A man of great wrath will pay the penalty, for if you deliver him, you will only have to do it again.
Some people just refuse to be helped. A man who has given himself over to his own passions, to anger or to another, can be pulled from one morass, but he will charge into the next with hardly a pause. Reformation which consists only of the cosmetic lasts about as long as literal cosmetics—a day, two, a week. When we make sin our self, we generally succeed; it’s only the grace of God which averts and cures this success.
Now, every man is a sinner, save Jesus Christ the Son of Man (Heb. 4:15). From the days of Genesis 6:5, all our thoughts have been only evil continually (8:21). Our actions and lives suit those thoughts. Man after Adam is pervasively corrupt; he is truly a ‘sinner.’ The Christian sins too (1 John 1:8-10). The difference is that he does not have sin as his root. Sin is in his periphery, slowly strangled (Rom. 8:13) and then completely removed in the second resurrection (Is. 61:10, 66:22-23). He sins, is in that sense a ‘sinner,’ but the word is little accurate of him. Sin is exterior to his definition, rather than integral to it, its guilt already born (Is. 53:10-12) and its fact on the way out.
Man without God, unlike the Christian, places sin in the center-point of his life. All his thoughts are in context of denying God (Gen. 6:5; Ps. 14:1). Very often, in this life, particular sins obsess him. He indulges in them, carving their channels into his soul and his flesh, forming his will to their shape. Lust becomes his guide; anger becomes his reasoning; greed becomes his foundation.
Whether he defines himself by his sin consciously (as with the man who identifies as homosexual) or unconsciously (most people), Godless man makes himself in the image of his pet sin. Being made in God’s image (Gen. 1:26), he desires to replace God’s image with his own, but he has no image which is not also God’s image, and so his attempt at self-definition can only become canted vandalism and self-destruction, carving away one part of God’s image and then another. The result is an image whose momentary individuality is pointless (nobody cares about what pattern of cuts is used to destroy the painting) and which degrades right quickly into the same dull, empty negation of His image all the dead in Hell exhibit.
So men shape themselves. We grasp on to anger. We form ourselves in anger’s image. We accept our selves, in the modern parlance, and recognize our anger. We lavish affection on it, as part of us, and the adoration carves new channels for its perversion in our lives. When we disapprove of it, we bat away ineffectually, restraining the anger and being proud of ourselves, worshipping ourselves for self-control, regarding it as a new form of autonomy. Then the anger we have carved into ourselves breaks forth, into a new channel, possibly even a new genre of vice….
The man formed in sin’s image will not let himself escape retribution. God’s justice comes in the end (Gen. 18:25), and the sinner, self-destroying and self-asserted, refuses any course except the rebellion which leads to final death. In the broadest sense, the sinner refuses Him and thus earns damnation. In narrower instances, the particular vices brings about their particular, circumstantial judgements on this earth.
The angry man gets in trouble with the law. His relationships strain and shatter. He hurts those he has affection for, his anger giving the lie to all professions of love (Rom. 13:9-10). A friend pulls him back in one place, mends a relationship in another, but the man who has made himself in the image of anger walks in anger once more, to his own suffering and destruction. This proverb warns us about standing in the path of that self-destruction: it only works for so long, and it will hurt us in the process.
The only way out, for the sinner, the man defined by his sin, is to utterly repudiate that sin. He will refuse this course, in his own desires. Only by the Spirit bringing a new will to him (John 3:1-15) will he heed the Lord’s call and repent, turning from his sin. This repentance, alongside the faith in God’s salvation which is its other part, is worked in us by God (Is. 26:12). It reflects and constitutes a change in the man. He ceases to be a sinner. He ceases to be a man of anger, a ‘homosexual,’ a liar, a thief. He does not lose all temptation to these things, on this earth, not in whole, though God may remove some particular temptation’s force. But he is free (Ja. 1:25), free within the law of God (Ps. 119:9), and at last he can know he will not bear the penalty: God has done that in his place.
God bless.
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.
