Written by Guy M. Richard |
Wednesday, August 23, 2023
Sin is not something that needed to be created in order to exist. It became a possibility when God created the angels who were capable of choosing godliness or ungodliness, and it was actualized when one of those angels chose the latter over the former. This angel, along with his army of demons who joined him in rebelling against God, are responsible for promoting and proliferating sin in every generation. And, under their influence, sin has become the natural bent of every human being’s heart, mind, will, and affections.

Sin exists. That much should be obvious. We see it manifested in the world all around us; we see evidence of it within ourselves as well. Violence and hatred go virtually unchecked. Selfishness and pride run amok in so much of what we do and in so many of the decisions we make. Anger and frustration so often lurk beneath the surface, just waiting for the right circumstances to call them up. And storms and diseases frequently wreak havoc on our lives and our livelihoods. These things we all know to be part and parcel of the world in which we live. The question is, why? Why are they part of our reality? Where did they come from? Better yet, if these things are all manifestations of sin, the real question we must answer is, where did sin come from?
The problem gets more complicated, however. If God created everything in the universe and declared it to be “very good” (Gen. 1:31), and if sin is, at its root, not good—i.e., it is unrighteousness and ungodliness, as I argued in my last article—then God couldn’t have created it. But if God didn’t create it, then where did sin come from? Has it always existed? Is it some kind of cosmic opposite to God? Or is there some “sinful” being that is responsible for bringing it into the world and sustaining its influence in every generation down through the ages? And, if that is true, then where did this being come from? These are just some of the things that we will be exploring in this article. Let’s start “in the beginning” with what happened at creation.
Sin Didn’t Need to Be Created
If, as I argued in my last article, sin is ungodliness or unrighteousness or, even, lawlessness, then this means that sin is not a substance that needs to be created in order for it to exist. It is an attitude or a posture—an anti-God attitude or posture—that leads in turn to anti-God thoughts, words, and deeds. Sin is the privation or absence of godliness or righteousness or lawfulness, much in the same way that darkness is the privation or absence of light. God didn’t need to create ungodliness; it already existed as an “opposite” to His own character and will.
In addition to the passages I cited in my last article, Titus 2:11-14 clearly supports this line of reasoning. Significantly, according to the apostle Paul, we are told in these verses that Jesus “gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness” (v. 14). Sin is necessarily, therefore, the opposite of law-keeping; it is the privation or absence of lawfulness. And because God’s character and will are the only bases for the law, this means that sin is nothing more or less than ungodliness. Paul confirms this interpretation by placing “lawlessness” in v. 14 in parallel with “ungodliness” in vv. 11-12. The work of Christ not only redeems us from our lawlessness; it also transforms us more and more to reflect God’s character and will over the course of our lives.
This, in turn, confirms that sin didn’t need to be created. It is the privation or absence of God, His character, and His will. All that is needed for it to come into existence is for creatures to exist who have the ability to choose to embrace God/godliness or to reject it. Therefore, when God created the angels with the ability to choose “for God” or “not for Him,” sin—which is simply ungodliness—became a distinct possibility for the first time in the history of the universe.
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Though the family is under attack in these difficult times, we have many occasions to stand up for the family by showing the beauty of marriage and children. We do not rely on the impression we make in our marriages and families, though such qualities stand out these days. We also share the Gospel, which is good and true news available for anyone who comes to Christ in faith. The choices people are making will not satisfy them. They are lonely, anxious, and confused. God the thoughtful Creator has not only given us the blessings of families, but has also provided forgiveness, guidance and love in the person of Jesus, the Son of God, the loving Redeemer, who welcomes us into the family of God.

