Slideshow image

There is something truly sick in our culture today…a deep-seated spiritual psychosis eating away at both saved and unsaved people alike. Simply put, it is the excusing of sin. Instead of calling sin sin and owning responsibility, since the fall in Genesis 3, we have become experts at blame-shifting. We say, "It wasn't really my fault," and downgrade even our greatest offenses against God into something negligible. In effect, our sins become “just a mistake”or an inevitable result of circumstances, rather than the evil that it truly is. This “the devil (or my circumstances) made me do it” mentality is pervasive, and it is undermining genuine repentance and faith.

My grandmother, a French immigrant married my grandfather, a Polish-American immigrant. He was highly educated, earned his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania and after school he and my grandmother packed their Volkswagen bus and drove cross-country to California with two young children to start a family medical practice. Tragically, I never met him. In the midst of personal turmoil, including being unfaithful to my grandmother, he took his own life while my mother and uncle were still small children. In the fallout of that tragedy, my grandmother (who did not yet know Christ) was determined to understand why her husband did what he did. She learned English, worked at a department store, and raised two elementary-aged children alone. She eventually enrolled at U.C. Berkeley in the 1980s to study psychology, hoping this would explain her husband’s tragic behavior. About halfway through her degree program, however, something happened that changed her perspective entirely: she came to know Jesus Christ as her Savior. Looking back now, she will gladly tell you that much of what she was taught in secular psychology was at odds with the Christian faith. So much of modern psychology, she realized, amounted to explaining away wrongdoing by identifying environmental, emotional, or childhood causes for behavior while refusing to take responsibility for actions in the present. It was a framework that often excused immoral behavior as the product of one’s upbringing, the environment, or “the proverbial man” rather than the result of a wicked human heart. This was Berkeley in the ’80s, a place steeped in humanistic thought. But coming to Christ gave her a brand-new perspective. She began to see that, while background and mental health are certainly factors in our struggles, the ultimate cause of our sin is within us: our own sinful nature. No psychological theory could cure the real problem of the heart. By God’s grace, my grandmother went on to build a godly heritage in our family pointing our family to Jesus!

Our broader culture today has only intensified the habit of excusing sin. We live in an age of explanations and exonerations, where everyone is a victim of something. Personal responsibility is downplayed as we point to any and every external cause for sinful behavior. 

Consider how easily we hear things like:

  • “I know I lied and cheated, but look, in this cutthroat business everyone does it. The environment basically forced my hand.”
  • “Sure, I have a bad temper, but can you blame me? I grew up in a dysfunctional home. My parents messed me up, so that’s just how I am.”
  • “I yelled at my kids, but I was having such a stressful day. I was overworked and exhausted—anyone would snap under that pressure.”
  • “Yes, I fudged the numbers, but my boss is unreasonable. If I hadn’t cut corners, I’d have lost my job. It’s really my boss’s fault I had to do it.”

We have a human tendency to cite anything but our own heart as the reason for our wrongdoing. Popular culture often encourages this. Crime and violence get blamed on societal issues or poor leadership; personal failures are attributed to psychological conditions or other people’s actions. Even in global events, we hear justification of atrocities by pointing to provocations or historical grievances. For example, someone might concede, “Yes, the horrors in [insert conflict] are terrible, but that’s what happens when people have bad leaders or a harsh upbringing.” In other words, “They really shouldn’t have done that, but it’s understandable given their situation.” This kind of reasoning seeks to soften the ugliness of sin by explaining it away. It’s as if we’re saying the evil wasn’t really evil, or at least our responsibility, because “the circumstances made me do it.”

Let’s be clear: understanding context can be helpful, but using context to justify sin is wicked in God’s eyes. When we add a “but” to excuse someone’s sinful behavior (or our own), we are on dangerous ground. We ought to be aware of this excuse-making in our own hearts and lives. How often do we catch ourselves doing this very thing? We gossip about someone, then think, “Well, I shouldn’t have, but they provoked me with their behavior.” Or we nurse bitterness and say, “Maybe I shouldn’t feel this angry, but you don’t know what they did to me.” Every time we insert a “but” to soften or explain away sin, we are essentially shifting blame off of the sinner. We’re implying the real blame lies with the situation, not with the person who sinned.

This blame-shifting reflex is nothing new. It has been with us since the very beginning. Scripture gives us a clear record of humans passing the buck:

When God confronted Adam for eating the forbidden fruit, Adam’s first words were an excuse: “The woman whom You gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate” (Genesis 3:12). Adam essentially blamed both Eve and, indirectly, God (“the woman You gave me”) for his sin.

Eve followed suit. She admitted eating the fruit but promptly said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate” (Genesis 3:13). In her mind, “the devil made me do it.” The serpent may have tempted her, but that excuse did not get her off the hook—God still held her accountable (Genesis 3:16).

