Have you ever wondered what makes sin and evil so repulsive? We know something is wrong just on the sheer basis that God says so. And, ideally, that should always be sufficient reason to avoid it. But I find added incentive in reminding myself of how utterly repulsive it is.
Consider this. Nothing but the face of Jesus himself is so beautiful as a simple act of self-forgetful help. That is to say, when someone does something helpful for someone else that is so spontaneous and natural as to be devoid of all self-regard — why, that is the very definition of beauty.
Conversely, ugly would then be defined as an act laced with calculated self-regard. That is to say, doing something for someone with little else in mind but what’s in it for me. Doesn’t that sound repulsive to you? Yet sadly, this is the sickening knowledge of good and evil we now have to put up with. And self-absorption is in the DNA of all temptation. Every temptation is a fresh appeal to just think of you, only you, make life all about you.
Little wonder, then, that Adam and Eve wanted to hide from the Lord after they disobeyed him. I’m inclined to think that their attempts to cover their physical nakedness had more to do with the shame they felt at knowing they were now infected with it’s-all-about-me ugliness. Imagine: coming to visit them in the garden was the One whose very nature was so spontaneously self-giving and self-disregarding that they could not bear the thought of him seeing in them their self-serving ugliness. So God’s questions, “who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?” were as if asking, “where did your innocence go? who got you thinking of yourself?”
And therein lies untold tragedy. God is love — spontaneous, self-disregarding helpfulness — truly unspeakable beauty — and here we are, calculating and self-absord, indeed so repulsively ugly that the more aware of ourselves we are, the more we hurry to get as far away from his presence as possible. Little wonder then that Jesus said that to enter God’s presence, “you must be born again.” We could not otherwise bear the shame. We would prefer hell as at least a refuge from that.
