It is when evil is consented that it does spiritual damage.
If evil entities torment people without their consent, the person may be spiritually enhanced by the experience. This is why wars may (like WWII in the UK) apparently lead to a Christian revival - as people fight evil.
But evil consented-to is evil internalised - like with the sexual revolution.
The magnitude of an evil is, in the end, less important than whether it is resisted or embraced.
An embraced trivial sin is generally far more harmful to the soul than a major sin repented. Even a trivial sin unrecognised as such, leads inexorably to more and worse sin; but a major sin repented is not harmful to the soul, and may be beneficial (St Paul, for example).
Sex is probably the second-most-powerful motivation in 'natural' men - religion being the first. Now moderns have dispensed-with (real) religion; for modern Men, sex reigns supreme as human motivator.
Most of the sexual sins are relatively trivial, in the great scheme of things. Therefore, modern people say: why not? Unasked, since they deny God in their hearts, is the proper question of whether some-sexual-thing is what God could plausibly want from them?
The danger is that with the sexual revolution what starts as why-not-it's-trivial? remains unrepented; then becomes no sin at all; then - since there are only two sides in the spiritual war - then becomes a virtue (to be defended, celebrated, funded, enforced...).
In such a situation, even a trivial sin rapidly becomes spiritually lethal; as we see all around us.
The Big Problem with the sexual revolution is, therefore, the combination of relatively-trivial sins combined with powerful motivation to embrace one or more such sins.
Obsessive desire synergizes with a perfect excuse to yield pride-full self-damnation and public advocacy of the same for other - which is an extremely evil result.
I like that you said "It is when evil is consented that it does spiritual damage." Things have to be considered with the time dimension when it comes to evil. For example, Adam and Eve partook of the fruit, but God prepared a way for them and their posterity to be saved, so the end result through time was better than the original status quo in the Garden of Eden.
ReplyDeleteIt makes sense that worse sins being repented of are not as bad as lesser sins that we don't ever want to repent of. Our connection with the Holy Ghost and testimony is our most precious possession. And it needs to be attended to properly.
There is a puzzle parking game called rush hour where you have to extricate different size cars from the parking grid by moving one and then the other. It becomes a difficult puzzle. I am convinced our souls are like that and when we turn ourselves over to God it may not be all smooth sailing after that because we are not perfect and we need to learn and sort out our priorities that have built up over a lifetime of experience. When God indicates to our hearts that something is important, we may respond by moving the wrong car and causing a parking crash. But, like Adam and Eve that partook of the fruit, God has a way to use that bad move by us to accomplish something good.
@Jared. Also, different people require different experience in order to learn. Sometimes we need to learn the hard way, in order to learn at all.
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