Comfort for Our 2020 World in the Darkness of Sin and Misery

If nothing else, the COVID-19 pandemic forces us to concede that misery exists in the world.  But most of the world has yet to discover the real source or the reason for this misery.

Where do we go to know about our sins and misery? We might be inclined to think that knowledge of our sin comes from our own conscience. After all, even as fallen men and women, we retain some notions about God, and about natural things, and about the difference between what is honorable and shameful.

Furthermore, there are many things in this world that should tell us about our misery. All the sickness and death in the world, all the violence and crimes, all the hatred and war, should make our misery evident to us. We would think that the news media along with the social media of Twitter and Facebook would be more than sufficient to make us know our misery.

However the Bible teaches us that the conscience of man is not enough to give him knowledge of his sins, neither is the experience of misery enough to give us knowledge of our misery. There are a number of reasons for this. In the first place, the word “know” means more than just know about sin. It carries with it the idea of acknowledging sin before God. This is something that the natural man refuses. Even though his conscience may accuse him of doing wrong, he suppresses this knowledge (cf. Romans 1:18). Though he may know about his sin, he refuses to acknowledge it in humble repentance before God.

In the second place, things such as sickness and death are sufficient to tell us that there is misery, but they cannot tell us why there is misery.  Although our sins and misery should be apparent to us from what we experience in daily life, our mind does not register the signals that come to us. That is because our mind has become impaired through sin.  Scripture says that the mind of fallen man has become darkened and senseless (cf. Romans 1:21). Because of this mental darkness, we do not come to know our sins by what we experience in life.