Last week, I discussed sliding from temptation into sin. Let’s now illustrate that practically by looking at the slippery slopes in life.

The late U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop observed, “It is a small leap in logic to go from taking life in the womb to taking it outside of the womb.” The logic used to do one wrong likely will justify other wrongs. Abortion leads to infanticide, which leads to euthanasia.

Promiscuity and infidelity slide into new sins. Cohabitation seems practical, and eventually, traditional marriage seems obsolete. It is fueled by books, television, and movies. As traditional marriage fades, there is a veneration of alternative relationships where just about anything sexual is OK. We now have open marriages, gay marriages, and an assortment of other arrangements limited by the imagination.

Then there is sexuality. Biblically, a man and woman become the husband and wife in traditional marriage as the vehicle for proliferating human life. Our pleasure-centric culture has co-opted such values. All forms of sexual perversion have crept into the mainstream of life. Even the clear biological evidence of gender is subordinated to a matter of choice.

As alarming as all of this is, we cannot overreact. The religious leaders in the time of Christ added hundreds more commands to demonstrate how they imagined obedience would look.

Do we look for a “happy medium?” Not really.

Scripture provides this warning:

Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter. (Isaiah 5:20)

Slippery slopes get worse, never better. The problem, in the first place, is permitting temptation to mature into sin. Once we permit the sin of murder by means of abortion, it unleashes a desire to justify the action. The justification creates a new logical mindset, which would permit infanticide and euthanasia.

The same is true for marriage and sexuality. While we have a sad habit of turning blessings into curses, it does not make the blessings evil. It is how we use those blessings that make a difference.

We need a world recalibrated to look heavenward for both our eternal destination and present direction. We fight the first sin to escape the slide into more sins. It can be that slippery!