I am just now getting over a bad bout with the flu. I said more than once in the course of it that I would have to get much better to die. Just kidding, of course, but it does give some sense of how miserable it can be.

Every year I take the flu shot and it usually helps me out and I avoid the influenza virus. But not this particular flu cycle. They are saying that the shot prepared for us this year will not help much with the really bad strain that is going around because government researchers missed it with their calculations and estimates this time. They guessed wrong. And I, like many other unfortunate folks, ended up with the virus. And it was really a terrible one this time. Body aches and pains. High fever. Coughing and wheezing. Weakness and listlessness. Simply awful! No way to spend the holidays!

Contagions like the flu remind us of what sin is like. Neither one is to be toyed with. They can make you very sick and can even kill you. God warned the original couple in the garden not to play with the fire of sin because “Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die” (Gen. 3:3). Death will attend it! Satan lied to Mother Eve and fooled her into thinking that God was attempting to keep from her some good and pleasurable thing, and the result has cursed our race with disease and death ever since their original transgression (Gen. 3:4ff.).

The contagion of sin is different than an ordinary disease or influenza virus, though, because most often we get ourselves into sin by poor choices. It is not just that we forget to wash our hands or mistakenly touch a surface and then scratch our nose or eye, or walk where someone else has sneezed, or something sinister like that. We choose the wrong kinds of friends and then spend way too much time with them when we know they are not a good influence on us. We go to the wrong kinds of places and frequent them often when we are well aware that those places will destroy what good there is left in us. We take up nasty, destructive habits like drinking alcohol and taking narcotics, and then persist with them as if we are somehow stronger than those others we have known who have fallen on account of these addictions. Who are we fooling? Only ourselves.

So, when it comes to sin we have no one to blame but ourselves. We get ourselves into it, and we can get ourselves out of it whenever we feel motivated to drag ourselves out of it. But don’t let anybody fool you into thinking that the end of it is not death. Death is where it is heading, fast or slow, that is its destination. “Sin when it is full-grown brings forth death” (James 1:15). Because the human mind is so easily swayed to believe that there must be some other potential destination, and that death is not where we are headed once we head down this turnpike, James went on to say in the next verse: “Be not deceived, my beloved brethren” (James 1:16).