Sin is like an aggressive snake. If we don’t proactively attack sin, it will prove deadly. Thankfully, we aren’t alone in the fight. The power to kill sin comes from Christ through the Holy Spirit. As we focus on snuffing out sin, we must also draw near to the throne of grace. It’s there we’ll find grace to help in our time of need (Hebrews 4:16).
The deadliest snake in the world is Australia’s inland taipan. The venom from one bite can kill 100 full-grown humans. Imagine you came home to find this venomous killer coiled up in your living room. What would you do? You wouldn’t encourage your kids to play with it. You wouldn’t keep it around as a pet. No, you’d grab a shovel and aim for its head!
We have something far more dangerous in our homes and hearts. Sin. Sadly, too many people play with sin instead of putting it to death.
John Owen famously warns Christians, “Be killing sin or it will be killing you.” His book The Mortification of Sin is an exposition of Romans 8:13: “For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.” Though Christians cannot eliminate sin in this life, Owen encourages us to diligently fight sinful desires and put them to death.
What is the shovel we use to attack our sin? Owen gives us nine practical directives:
1. Diagnose sin’s severity.
When a person has struggled with a sin for a long time, it’ll be more difficult to kill. This is especially the case if there have been long seasons when that person has indulged the sin rather than actively trying to kill it. Making excuses, justifying sinful behavior, or too quickly applying grace and mercy to a sin also contribute to the sin’s severity and lead to a hardened heart and conscience. Consider such factors when diagnosing a sin’s severity, because a more severe struggle calls for more focused effort in mortification.
2. Grasp sin’s serious consequences.
Even for the Christian, who has been declared righteous positionally, sin remains dangerous. Owen outlines four dangers sin poses for the believer: being hardened by sin’s deceitfulness, God’s temporal discipline, losing peace and strength, and, finally, the danger of eternal destruction—that by continuing in sin, one may prove he was never truly converted. A Christian’s sin grieves the Holy Spirit (Eph. 4:25–30), wounds the Lord Jesus (Heb. 6:6), and can cause a Christian to lose his or her usefulness for ministry.
3. Be convinced of your guilt.
We understand guilt through the law and the gospel. “Bring the holy law of God into thy conscience,” Owen writes, “lay thy corruption to it, pray that thou mayst be affected with it.” Meditate on biblical commands that speak to sin’s sinfulness then also consider your sin in light of the cross. Ask yourself, “Why have I gone on sinning when I’ve been shown such grace and mercy? How can I show such contempt?”
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Written by J. Lance Acree |
Monday, December 13, 2021
For example, Francis S. Collins wrote a foreword for Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution, in which he espoused a theology of Christianity free of any historical interest in the Genesis creation account.  But as we see in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15, without a historical First Adam as our first covenantal representative there can be no historical Last Adam, and hence no salvation—for anyone, at any point in history.

Christians do not need to adopt the Neo-Marxist theory of race as a social construct in order to do battle against the CRT of Neo-Marxism. It is better to recognize the truth that distinct races do exist in objective reality, and that good and bad attributes become characteristics of races as a result of the religion that dominates them.  This includes both black and white. 
After reading a number of books on Critical Race Theory (CRT) by evangelical and reformed authors, I have become convinced that sometimes good men get it wrong.  Some of the writers I respect the most are saying that the existence of distinct human races is not real.  It is just a social construct.
In his recent post (Race is Real and Not a Social Construct, October 14, 2021), Larry Ball referenced writers quoted above, who are doubtless asserting that race is not real because its scientific basis is in debate.  The debate among scientists rages around values of an abstract probability (Fst) and what constitutes a “sub-species.”[i]
In western culture, the concept of race was given a veneer of scientific legitimacy by Charles Darwin, the title of whose best-known work is usually abbreviated as On the Origin of Species, but the title continues with race-grounding language: by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.  The theory of evolution he espoused was, and remains to this day, inherently race-centric and inextricably racist.  He himself acknowledged this racist element when he pointed out (in his less well-known work The Descent of Man) his theory’s implications with regard to white supremacy:[ii]
The great break in the organic chain between man and his nearest allies, which cannot be bridged over by any extinct or living species, has often been advanced as a grave objection to the belief that man is descended from some lower form; but this objection will not appear of much weight to those who, from general reasons, believe in the general principle of evolution.  Breaks often occur in all parts of the series, some being wide, sharp and defined, others less so in various degrees; as between the orang and its nearest allies—between the Tarsius and the other Lemuridæ—between the elephants, and in a more striking manner between the Ornithorhynchus or Echidna, and all other mammals.  But these breaks depend merely on the number of related forms which have become extinct.  At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world.  At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Prof. Shaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated.  The break between man and his nearest allies will then be the wider, or it will intervene between man and a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.
