen: “Be killing sin or it will be killing you.” That’s true too. And yet it doesn’t quite say enough: Our sin might also be killing those around us. “The wages of sin is death,” the Bible tells us (Rom. 6:23). That death might not simply be one’s own, but also one’s neighbors.

In August of 2022, the University of Michigan Library announced that one of its most prized possessions, a manuscript said to have been written by Galileo around 1610, was in fact a 20th-century fake. This brought renewed attention to the checkered career of the man named as the likely culprit: Tobia Nicotra, a notorious forger from Milan.

Nicotra hoodwinked the U.S. Library of Congress into buying a fake Mozart manuscript in 1928. He wrote an early biography of the conductor Arturo Toscanini that became better known for its fictions than its facts. He traveled under the name of another famous conductor who had recently died. And in 1934 he was convicted of forgery in Milan after the police were tipped off by Toscanini’s son Walter, who had bought a fake Mozart from him.

Here's his explanation of what had motivated his many forgeries, which were said to number in the hundreds: “I did it to support my seven loves.” When the police raided Nicotra’s apartment in Milan, they found a virtual forgery factory, strewn with counterfeit documents that appeared to bear the signatures of Columbus, Mozart, Leonardo da Vinci, George Washington, the Marquis de Lafayette, Martin Luther, Warren G. Harding, and other famous figures.

Investigators had also found a sort of shrine to his seven mistresses, at least according to The American Weekly. The article described a room with black velvet-covered walls, with seven panels featuring paintings, sketches, and photographs of the women with fresh flowers in front of each. “Incidentally,” the publication added, “he had a wife.”

The Ganges River is one of the world’s largest fresh water outlets, after the Amazon and the Congo. The headwaters emerge from a glacier high in the western Himalayas, and then drops down steep mountain canyons to India’s fertile northern plain. Just after it merges with the Brahmaputra, the Ganges empties into the Bay of Bengal. It supports more than a quarter of India’s 1.4 billion people, all of Nepal, and part of Bangladesh.

But sadly, the Ganges has also long been one of the world’s most polluted rivers. The river is befouled by poisonous bi-products from hundreds of factories and towns. Arsenic, chromium, and mercury combine with the hundreds of millions of gallons of raw sewage that flow into the river on a daily basis.

But despite countless studies and evidence proving the river's polluted state, environmentalists have gained little traction in cleaning up the river. Why?

The Ganges River is a sacred waterway worshipped by a billion Hindus as Mother Ganga, a living goddess with power to purify the soul, and to cleanse itself. A recent article in National Geographic explains: “There is this belief that the river can clean itself. If the river can clean itself, then why should we have to worry about it? Many people say the river cannot be polluted; it can go on forever.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

False gods are capable of cleaning neither themselves or their worshippers. Only Jesus can purify the pollution of the human heart.

In the early 1960s, political writer Hannah Arendt attended the trials of Adolf Eichmann, the German officer who had orchestrated much of the Holocaust. In 1934, Eichmann had been appointed to the Jewish section of the “security services” of the SS. From then on, he became deeply involved with the formulation and operation of the “final solution to the Jewish question.” He drew up the idea of deportation of Jews into ghettos, and went about gathering Jews into concentration camps with murderous efficiency. He took great pride in the role he played in the death of six million European Jews.

At his trial, Arendt expected to find a monster. Only a deranged psychopath could lend his considerable organizational skills to the mass murder of millions in Nazi Germany. What stunned Arendt was her startling discovery of a “normal” and “simple” man at the trial. The notorious architect of the Holocaust did not appear as a devil but as a banal bureaucrat doing what he was told.

Hannah Arendt’s book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, provides an unnerving account of unreflective living. Eichmann insisted in the trial that he was not a murderer but that his conscience demanded of him unquestioning submission to the demands of his superiors. Those demands resulted in the calculated deportation of millions of women, children, and men to their orchestrated deaths.