When Moses came down Mt. Sinai to find Israel worshiping the golden calf, Aaron tried to dodge responsibility. He said the people pressured him, and then he even suggested the idol miraculously popped out of the fire: “they gave me the gold, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf” (Exodus 32:24). 

God told King Saul to wait for the prophet Samuel before offering a sacrifice, but Saul grew impatient. When Samuel confronted him for disobeying God’s command, Saul blamed the situation: Samuel’s late arrival, the scattering troops, the Philistine threat (see 1 Samuel 13:11–12). He rationalized his unlawful sacrifice as a necessity under the circumstances.

Blame-shifting is humanity’s oldest coping mechanism for guilt. And to this day, on any given day, we often don’t even realize we’re doing it.  I did that because… I was tired. They yelled at me first. I was under pressure. I had no other choice. Excuses trick us into accepting sin or treating it as inevitable. Brothers and sisters, this ought not be.

Despite all our environment and upbringing influences, the Bible is adamant that situations do not cause us to sin; our own hearts do. Our sin is always ultimately a choice we make. Jesus taught this clearly: “For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts...” All kinds of sins—“sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness”—flow from inside of us. “All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person,” Jesus said (Mark 7:21–23) Similarly, the book of James exposes the true source of our temptations: “Each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin… brings forth death” (James 1:14–15) In short, we sin because we are sinners. We can’t even blame the devil for our choices. Yes, Satan tempts and deceives (he certainly tempted Eve, and he tempts us still), but he cannot make us sin. Except in the extreme case of demonic possession (which cannot happen to a Christian indwelt by the Holy Spirit, the devil has no power to force your will. The old quip “the devil made me do it” is not a valid excuse. 

We downplay our gossip as “venting.” We excuse our lust as “normal, human weakness.” We rationalize our lack of prayer as “I’ve been so busy.” Our deceitful hearts always look for an out. But God’s Word allows no such escape hatch. The blame for sin falls squarely on the perpetrator of the sin. “Each of us will give an account of himself to God,” Romans 14:12 says. All of us have these influences; none of us is without some difficult circumstances. Yet God still says we are responsible for what we do.

Even secular observers have noted our culture’s drift toward explaining away sin. Back in 1973, a psychiatrist named Karl Menninger asked the pointed question, “Whatever became of sin?” He wrote a book by that very title, observing that the concept of personal sin and guilt had nearly disappeared from society’s vocabularyIn Menninger’s words, “society had rejected the notion of sin” and replaced it with medical or social explanations.The effect was that people began to see themselves not as sinners in need of forgiveness, but as patients in need of a diagnosis, or victims of circumstance. Menninger, though not a theologian, warned that this was a dangerous evasion of reality. And he was right. If nothing is called “sin” anymore, then nothing needs forgiving, only therapy or social reform.

God calls us to stop hiding behind excuses and start hiding in Christ. John writes, “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8). To walk around pretending (or explaining) that “there’s no sin here—nothing to see, move along” is self-deception of the highest order We may claim to be walking in the light, but we’re actually in darkness if we refuse to admit our sin. John continues with the hope-filled promise: “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). Every excuse we make for sin is a missed opportunity to experience God’s grace. When we cover up our sins or explain them away, we forfeit the mercy and cleansing that come with honest confession.

Church, if we will humble ourselves and say, “Yes, Lord, I have sinned, have mercy on me”—He rushes in with grace upon grace. “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble” (James 4:6). The humble person says, “Lord, it’s my fault; I need Your forgiveness and power to change.” And that prayer will never be despised by our Lord. He is faithful to forgive and mighty to save.

Let’s call sin what it is, in our own lives and in the world around us. This doesn’t mean we become harsh but it means we exercise true compassion by pointing ourselves and others to the only remedy for sin, which is Jesus. Beware of the subtle language of “I did wrong, but…” that can creep into our hearts. Ask the Holy Spirit to put a check in your spirit whenever you start to make excuses for a sin. I encourage each of us (myself included) to take a good, hard look at our hearts in light of God’s Word. Where have we been explaining away what we need to simply confess? Where have we been saying, “I know it was wrong, but here’s why I did it,” instead of saying, “I have sinned, period, and I repent”? 

Every sin we expose in repentance, He expunges by His grace. Let’s be the kind of people who are happy to own our shortcomings because we have absolute confidence in the grace of our Savior. When we do this, we actually uphold the gospel: we demonstrate that Jesus died for real sins, not just “mistakes,” and that His righteousness is our hope.

May we all, by the grace of God, put to death the habit of excusing sin and instead humbly acknowledge our sins knowing that “but for the grace of God, there go I.” And when tragedies shake our world, let’s not join the culture in explaining them away. Sin is the problem, and Christ is the cure.