A few years ago, a beautiful young woman named Yeonmi Park, escaped into China from North Korea, where people are arrested for religious crimes and face detention, forced labor, torture, sexual violence, and death. Eventually, she came to the United States, where she enrolled as a graduate student at Columbia University. Here are her thoughts about her graduate experience:
The things that I was learning at Columbia really shocked me because it was the exact same thing that my North Korean teachers were brainwashing me in the classroom. At Columbia University, they were literally saying that all the problems that we have is because of capitalism, because of white men, and the solution for all these problems is a communist revolution in the name of equity.[1]
She dubbed her alma mater a “pure indoctrination camp” and said that many of her classmates at New York City’s most elite school were “brainwashed like North Korean students are.”[2]
The story continues. Some students at Syracuse University objected to Yeonmi Park’s invitation to address a gathering hosted by the Syracuse College Republicans. They called Park a liar and tore up her promotional flyers.[3]
Similarly, during an April 12, 2023 meeting, the Associated Students of Whitworth University voted 9-4 against hosting Xi Van Fleet, a survivor of Maoist China, on campus, due to her anti-woke tweets.[4] Van Fleet, who immigrated from Maoist China to the U.S, draws parallels between the Chinese Cultural Revolution and what she calls the “Woke Revolution,” according to a description of her book Mao’s America: A Survivor’s Warning. The students objected to her tweets because they “were fearful of her bringing views to campus that would be hurtful or offensive.”[5]
Ironically Columbia University (see above) was home of the neo-Marxist “Frankfurt School” in the 1930s, whose mission was to end the influence of Christianity in the culture. The “long march through the institutions” includes the neo-Marxism of a modern radical Left that are transforming our universities into one-party indoctrination and recruitment centers for CRT and Wokism. Current success figures: 82% of university faculty members are leftists, 16% are moderates and only 1.4% are conservatives. “Republicans make up 4% of historians, 3% of sociologists, and a mere 2% of literature professors.”[6] It is little wonder that a majority of students dislike America and its free market system.
Have we come to the point at which American college students will not believe the impassioned warnings of those who have escaped from communism? Are our students so brainwashed that they deny history? Perhaps this is what Obama meant when he said: “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America” (October 30, 2008).[7]
This popularization of Marxism has been documented by three non-Christian academics: James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghosian, two of whom co-authored the popular philosophical book, Cynical Theories. They state:
Though we didn’t understand the (Marxist) Gramscian, Maoist, Marcusian strategy of the Long March through the Institutions or its mechanisms at the time, we certainly could see the fruits of it in operation in the corner of scholarship we targeted. In short, through the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, the halls of academe were increasingly filled with neo-Marxist and postmodern activists who reliably place their social and political prejudices ahead of any pursuit of truth, … Our universities have become increasingly insular seminaries for a neo-Gnostic cult religion that passes itself off as social science and theory. Entire institutions, including national governments, huge mega-corporations, global NGOs, the entire establishment media apparatus, and most terribly our universities and schools are wholly in thrall to the fraudulent ideology we exposed. In our time the worst of our kind dominate and control almost every lever of authority and power in our land.”[8]
These seemingly abstract ivory tower ideas have had real and nefarious effects in our culture on a practical level, particularly in what progressivism is doing to the family. The attack on the family is not simply an expression of godless secularism. Marx and Engels argued that the nuclear family performs ideological functions for Capitalism and teaches passive acceptance of hierarchy. The family is also the institution through which the wealthy pass private property to their children, thus reproducing class inequality. According to Engels, the monogamous nuclear family only emerged with Capitalism and so must be destroyed.[9]
The debate rages in many places. Take, for example, the Republican walkout in the Oregon Senate on May 3, 2023. Floor sessions were stalled over Republican resistance to far-left legislation that would allow minors to have abortions and access transgender drugs and procedures without parental consent. The conservative author of the article states: “the normative family, the mother and father sticking together for the sake of the children, is the only possible basis for a safe and successful society.” [10] A child changing his or her gender identity has major long-term medical and psychological ramifications. Parents should know, and have an opportunity to be involved in, such an important aspect of their child’s well-being.
The progressive extremists, on the other hand, believe that the nation’s children belong to the state. Parents should just “shut up,” as a Democrat New Hampshire state legislator put it. They want to take over the impressionable minds of the parents’ kids to indoctrinate them with gender identity and critical race theory dogma. These extremists’ aim is to destroy the nuclear family.
Richard Pipes, Emeritus Professor of History at Harvard University, posits that “the totalitarian state aims at obliterating all distinctions between itself and the citizenry (society) by penetrating and controlling every aspect of organized life.”[11]  Robert Knight Senior Fellow for the American Civil Rights Union and a columnist for the Washington Times would no doubt agree with Pipes, for on April 16, 2023, Knight said, “We are, indeed, in a titanic battle of worldviews. One of them will refloat America’s economy guided by the Constitution and America’s heritage, and the other will sink it like a rock.” We see the attempt at division and even indoctrination in our schools and communities. College professor and MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry says your children are not yours—they are owned by the community. “We have to break through our private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families,” she says from her position as professor of political science at Tulane University, where she is founding director of the Anna Julia Cooper Project on Gender, Race, and Politics in the South. Kids belong to whole communities, she insists, and once we realize this, we’ll make “better investments” in government indoctrination of children.[12] This same reasoning has been brewing in our culture for a long time, as we remember from Hillary Clinton’s It Takes a Village.
