Sinful Occasions (Revised)

Last week (Sept. 6/07) I wrote about the latest (and what I consider perhaps the greatest) act of perversion and rebellion of our generation: the (potential) creation of hybrid embryos from human beings and animals for the purpose of medical research.

In this post, I will focus on two aspects I think are central to this issue and consider the inevitable out flowing of consequences engendered by this new and disturbing situation.

An affront to God
First, what the scientists are proposing is an affront to God, perhaps, as I mentioned in my previous post, the greatest affront to God. Of course these scientists are secular humanists and (I’m guessing) atheists. But how could it be otherwise? So for them there is no dilemma. They are not breaking God’s moral law because (so they believe in their foolish hearts) there is no God and therefore no divine moral law to be broken or obeyed.

Of course in their foolish pride, they have not been able to understand the ultimate and final outcome of such a world-view. God, in the inscrutableness of His sovereign will, has hidden it from their eyes. The true significance of the atheistic, humanistic world-view—that anything is attainable and permissible if we only imagine it—is summed up well by Shakespeare in his play Macbeth. When Macbeth was confronted with the failure of his mad and greedy hope for greater power and prestige than what had been providentially given to him, the illusory aspect of his schemes, indeed his very world-view, came into sharp focus:

“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”

Macbeth V, v, 19

Is this not the echo of the same reality, the same conclusion reached by David the Psalmist: “Behold, thou hast made my days as an handbreadth; and mine age is as nothing before thee: verily every man at his best state is altogether vanity” (Ps 39:5) or of his son Solomon, the great King of Israel: “Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labour that I had laboured to do: and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun” (Ec 2:11).

This is indeed the end of all humanist endeavours, the reality of this tragically mistaken world-view: chaos and meaninglessness. Without limits set by an all-knowing, all-loving and all-powerful God, everything becomes relative and in that relativism, devoid of meaning and intrinsic value. When everything is the same, when one choice is as good as any other choice, when an animal and a man are inter-changeable, what is left but randomness, which is just another word for chaos?

But do we think it will stop with embryos alone? And what difference would that make if it did? The damage would already have been done. It will have been to deprive what was intended by God to be a creature after Himself from his rightful inheritance, his portion. God decided in eternity past to create those after His likeness, in His image. (Some may argue that for all we know each human embryo that will eventually be combined with an animal embryo is reprobate and therefore ordained for damnation anyway. But this is presumptuous. It is to attempt to see into the hidden, sovereign will of God, where even angels fear to tread!) The sovereign Creator was careful to separate the animals from man and made man to rule over them, as their master. Man was endowed with qualities shared by no other creatures. God was ever careful to determine the relationship that was to exist between animals and man. He placed a boundary beyond which He did not (and does not) want us to go (Gen 1:20-24; 2:18-20; 9:2; Ex 22:19). But we as a people in our arrogance and self-centered rebellion have flung this restriction in His face even as Satan did in Milton’s classic, Paradise Lost:

“O thou that with surpassing Glory crownd,
Look'st from thy sole Dominion like the God
Of this new World; at whose sight all the Starrs
Hide thir diminisht heads; to thee I call,
But with no friendly voice, and add thy name
O Sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams
That bring to my remembrance from what state
I fell, how glorious once above thy Spheare;
Till Pride and worse Ambition threw me down
Warring in Heav'n against Heav'ns matchless King.”

Book Four, lines 32-41

But now the immortal soul given by God to man alone upon his birth, and which was to be, in the Sovereign intentions of God, the Imago Dei, is to be intermingled with animals. Oh how Satan must be relishing our disobedience to God and our willing obedience to him, which was the ultimate end of all his schemes after all:

“Though Heav'n be shut,
And Heav'ns high Arbitrator sit secure
In his own strength, this place may lye expos'd
The utmost border of his Kingdom, left
To their defence who hold it: here perhaps
Som advantagious act may be achiev'd
By sudden onset, either with Hell fire
To waste his whole Creation, or possess
All as our own, and drive as we were driven,
The punie habitants, or if not drive,
Seduce them to our Party, that thir God
May prove thir foe, and with repenting hand
Abolish his own works.”

