Sin and Death

“Do you see this shepherd?” “I see him, Lord.” “This,” he said, “is the angel of luxury and deceit. He wears down the souls of God’s servants and turns them from the truth, deceiving them with the wicked desires in which they perish.

They forget the commandments of the living God and walk in deceits and empty luxuries, and they are ruined by this angel — some unto death, some unto corruption.”

How then am I to accept a birth under fate, when I see such “managers” of it? I do not want to be king. I do not want to be rich. I have refused generalship. I have hated fornication. I do not sail for greed. I do not compete for crowns. I am free of glory-madness. I despise death. I rise above every kind of sickness. Grief does not consume my soul.

If I am a slave, I endure slavery; if I am free, I do not boast of noble birth. I see one sun for all, and one death for all through pleasure and lack. We were not made in order to die — we die through ourselves. Self-determining power (τὸ αὐτεξούσιον) ruined us; we who were free became slaves; we were sold through sin. God made nothing base; we displayed the wickedness — and those who displayed it are also able to refuse it again.

The tree of knowledge was not evil as a tree; disobedience was evil. Knowledge itself is good when used rightly. Adam was still a child; he could not yet receive knowledge as he should.

That is why God forbade him to take from the tree for a time — not from jealousy, but so that he might grow first. Disobedience finally brought death.

If people shared in God — and so also in reason — they would first weigh what repentance is worth, and would never use it to enlarge a crooked “improvement.” They would temper the measure of repenting because they would also hold the measure of sinning — fearing the Lord.

But where there is no fear, there is likewise no amendment; where there is no amendment, repentance is necessarily empty, because it lacks its fruit — the fruit for which God sowed it, that is, human salvation.

After so many and such great sins of human rashness, beginning from Adam the head of the race — after man was condemned with the world’s dowry, cast out of paradise and subjected to death — when God again ripened toward his mercy, he dedicated repentance in himself first: he revoked the sentence of earlier wrath and covenanted to forgive his own work and image.