Captured: Sin

Captured: Sin 

“A spider’s life can’t help being something of a mess.”⁴ 

White describes Templeton’s debauched, ratty nature with thorough blackness: 5 

“The rat had no morals, no conscience, no scruples.” To persuade him, the sheep appeals to “his baser instincts, of which he has plenty.”⁶ And although White asserts his animals are amoral,⁷ Templeton exemplifies the sinner’s nature. 

Flannery O’Connor, stated that a “Christian novelist . . . sees [sin] not as sickness, an accident of environment, [or a ‘mistake’ as E. B. White’s father viewed sin,⁸] but as a responsible choice of offense against God which involves his eternal future.”⁹ Augustine defined sin as the state of being “caved in on oneself.”¹⁰ Sin is disobedience to the One who made us, and it has consequences. 

Charlotte wraps her prey round and round with a slender thread until it can’t move. Sin begins with only a small thread, a seed of a thought, perhaps an attitude of discontentment, entitlement, or rebellion. Jesus explained “But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery” (Matt. 5:28). We may indulge our small sins, but like Charlotte’s threads around her prey, daily sinful thoughts or habits wrap round and round us until we’re trapped, and escape becomes tremendously difficult. How foolish for a fly to sidle up close to a spider web. How foolish for humans to be comfortably cozy with sin. “The cords of death entangled me; the torrents of destruction overwhelmed me” (Ps. 18:4 NIV). 

^“For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 6:23). 

Prayer: “Almighty and most merciful Father, we have erred and strayed from Your ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.”¹¹