Bringing disaster upon yourself

“The look on their faces testifies against them; they parade their sin like Sodom; they do not hide it. Woe to them! They have brought disaster upon themselves.” Isaiah 3:9
The Bible tells us, very clearly, over and over again, that disasters await those who parade their sin. As humans we can have different attitudes towards sin, and different ways that it can happen. The Bible tells us that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23), and the wages of sin is death (Rom. 6:23). We all have a sin nature, inherited from Adam. This sin nature separates us from God, and is our greatest weakness. The tendency of this sin nature, if we are faced with a choice to sin or not, is to sin. Then there are the specific sinful acts which result from us giving in to this sin nature. These may be accidental – we may not realise that we are sinning by doing something, but it only becomes apparent later. In the Old Testament these kinds of sins had provision for atonement through the guilt offering and the sin offering. These may be sins of commission or sins of omission – failing to do what is right. Then there is another type of sin: the sin that is deliberate. We know something is wrong, and yet we do it anyway. There was no provision in the Old Testament for forgiveness of these kinds of sins.
Isaiah speaks of people who go one step further than this: engaging in deliberate sin, not just to bring pleasure to themselves, but to parade it in front of others. I am noticing this more and more in today’s society. Things which wouldn’t have been mentioned a few decades ago, now feature on prime time TV. They are spoken of as ‘alternative lifestyles’ and protected by ‘freedom of speech’. A year or so ago someone I knew was telling a group of us how her 14-year-old daughter had lost her virginity only a couple of months before and was now regularly sleeping around with boys. She was laughing and had absolutely no shame in telling us this – nor did it seem she was planning on doing anything about it. It shocked me deeply at the time, and now reading this verse I can only think how these sorts of actions will only result in that girl – and mother – bringing disaster upon themselves. We all need to examine ourselves and see if there is any sin that we are holding onto and parading around, and deal with it.