This goal is not that of secular humanism but of the specific ideology of Marxist theory. Marx and Engels were committed to the destruction of the Western family. Theologian Jerry Newcombe states that “America is a grand experiment, encapsulated by an idea which flies in the face of Marxism: self-rule under God. Remove either part, the ‘self-rule’ or the ‘under God’ (as our internal and external enemies would like to see happen) and we would no longer have America as founded…It would seem that we are faced with a choice of two options for our national future: revival or ruin.”[13]
The Media Research Center, a conservative watchdog group, obtained documents showing that a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) program, previously meant to fight terrorism, is now funding a group whose work has explicitly targeted Christian, conservative, and Republican organizations using federal taxpayer dollars. In his presentation, one of the leaders of this program, Dr. Michael Loadenthal, professor at Loyola University, Maryland, boasted openly that “a lot of things we’re doing are illegal” and “a lot of it involves breaking the law.”[14] Invoking Marxist and Postmodern theory, he justifies the wrong doing as necessary because “hate speech is more than speech. It’s materiality. It’s organizing. It’s mobilization. It’s not an exchange of ideas in the marketplace and the best one wins. It’s something else. It’s the strategic deployment of organizational energy and power.”[15]
With this methodology, employed in government organizations, anything, including the Marxist destruction of the family, can be justified. This is what is understood by equity.
Our children are certainly under attack from the LGBTQ ideology. Popular stores like Target and Walmart are marketing “gay clothes” to children. The “drag queen story hour” is proposed to children in many public libraries. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, friend of Jeffrey Epstein and visitor to his island, has invested tens of millions of dollars into a radical nongovernmental organization called the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF). It is endorsed by the WHO that is pushing for young children to be considered “sexual beings.” “Sexual activity may be part of different types of relationships, including dating, marriage, or commercial sex work, among others,” IPPF said, concerning what children under 10 should be taught. They should also be told: “As you grow up, you might start to be interested in people with diverse gender identities.”[16] Our children are under fire from Queer theorists, who are not silent about it.
The San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus sings:
“We’re coming for your children…We’ll convert your childrenHappens bit by bit. Quietly and subtlyAnd you will barely notice it…”
As an example of how they “come,” organizers of a “Youth Carnival” sponsored by two Indiana LGBTQ+ associations and the Indianapolis Airport Authority will not allow parents to attend with their children. According to an Instagram post by Indiana Youth Group, it is collaborating with Indy Pride to hold the carnival for “youth” ages 12 to 20.[17] The role of parents is totally undermined.
Respected journalist Daniel Greenfield shows how the US State Department of Education conducts civil rights investigations that accuse school districts of creating “a hostile environment for students, based on sex.” How are these schools doing this? By removing books containing “graphic details of sexual acts” from school libraries. Removal, that is, not the reading of these books (like the one mentioned below) is harmful for society. This would include “All Boys Aren’t Blue.” I hesitate to type the words from this book, for I would never utter them! However, as Christians, we must realize the horrors that are foisted on our children. In the afore-mentioned book there are sections describing two young boys engaging is mutual sexual discovery, with phrases such as, “he reached his hand down and pulled out my d____. He quickly went to giving me h___” and “for the first few minutes, we dry humped and grinded.”[18] This is meant to foster homosexual desire in young boys. About the controversy over the book, our first lady (a mother herself), Jill Biden, publicly declared: “All books should be in the library. All books. This is America. We don’t ban books.”[19]Except, maybe one day, the Bible.
The goal of my text, in denouncing these policies and political tendencies, is not for the creation of a theocracy, for a Christian nation or for a rightwing political ideology. As Al Mohler says, theocracies apply the first table of the Law, which requires love for and worship of God by God’s chosen people. This cannot be a Christian goal for believers to impose on unbelievers. Christians can, however, propose legislation that upholds the second table of the law, namely inter-personal morality which applies to everyone, especially our children, living in a God-created universe, for their own good and prosperity as created beings. This certainly applies to the family, which is so deconstructed that young people either reject marriage or, if married, refuse to have children. Even the Supreme Court is involved in undermining the family, declaring same-sex marriage in 2015 to be a legal marital structure, but thereby destroying the family as God intended it at the beginning.[20] When God says “It is not good for man to be alone” that could well be understood to say, “It is not good that there be men alone,” which is clearly true of marriage, which the Supreme Court failed to maintain. The civilization and the family declared by the Creator, required women, who would be mothers. Two married men, claiming to be fathers, do not make a family or a civilization, as God intended.
