Man’s Significance – He Is A Sinner!

“And this is the very proof of Christianity’s being the highest religion, that none other has given such a profound and lofty expression of man’s significance – that he is a sinner. It is this consciousness that paganism lacks.” Kierkegaard.

Dignity is bestowed upon men and women when they are recognized as sinners outside of Jesus Christ. This is one of the great tragedies of our churches – in becoming places of entertainment, whose highest function is to make us feel good, they (certainly not all) have robbed us of our significance. For when we affirm that outside of Christ we are sinners, we also affirm that we are created in the image of God and that we are now alienated from the life of God (Ephesians 2:1 – 10; 4:17 – 24).

When we justify our sins, when we explain away the evil in the world which is in us, when we are such fools as to believe that we can educate evil away, or that money and food will eliminate evil (just look at how many of the rich and powerful and famous live and die and exploit humanity) – when we look at ourselves as products of time plus matter plus chance – when we do these things we strip away the image of God within us, we desecrate the Divine image, we enslave our fellow man making them less than they are – we snuff out any vestige of Divine Dignity that shows a glimmer of life, of light, of sympathy, of decency. We offer ourselves and our children on the altars of demons – yes, I wrote demons. For what other than the demonic can possibly account for the self-destruction we see around us?

As Pascal taught, only Christianity accounts for the fact that mankind can be angelic one moment and evil the next – this is not the way it was meant to be. We are broken, we are sinners, and only in Christ and by Christ can we experience and discover and begin to understand what it is to live in intimate relationship with God and with one another – only in Christ can the true measure and fulness of our significance be restored.