When a man’s folly brings his way to ruin, his heart rages against the Lord.
When we hit our rock bottom, we will do anything except admit that we’re to blame. This talent we inherited from Adam, and this talent we pass along to our children. Everybody can be to blame, except myself. Even if I am to blame, it must be nothing I could have helped- I was doomed by nature to failure, without an option for my will to take. Gravity, God, and the guy next door were to blame for me falling over, not my insistence on using roller skates to go down stairs.
The most benign example of this tendency can be seen in our reaction to stubbing our toes and other minor injuries. Very often, when we singe our fingers or smack our shins or meet any other of the many minor troubles which afflict mankind, we respond by glaring at the instrument by which we achieved that suffering: the stove, the table, the rock. Or at least I do; perhaps you have more dignity.
The human genius for shifting blame is remarkable. It lies at the bottom of the Scapegoat structure posited by Rene Girard; it forms the basis of many a religion and ideology. The woke religion, for instance, systematically shifts blame for evil onto a combination of ‘the ignorant ___ (demographic)’ and ‘structural’ deficiencies. If you are both woke and a member of the evil-causing identities, you can still shift blame either by participating in ‘oppressed’ (and therefore un-blameable) identities, becoming ‘woman’ or ‘queer’ rather than ‘white,’ or you can, by understanding the part of your demographic in being the root of all evil and by expiation rituals (protesting, etc) shift the blame onto those who have not prostrated themselves for their whiteness, Christianity, etc.
Getting rid of blame is one of the two human responses to sin, the two sinful responses to sin. As I discuss here, people instinctively know their own damnation. We know our damnation (Rom. 1:18-25), and we dislike it. We want to escape it. Apart from outright blasphemy and assertion of superiority to God, we can get rid of the sin problem in two ways: say that what we did wasn’t wrong or say that somebody else should be blamed for what we did wrong. Both involve shifting the blame, the guilt, the responsibility.
The sheer variety of devices for this bewilders the mind. The societal out-group, the social elite, the social underclass, my neighbor, my sibling, my spouse, anybody and anything can become an excuse. The end-goal, however, is always the same: I am no longer guilty, regardless of the truth.
All this, and you may remember the ‘scapegoat’ of Leviticus 16:10, how that is a figure of Christ (Is. 53:6). Does this not make Christ yet another method of avoiding the blame, the guilt, the responsibility? By no means.
The crucial point is that Christ does not take away the fact that the man sinned. In fact, an essential part of repentance is confessing responsibility. If I say, “I did not do this,” I cannot turn from it, having given myself nothing to turn from. If I say that I didn’t do it via subtleties, asserting that ‘I did it, but somebody or something else made the choice, and I didn’t have any ability to do otherwise,’ I still cannot repent. Christ does not allow us to blame our sin on others (other people’s sin, of course, we are free to assign to them, so long as we remember our own).
Christ takes not our sin’s fact; He takes instead its guilt, the judgement due to it. We sinned, and He bore that sin’s curse (Is. 53:12), its disunity from God and the resultant suffering. Hence Job’s certainty that his suffering does not rise from his sin (Job 3). He takes the guilt of our sin, and He gives us His righteousness. The sin’s historical fact remains ours; His righteousness’s historical fact remains His. It is the merit and the reward of each which is imputed, the credit of it in God’s eyes. This is the glory of the Cross, and the great distinction between the man whose “heart rebels against the Lord” when he falls and the man who, having fallen, can rely upon the Lord to hold him, lest his feet strike against a stone (Ps. 91:12).1
God bless.
1 – Who therefore has no need to put God to the test (Luk. 4:12).
Sanctuary Functional Medicine, under the direction of Dr Eric Potter, IFMCP MD, provides functional medicine services to Nashville, Middle Tennessee and beyond. We frequently treat patients from Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, and more... offering the hope of healthier more abundant lives to those with chronic illness.
Colson Potter writes copious fiction and nonfiction, including a weekly Proverbs post and his blog at Creational Story.