See how the Creator and marriage are joined in Scripture: “For your Maker is your husband, the LORD of hosts is his name; and the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer, the God of the whole earth he is called” (Isa 54:5). This text presupposes a wife, namely Israel.
Though the family is under attack in these difficult times, we have many occasions to stand up for the family by showing the beauty of marriage and children. We do not rely on the impression we make in our marriages and families, though such qualities stand out these days. We also share the Gospel, which is good and true news available for anyone who comes to Christ in faith. The choices people are making will not satisfy them. They are lonely, anxious, and confused. God the thoughtful Creator has not only given us the blessings of families, but has also provided forgiveness, guidance and love in the person of Jesus, the Son of God, the loving Redeemer, who welcomes us into the family of God.
Dr. Peter Jones is scholar in residence at Westminster Seminary California and associate pastor at New Life Presbyterian Church in Escondido, Calif. He is director of truthXchange, a communications center aimed at equipping the Christian community to recognize and effectively respond to the rise of paganism. This article is used with permission.

[1] https://legalinsurrection.com/2023/02/north-korea-defector-compares-woke-education-in-america-to-regime-she-escaped/
[2] Ibid.
[3] Syracuse U. Students Object to Talk by North Korea Defector Yeonmi Park, Calling Her a Liar, Legal Insurrection, 04/27/2023, Mike LaChance.
[4] What are they afraid of?, Student govt. rejects hosting anti-woke survivor of Maoist China, Campus Reform, 21 Apr 2023, Thomas Stevenson
[5] Graham J Noble Liberty Nation, May 13, 2023
[6] https://www.frontpagemag.com/americas-crisis-is-the-universities/
[7] https://www.timesrepublican.com/opinion/columnists/2022/06/biden-continues-obamas-fundamental-transformation/
[8] Woke Identity Marxism Video: The Reformers: A New Film About the Grievance Studies Affair:
James Lindsay, Corruption, Evil, Hatred of God, Ideology, Marxism, Other Writers, New Discourses, May 7, 2023.
[9] https://revisesociology.com/2014/02/10/marxist-perspective-family/#:~:text=Marxists%20argue%20that%20the%20nuclear,children%2C%20thus%20reproducing%20class%20inequality.
[10] Katherine Hamilton, Oregon GOP Continues Walkout as Democrats Push Anti-Parent Abortion, Trans Bills, ChicagoConservative27, 05/26/2023
[11] Richard Pipes, Communism: A History (Random House), 105.
[12] Kurt Nimmo, MSNBC Host Harris Perry: Your Kids Belong to the Collective; Infowars.com, April 6, 2013. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrxTeM9r9ak.
[13] https://new.americanprophet.org/is-america-still-worth-fighting-for/
[14] https://researchdirectory.uc.edu/p/loadenml
[15] Luis Cornelio and Tim Kilcullen, “How Biden’s DHS Is Weaponizing an Anti-Terror Program Against Christians, Conservatives & the GOP,” (May 25th, 2023), MRC NEWSBUSTERS.
[16] Frank Bergman Bill Gates Plows Millions into Group Claiming Kids Are “Sexual Beings,” SLAY News, April 17, 2023.
[17] https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/05/24/indiana-pride-group-hosts-carnival-banning-parents/?fbclid=IwAR2m_C2cirDotaI83H6BknCSrRI-ICdoSP72OVGasCgXEgTYsJsvQMYzCxs
[18] https://www.frontpagemag.com/department-of-education-investigates-schools-for-not-sexualizing-kids/
[19] https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/09/13/jill-biden-dismisses-parental-control-of-books-in-school-libraries-this-is-america-we-dont-ban-books/
[20] The Respect for Marriage Act. 2022, repeals the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). DOMA barred the federal government from respecting the marriages of same-sex couples who were married under state law, which excluded them from federal recognition, such as with Social Security benefits, tax benefits, and more. The Respect for Marriage Act extends the act of the Supreme Court and received bipartisan support in Congress and signals how far public support is now given to same sex marriage.
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“I don’t understand at all why pro-life Americans say they won’t vote for Donald Trump,” said the Hungarian pro-life activist sitting across from me. Well, let me explain—and say why European pro-life voices, however few, are urgently needed to steady the political thinking of their American counterparts.