Close reading of the final half of this section reveals that Darwin considered only white-skinned Caucasians to be civilized, and therefore destined (through “the general principle of evolution”) to “almost certainly” exterminate and replace the “savage” (non-Caucasian) races.  Scholarly research shows that this intrinsic white supremacy was a driving force in the formulation of Nazi racism.[iii]  ‘There is a way that seems right to a man, but it ends in death.’
Since Darwin published his theory, many have attempted to forge a savvy syncretism between Christianity and evolution, perhaps feeling intellectually ashamed under the constant bombardment of evolution propaganda.  That kind of effort inevitably leads to gutting Christianity until it is unrecognizable.  For example, Francis S. Collins wrote a foreword for Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution,[iv] in which he espoused a theology of Christianity free of any historical interest in the Genesis creation account.  But as we see in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15, without a historical First Adam as our first covenantal representative there can be no historical Last Adam, and hence no salvation—for anyone, at any point in history.
The person who avidly endorsed this book to me also asked me, “Why save Genesis?”  They clearly felt the hopelessness of rationally integrating evolution with biblical history—and had decided to throw Genesis away.  If I remember correctly, I responded, “I can think of about fifty reasons to ‘save’ Genesis.”  One of them would be to preserve an alternative to the metanarrative and religious dogma of evolution (with its two Big Invisible Friends, MegaTime and Chance).  This has become the Theory of Everything, the Religion of the Age, despite the obvious fact that it requires believing the Gambler’s Fallacy to be true when we know scientifically that it is false.
Devotion to evolution also requires persistently avoiding a glaringly obvious scientific fact: the origin of a species has never been observed and recorded, even though the species generation rate must be significant.  This is the classic null result. A couple of null results in the Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887 abruptly ended the theory of “luminiferous aether.”  Not so with the supposedly scientific theory of evolution.  Across all the fishponds and aquariums, all the pastures and backyard chicken houses around the world, we see a continuous stream of null results.  Where is a newly originated and reproductively independent species?
We all hear when someone discovers the two-headed calf or a two-headed snake in the barn; but we never hear of a completely new and reproductively independent species appearing among the cattle in the pasture or the goldfish in the bowl.  Over millennia of livestock domestication and managed breeding across the animal and plant kingdoms across the globe, not one record has emerged that indicates the spontaneous origin of a new and independent species from an existing one.  We are told that evolution is one of the most powerful forces among all living things; yet no one has won a Nobel prize for documenting a recent origin.  No ancient texts supply a hint of an observed origin.  All we get instead is romanticized but ambiguous “flex-splanations” such as “speciation” among interbreeding finches in the Galapagos.[v]  I have often thought of writing a book entitled The Beak of the Acrees: A Romantic Story of Scholastic Sleight of Hand.
But there is something else curiously missing.  Despite the estimation that over 99% of earth’s species have gone extinct, no evolutionist publishes a mathematical (Fibonacci) model of species origins; the correspondingly high species origination rate (that must necessarily exceed the high extinction rate) to produce the millions of species we now observe alive and well.  We are bombarded with the output of population models and climate models, but no species origination models.
And with any systemic outcome like racism, we should (if we are rational and system thinkers) look for systemic inputs.  And few inputs to our society have been more systematic than the fawning exaltation of evolution in just about every high school and college biology class.  What student makes it to a diploma without multiple doses of this theory crammed down their throats?  The state has installed its one religion.  This formal propaganda is reinforced with a steady stream of film and song riddled with evolution dogma.  The pope must be jealous.
This may be what Ball is thinking of when he says race is real, but that would require him to confound race with racism.  Racism is certainly real—it’s a real and measurable characteristic of a population systemically indoctrinated with the inherently racist theory of evolution.  If all of humanity were, as Ball says, of one race, then the term is useless slang; “race” becomes a synonym of “human.”  Like the word “stuff,” it denotes a categorical distinction without significance.  But race is a fiction that persists, a fiction useful for secular propaganda purposes.
