To be near unto God - pagina 401

Here on earth sin characterizes all of life. It does this by no means merely in the sense, that sin is continuously committed night and day, and that sin occasions ruin, but rather in this sense that sin breaks human life, constantly removes its supports and makes them change, and makes the way of life not straight, but restlessly to go up and down; now through deep places, again across heights, now through light, then through darkness; now marked by laughter, then by the weeping of those who mourn. That there is pleasure and pain; joy and sorrow; that there is strength and health and again weakness and sickness; that there is birth and death; a carrying to baptism and a carrying out to the grave that there is total exhaustion and revival of strength; that there is corruption of soul and conversion; that there is temptation and allurement after Christ; in brief, that all of life reaches upwards and breaks into endless antitheses, springs from the one all;

dominant

When

fact of sin. once fixed in the

it is

mind

that without

sin there would be no misery, no sickness and no death in the earth, that it is sin which imprints its stamp of rupture and of healing upon our entire earthly life, it is exceedingly interesting for once to picture human existence from the viewpoint of this rupture. Without sin there would

be no judges to pass sentence, no physicians to heal the sick, no clergy to preach God's Word, no works of mercy, no church of God in the earth. It must not be inferred from this, of course, that this broken life which has burst into all sorts of differences and antitheses, is the real life. Life in holy harmony and unbroken unity stands infinitely 397

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