Book 2, lines 358-370

The downward moral decay of human kind
The Paslamist described the unique place of man in God's great work of creation,

"What is man that You take thought of him,
And the son of man that You care for him?
Yet You have made him a little lower than God,
And You crown him with glory and majesty!
You make him to rule over the works of Your hands;
You have put all things under his feet,
All sheep and oxen,
And also the beasts of the field,
The birds of the heavens and the fish of the sea,
Whatever passes through the paths of the seas."

Psalm 8:5-8 (emphasis added)

Paul was blunt and to the point when he described, not only the actual condition of lost humanity, but also the increasingly degrading effects of self-chosen sin. He observes that pretended ignorance of God’s existence and His intentions cannot be used as an excuse for our condition (Rom 1:18-25).

In his four volume commentary on Romans, JM Boice describes man’s predicament this way: “Although man is a mediating being, created to be somewhere between the angels and the animals, in Psalm 8 he is nevertheless described as being somewhat lower than the angels rather than as being somewhat higher than the beasts, which means he is destined to look, not downward to the beasts, but upward, toward the angels and beyond them to God and so to become increasingly like him. But if we will not look up, if we reject God as secularism does, then we will inevitably look downward and so become increasingly like the lower creatures and behave like them. We will become beastlike, which is exactly what is happening in our society. People are acting like animals, and even worse.” I'm sure the horrrible irony of these words, written before his death, would have made Boice shake his head in tragic dismay.

Now this downward moral decay works in generations. This means that when Moses recorded that God looked down on the human race and saw the depravity and wickedness (Gen 6:5) it is the same today; it is the same depravity. The truth of Jeremiah’s statement that the heart is desperately wicked (Jer 17:9) is as true today as it was in his time, but not more true. The important point being that the human race is not more wicked now than it ever was. A dead person can not be deader. No, what has changed is not our capacity for sin; that has remained constant. However, what has changed is our opportunity to sin. Our opportunity to sin has increased by several orders of magnitude as a result of Science and Technology. These have combined to enable mankind to sin in ways that Paul could never have dreamed of in his wildest nightmares. It is still the same depraved heart, but now it has so much more opportunity! This is exactly the case with the creation of hybrid human embryos. It was never possible in the entire history of mankind to do such a thing; not because there was not sufficient wickedness to do it, but merely the lack of opportunity.

This train of thought leads me to reflect on the novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. It was the same evil pride and arrogance of Frankenstein to attempt to create animate life from lifeless corpses —given opportunity by science and technology—that even now drives these new Frankensteins on in their dark labours, “One secret which I alone possessed was the hope to which I had dedicated myself; and the moon gazed on my midnight labours, while, with unrelaxed and breathless eagerness, I pursued nature to her hiding-places. Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil, as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave, or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay? My limbs now tremble and my eyes swim with the remembrance; but then a resistless, and almost frantic, impulse urged me forward; I seemed to have lost all soul or sensation but for this one pursuit.”

But Doctor Frankenstein was brought to a sudden and unhappy repentance of what he had done. Too late, he realized the horrible error of his pride and arrogance, “The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature. I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room, and continued a long time traversing my bedchamber, unable to compose my mind to sleep.”

In the novel, Doctor Frankenstein is made to pay for all his self-centered, essentially humanistic pride. In his own personal loss he was brought to recognize the hand of an almighty and sovereign Will and Power that no one in our own day seems able (or should I say willing) to acknowledge. In the end the realization of his sinful folly come upon Frankenstein—who is less a fictional character than he is a type of humanity—with devastating force and permanence: “All my speculations and hopes are as nothing: and, like the archangel who aspired to omnipotence, I am chained in an eternal hell…. I trod heaven in my thoughts [Oh what foolish pride!] now exulting in my powers, now burning with the idea of their effects…. Despondency rarely visited my heart; a high destiny seemed to bear me on until I fell, never, never again to rise.”

Like Frankenstein, we will suffer, and do suffer, from our own creations. In our desperate rebellion against the limits of life imposed by God, we reap, and will continue to reap, a bumper crop of death. Unless we are able, because of the sovereign will of God, to come to realize the futility and vanity of all our own self-generated creations and refuse to accept the fact of a sovereign God who is all-loving and all-wise in His eternal and infinite Fatherhood, we will perish, never, never again to rise. God have mercy!

Soli Deo Gloria.