Sin and the Savile Scandal

On tonight’s Moral Maze on BBC Radio 4, Michael Buerk is to discuss whether, in the light of this week’s revelations about Jimmy Savile and Lance Armstrong, people’s good works are inevitably tainted by their evil deeds. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01nbq68 

 

No doubt it will be an interesting debate. The programme will also examine to what extent the sinner can be separated from the sin, and whether works of art are contaminated by the private lives of their creaters. The Bible, however,  gives an unequivocal and unpalatable answer:

‘All of us have become like one unclean,
and all of our righteous acts are as filthy rags.
We all shrivel up like a leaf,
and like the wind our sins sweep us away.      
                                                                                 (Isaiah 64:6)

Even the best things we do are so contaminated by sin that we are ‘swept away’ by the wrath of God. From the cradle our natures are so corrupted that what was designed to generate holiness, goodness and to glorify God produces, at best, something so contaminated as to be of no worth before God.

 

True in cases like Savile and Armstrong, perhaps, but true of us? Take the greatest acts that you have done and analyse your motives honestly. Who of us can claim to have acted completely disinterestedly, without a  thought to our own interests or the desire to stand a little higher in the estimation of others, God or even just ourselves?  The more I have come to know myself and to see myself reflected in the mirror of Scripture, the more I see that my best deeds are indeed as filthy rags – or as other translations put it, a ‘polluted garment’ with which I once tried to make myself presentable before God.

My only hope is in the grace of God, whereby God offers us Christ’s glorious righteousness like a pure white garment to cover over all our foulness. All he asks of me is to admit the utter inadequacy of my former attire and that I appeal to him for grace.

‘Jesus, thy blood and righteousness

My beauty are, my glorious dress.
Midst flaming worlds in these arrayed
With joy shall I lift up my head.’                               
                                                                 (Nikolaus von Zinzendorf)