Pro-life American Christians have been in crisis during this election season as Trump has steadily abandoned pro-life policies, and attempted to establish his pro-choice bona fides. The loudest cry of alarm went up when Trump last week said he would vote for a Florida ballot initiative that would effectively restore the permissive Roe v. Wade standard in state law. Trump’s campaign walked that back, which temporarily doused the fire, but make no mistake: pro-life conservatives are running scared.
They—we, because I am one of them—should be. It was always a fiction that Trump was pro-life. Only the truest of the MAGA faithful believed it. Nevertheless, Trump provided the Supreme Court justices who finally achieved the great goal of the pro-life movement for nearly fifty years: slaying the Roe dragon.
European readers should be aware that the effect of this was not to ban abortion, but simply to declare that there is no constitutional right to the procedure, thus, in the American system, leaving the decision to state legislatures. The Dobbs decision of 2022, which overturned 1973’s Roe ruling, returned the abortion issue to democratic political deliberation.
So far, Dobbs has been a Pyrrhic victory for the pro-life side, which has lost all seven of the state referenda on abortion since Dobbs—even in red states. Trump has been backpedaling on abortion because polls show that the pro-choice line is popular with American voters. Many pro-lifers, for decades the most reliable GOP voters, are shell-shocked by the Trumpified party’s swift collapse on abortion.
They shouldn’t be. America is a pro-choice country. According to a Gallup poll, only 12% believe abortion should be illegal in all circumstances. Almost three times as many—35%—believe it should be legal in any circumstance. Fifty percent say abortion should be legal under some circumstances (3% had no opinion). So: 85% believe in some form of legalized abortion.
Plus, 60% polled say that overturning Roe was a bad thing. That figure is not new. As Gallup says that number has been stable for the more than three decades that it has been polling on the question. It was easy for Americans who don’t feel strongly about abortion rights to downplay the issue in their voting when Roe was the law of the land. Now that abortion has been put back into political play, being pro-life has become an election liability.
What’s more, when it comes to in vitro fertilization (IVF), Americans overwhelmingly endorse it. An overwhelming 82% endorse the practice, while only 10% oppose it. IVF involves the lab creation of surplus embryos, which are usually frozen and stored. If one believes that life begins at conception, there’s no way around it: these embryonic human lives will one day die when they are thawed. There is no way to be consistently pro-life and pro-IVF—but a lot of American pro-lifers are. In fact, if the argument for or against abortion rights stands or falls on the moral status of the embryo at conception, you could argue that the only consistent thinkers about abortion are idealists at both extremes.
The messy truth is that most Americans are squeamish about abortion, but most see it as a socially necessary evil. In a democracy, you should not be surprised when politicians shift their positions to go where the votes are.
In Trump’s case, there is a major difference between his moderate pro-choice position and Kamala Harris’s view. Trump wants to leave it to the states to decide. Conservative states can tailor their laws to the views of the majority there, and liberal states can do likewise. Harris, though, believes in imposing unrestricted abortion on every state, through federal law.
And this is what my Hungarian pro-life activist friend was getting at. She was visibly shocked that this is even an issue for American abortion opponents. Why would you see no meaningful distinction between someone who won’t give you everything you want on the life issue, versus someone who would take away everything you have, and shove her pro-abortion beliefs down your throat?
Besides, said the Hungarian, the Democratic Party is so opposed to what conservative Christians believe on other key issues—LGBT rights, religious liberty, and others—that the idea of U.S. Christians abandoning Trump to punish him is simply bizarre.
I told my companion that I agreed with her, and that her view is the result of living as a pro-life Christian in a culture and on a continent that has been de-Christianizing for several generations. America is not yet in that post-Christian spiritual desert, but its people are moving there quickly. I suspect that pro-lifers, most of whom are Christians, have been shocked by Trump’s walking away from pro-life orthodoxy because they haven’t confronted how post-Christian America has become in our lifetimes.
Put another way, they are shaken up by this because they—because we—are part of what it likely to be The Final Christian Generation.
This is a reference to The Final Pagan Generation, a 2015 book by historian Edward J. Watts. The title refers to Roman pagan elites born at the beginning of the fourth century, when the Empire changed gradually from pagan to Christian.
What made them the “final” generation is not that pagans ceased to exist in Roman society after they died out. Rather, as Watts tells it, they were the last generation in Rome’s history to have lived in a time when paganism was the default religious mode of their civilization.
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