As Arendt reported, psychologists diagnosed Eichmann as “normal” with familial affections that were enviable. Herein lies the horror. Eichmann loved his wife; he was a good father. He was not a monster. He was banal, unremarkable, and commonplace. This “normal” man could be transformed into the abhorrent perpetrator of humanity’s grossest crimes because his banality and ambition kept him from an inner examination of his life.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Eichmann’s crimes seem far removed from anything ordinary people would commit. But without self-reflection and confession, normal people are capable of horrific evil. Psalm 36:2 (“In their blind conceit, they cannot see how wicked they really are,” NLT) has something to say about Eichmann and the banality of evil. It has something to say to us.

Everyone is acting so weird! The most obvious recent weirdness was when Will Smith smacked Chris Rock at the Oscars. But people have been behaving badly on smaller stages for months now. Last week, a man was arrested after he punched a gate agent at the Atlanta airport. People also found ways to throw tantrums while skiing—skiing. In one viral video, a man slid around the chairlift-boarding area, one foot strapped into his snowboard as he flailed at security guards and refused to comply with a mask mandate.

During the pandemic, bad behavior of all kinds has increased. Americans are driving more recklessly, crashing their cars, and killing pedestrians at higher rates. Health-care workers say their patients are behaving more violently, as a result, Missouri hospitals planned to outfit nurses with panic buttons. In 2020, the US murder rate rose by nearly a third, the biggest increase on record, then rose again in 2021. And if there were a national tracker of school-board-meeting hissy fits, it would be heaving with data points right now.

What on earth is happening? How did Americans go from clapping for health-care workers to threatening to kill them? More than a dozen experts on crime, psychology, and social norms suggest few possible explanations:

We’re all stressed out: One explanation for the spike in bad behavior is the rage, frustration, and stress coursing through society right now. Everyone is teetering slightly closer to their breaking point. Someone who may have lost a job, a loved one, or a friend to the pandemic might be pushed over the edge.

People are drinking more: People have been coping with the pandemic by drinking more and doing more drugs. A lot of these incidents involve somebody using a substance. Americans have been drinking 14 percent more days a month during the pandemic, and drug overdoses have also increased since 2019.

We’re social beings, and isolation is changing us: The pandemic loosened ties between people: Kids stopped going to school; their parents stopped going to work; parishioners stopped going to church; people stopped gathering, in general. Sociologists think all of this isolation shifted the way we behave. The rise in disorder may simply be the unsavory side of a uniquely difficult time—one in which many people were tested, and some failed.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Extraordinary times reveal that our civilized veneer is very thin. Stress strips away the manners that people use as masks and shows true character of the old nature. Only the new nature that God implants in the redeemed can cope with stressful, disruptive times (2 Cor. 5:17; Rom. 8:1-39).

Notorious cult leader Charles Manson was responsible for the brutal deaths of nine people in the summer of 1969. The murders were so gruesome and sensational that Manson has been an obsession for many people even after his death.

This summer (2019) a Quentin Tarantino movie, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, is being released. It is based partially on Manson’s crimes and stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Kurt Russell, and Al Pacino. Film historian Peter Biskind writes about Manson’s appeal in an issue of Esquire.

Some examples of our fascination with Charles Manson and evil:

-At least 50 books have been written about Manson.

-Helter Skelter, the book on his investigation and trial, has sold over seven million copies. It is the “best-selling true-crime book of all time.”

-One opera entitled The Manson Family was produced.

-Eleven feature films, documentaries, and TV series focus entirely on him or he is a large part of the subject covered.

-According to the recent article in Esquire: “In addition to comic books and multiple websites devoted to him …, jewelry, coffee mugs, and T-shirts displaying his image sell on eBay, Etsy, and Amazon. ... You can download his singing and talking ringtones to your cell phone—for free.”

Biskind ends his article by delving into the essence of this fascination:

One thing Charlie liked to say was “Look straight at me and you see yourself.” Maybe one answer to the riddle of Manson and his girls is that they remind us of the ultimate unknowability of other people, even the seemingly unremarkable ones. Theirs is the story of Little Red Riding Hood in reverse: The smiling young girl at the door selling Girl Scout cookies is herself the Big Bad Wolf, and may be hiding a dagger under her cloak.