Love Revealed (Rewritten)

Love is a mystery. We can’t pin it down with a neat definition. The best we can do is describe the moments when it awakens in the soul. If human love already stretches beyond explanation, divine love goes infinitely further. It is an ocean so deep that neither human reason nor even angelic intellect can sound its depths. Anyone who has never personally known the love of God will find this subject closed to them intellectually. It opens only with the key of experience.

Love is not something the mind manufactures. It does not come from logic or analysis. It arises freely from the soul when it encounters what it loves. God is not merely loving — God is love made visible. And God’s perfect love toward humanity is meant to awaken a corresponding love for God in the human heart. The mirror that reflects this love may be cracked and uneven. Human souls, even at their best on earth and even under grace, are fractured by weakness and enduring flaws. Still, a person’s love for God can surge forward with the full strength of their being.

"Sins" and "Sin" — Singular and Plural

QUESTION: Is  it not a fact that all Scriptural texts speaking of sin in the singular number have reference to inbred sin and never refer to actual sins (plural)? Is not this true?

ANSWER: It is not true. In the singular "sin" is found in the Synoptic Gospels (Matt., Mark and Luke) but once, "Every sin and blasphemy," etc. (Matt. 12:81). Stephen prayed, "Lord lay not this sin to their charge" (Acts 7:60), "If any man see his brother sinning a sin not unto death," etc. "There is a sin unto death" (I John 5:16), and "If we say we have no sin" (1:8), in all these texts some act of sin is meant. The phrase "to have sin" is found elsewhere only in John 9:41, "If ye were blind, ye would have no sin;" 15:22, 24, "If I had not * * *  spoken * * * they had not sin." Also, "He that delivered me unto thee hath the greater sin" (19:11). This phrase "to have sin" the experts say is the strongest possible expression for an act entailing guilt. The poet Euripides uses it of one who has committed murder. John uses the term "sin" in only one signification, "the transgression of the law." Paul rhetorically personifies sin, i.e., sinning, as an imperial personage ruling sinners who become his slaves, and John personifies sin as a slave holder (8:34). "The slave of sin is bondage to sinning." Sow a thought, and you reap an act, sow an act, and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character and you reap a destiny. The consequences of Adam's transgression have damaged me, but the guilt he did not bequeath to me, because it is non-transferable. Yet Wesley in the second of the Articles of Religion speaks of Christ as "a sacrifice not only for original guilt, but also for the actual sins of man." Substitute Adam's for "original," and I will accept it.

— Steele's Answers pp. 117, 116.

Christians Have One Nature, Not Two

QUESTION: How would you answer the assertion that every Christian has two natures, that of the old Adam, which until physical death lives and sins day by day without ceasing, and that of the second Adam, the Lord Jesus, which nature cannot sin?

ANSWER: The Christian has only one nature called human. This nature is a fallen nature redeemed and reconstructed more or less perfectly, according to one's faith. But it has from the moment of the new birth the gracious ability to be victorious over every temptation and to verify John's description, "Whosoever has been born of God (perfect tense implying the continued similarity to God) is not sinning, because his seed (love divine) continues in him and he cannot be sinning because he has been begotten of God" (perfect tense including the present). That our annotated American version gives the exact meaning of the original is confirmed by the Twentieth Century Version, "No one who has derived his life from God acts sinfully, because God's very nature is always within him and he cannot live in sin, because he has derived his life from God." This precludes a career of sinning by a child of God, but it does not preclude the possibility of a single wrong act under the stress of sudden temptation, as in I John 2:1, "If any man sin (the tense denoting a single act) we have an Advocate," etc.

— Steele's Answers pp. 99, 100.

The Fall and Death

QUESTION: Did the fall of man destroy the immortality of the soul?

ANSWER: Adam and Eve were forbidden to eat of a certain tree, lest they die. The death here threatened was not extinction of being or annihilation — a term not used in the Bible — but natural death, the separation of the spirit from the body, and spiritual death, the separation of the soul from God, the source of its well-being.

— Steele's Answers pp. 84, 85.