All this means that for Christians the widespread use of the phrase “systemic racism” offers an opportunity: to (graciously but firmly) point out to our pagan friends the systematic indoctrination in the intrinsically racist theory/religion of evolution.  This is a kind of paraclete work, and it’s a work of love: walking hand in hand with our friend while he walks in the wrong direction.  The path seems right to him, but we know it leads to death.  And when our friend is standing at the end of the path, staring into the empty pit and feeling the devastating death in his soul, we must be standing there with him, holding his hand.
What, Where, When and How questions are how we walk alongside.[vi]  We may politely ask, Francis Schaeffer fashion, where and when the origin of a reproductively independent species has been scientifically documented?  How many more billions of null results are required to make evolution a suspect theory?  To ask what is preventing people from tearing down the two statues of the well-known white supremacist Charles Darwin?  To ask what “chance” really is?  To lovingly hold their hand as their intellectual house of cards collapses in their hands—and then offer them real hope through the historical last Adam who has mercifully fulfilled the covenant office of the first Adam.
J. Lance Acree is in his 33rd year of service as a Ruling Elder in the Presbyterian Church in America.  He researches preventable human error and lives with his wife of 41 years in Clinton, Tennessee.

[i] Faulk, Ryan. “Variation Within and Between Races – The Alternative Hypothesis.” Accessed December 7, 2021, https://thealternativehypothesis.org/index.php/2016/04/15/variation-within-and-between-races/.
[ii] See Chapter VI, “On the Affinities and Genealogy of Man”, 1871
[iii] Weikart, Richard. “The Role of Darwinism in Nazi Racial Thought.” German Studies Review 36, no. 3 (2013): 537–56. https://doi.org/10.1353/gsr.2013.0106.  Kelly, Alfred. The Descent of Darwin: The Popularization of Darwinism in Germany, 1860-1914. UNC Press Books, 2012.  Bergman, Jerry. The Darwin Effect: It’s Influence on Nazism, Eugenics, Racism, Communism, Capitalism & Sexism. New Leaf Publishing Group, 2014.
[iv] Giberson, Karl W., Harper One, 2008.,
[v] Weiner, Jonathan. The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time. Reprint edition. New York, NY: Vintage, 1995.
[vi] Good, Mark C. Real Talk: Creating Space for Hearts to Change. Sisters, OR: Deep River Books LLC, 2017.

The title “the Holy One of God” not only recalls the divine Sonship of Jesus’ baptism (1:11), but apparently likens Jesus to Samson, the mighty vanquisher of the Philistines, who is the only other person in the Bible to be called “Holy One of God” (Judg. 16:17). There may be an added correlation between Samson’s “Nazarite” vow and the reference to Jesus from “Nazareth,” both of which stem from the same Hebrew root. Again anticipating the imagery of the “strong man” in 3:27, Jesus subdues the evil prince and his minions by the power of the kingdom of God.[1]

While preaching through the Gospel of Mark recently, I came across one of those (seemingly) throwaway lines which you just know is laden with theological meaning. One such example occurs when a man in a Jewish synagogue, who is possessed by an evil spirit, says to Jesus, “What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are—the Holy One of God!” (Mk. 1:24)
Demons always seem to speak better than everyone else knows. For the apostle John says this is precisely what the Lord Jesus Christ has come to do. i.e. “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work” (1 Jn. 3:8b). Perhaps there is a diabolical double entendre regarding what the unclean spirit says here with the accusation being that Jesus himself is meanspirited and judgmental (contra John 10:10).
Samson and Jesus
But what is the significance of referring to Jesus as “the Holy One of God”? James Edwards makes the following fascinating insight in his commentary on Mark’s Gospel:
The title “the Holy One of God” not only recalls the divine Sonship of Jesus’ baptism (1:11), but apparently likens Jesus to Samson, the mighty vanquisher of the Philistines, who is the only other person in the Bible to be called “Holy One of God” (Judg. 16:17). There may be an added correlation between Samson’s “Nazarite” vow and the reference to Jesus from “Nazareth,” both of which stem from the same Hebrew root. Again anticipating the imagery of the “strong man” in 3:27, Jesus subdues the evil prince and his minions by the power of the kingdom of God.[1]
The link between Jesus and Samson is a compelling one. As Edwards explains, there is a clear connection with the reference to Jesus being from Nazareth and Samson having taken a Nazarite vow.
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