I’ve been reading the first chapter of Paul David Tripp’s book, Instruments in the Redeemer’s Hands and his intro caught me as quite biblically insightful.  It seems so basic, but the way Tripp portrays the effect of sin and what it causes us to become was, when it comes down to it, true.  Allow me to share a few of his insights from the first chapter (pages 12-16).

David wrote in Psalm 51:5, “Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me” so sin is a condition, the ultimate disease, that causes us to do wrong behavior.  Now, what this sin actually does to us is explained by Tripp in the triad: rebels, fools, and cripples (actually, Tripp uses ‘moral quadriplegics’ for cripples).

First off, Tripp writes that sin causes us to be rebels.  Tripp writes that rebellion is our tendency to say “I have the right to do what i want when I want to do it” (Autonomy), “I have everything I need in myself, so I don’t need to depend on or submit to anyone” (Self-sufficiency) or “I am the center of my world.  It is right to live for myself and to do only what brings me happiness” (Self-focus).  Essentially, this rebellion is a desire to be God and to rule our own lives without God in the picture.  It means refusing to submit to God’s authority and not living for God’s glory. 

As an aside, in the garden of Eden, when the serpent tempted Eve to eat the fruit that they would be “...like God knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:5), the word “know” means more than intellectual knowledge (as in I can understand/comprehend what is right and what is wrong).  That word “know” means “deciding for oneself” or “determining for oneself without reference to someone else” so that “knowing good and evil” means deciding in my own eyes what is good and what is evil without reference to God, that is, without considering His standards and His commands.  It’s something like me saying, “I have the right to choose what is good in my own eyes” - now this is the essence of trying to be likeGod - this is rebellion.  Perhaps I’ll explain this passage further in another article.

Anyhow, back to Tripp’s first chapter.  If the first effect of sin is that it causes us to be rebels, then the second effect is that sin causes us to be fools.  Once we become rebels against God, we begin to assume that our own perspective, our own values and our own wisdom is superior to God’s wisdom.  Sin causes us to think that our rebellious choices are the best ones, however, as Tripp writes, “We were never created to be our own source of wisdom.  We were designed to be revelation receivers, dependent on the truths God would teach us, and applying those truths to our lives.  We were created to base our interpretations, choices, and behavior on his wisdom.  Living outside of this will never work.” The commonly quoted Psalm 14:1 “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God’” identifies what it means to be a fool.  A fool is someone who rejects God and replaces God’s wisdom with one’s own wisdom and such is the second effect of sin on us. 

The third effect of sin that Tripp identifies is that sin makes us cripples in that we are unable to do what is good even when we have all the right intentions.  Romans 7:19, 21-23 says, “For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing… So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members.” Basically, Paul is saying that even when I try to do what God says is good, I just can’t do it and instead, I end up failing miserably by doing what is wrong.  This third effect of sin is that we become moral cripples - we just cannot do the good that God designed for us to do.

Friends, think through these three truths and surely you’ll see in your own life those occasions when you yourself were a rebel and a fool and a cripple (perhaps all at the same time!).  So, this ultimate disease of sin makes us rebels, fools, and cripples.  Now what?  Let these truths bring out the glory of God’s gospel; the glory of Christ as our Redeemer.  Our King, the Lord Jesus Christ, has come to heal us from this wretched mess.  Christ came to change our rebellious hearts to submit to God as we were created to.  Christ came to make us un-foolish by causing us to listen to God’s wisdom as we were created to do.  Christ came to enable our crippled selves to do the good that God designed for us to do.  We will never reach perfection on this side of eternity, but our only hope of undoing the effects of sin rests completely on Christ.