Page 53 - The Divine Unfolding of God's Plan of Redemption

relax in any way on the conviction that “all that is in the world…is not of the Father,”
and he is more than likely to reap the whirlwind with his children. Young folk have a
very keen sense of consistency, and they readily detect a lack of it in their parents. For

their parents to profess one set of things to be important and then for the children to be
placed where exactly the opposite things are emphasized, puts their parents in the light
of being either ignorant or insincere. “They have taught us to think and do certain
things, and now they put us in this place where nobody thinks or does that way. Either

they don‟t know this point of view and method or they don‟t believe what they claim
to believe after all!” So runs the logic of youth, and it is likely to be the springboard
from which they dive off into the roaring current of worldliness.

Spiritual sins are those lapses of faith and obedience that directly concern man‟s
relation with God. We have been pointing out the disasters occasioned by them. Moral
sins are those breaches of faith and conduct of which man is guilty in his relationship
toward his fellow-man. These moral irregularities, though not so far-reaching or

irremediable, are nevertheless sure to be re-echoed in posterity and inevitably bring
their recompense. The deceitfulness and selfishness that characterized Jacob‟s early
life were brought sharply to his mind in connection with the actions of Simeon and
Levi toward Hamor and Shechem and the people of their city, as recorded in Genesis

34, even as Isaac‟s untruthfulness at Gerar (Gen. 26) duplicated that of his father in
the same place (Gen. 20:2) and also in Egypt (Gen. 12). Another familiar illustration
of this principle is found in a much later day in the case of David, whose great sin (II
Sam. 11) was reverberated in the wicked performances of Absalom and Amnon.

Jacob‟s deception of his father with regard to the blessing which should normally
have come to Esau was repeated in the cheat practiced upon him by his sons in the
sale of Joseph, his favorite, into Egypt and the dipping of the coat of many colors in

the blood of a kid.

Spiritual laws and moral laws are distinct from one another and yet they interact
upon one another. It is therefore difficult and sometimes impossible with our finite

understandings to define the limits of these two laws.

The directive will and the permissive will of God are two other elements that we

shall never perfectly understand as long as we are in this condition of seeing “through
a glass darkly.” God‟s directive will is His primary will and purpose for His creatures.
His permissive will is what he permits to happen to them or even allows them to do
which yet is a departure from His primary desires for them. Yet He mysteriously
brings it about that these very divergences from His “good and acceptable and perfect

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