I stumbled across a beautiful quote by President Spencer W. Kimball on the nature of sin. It is taken from the talk, "Jesus: The Perfect Leader" delivered to the Young Presidents Association, Sun Valley, Idaho, in 1977:
"Jesus saw sin as wrong but also was able to see sin as springing from deep and unmet needs on the part of the sinner. This permitted him to condemn the sin without condemning the individual."
This thought captivates me. It is so loving, merciful, and full of hope! I wanted to see if anyone had written their own thoughts on this teaching of President Kimball's, and I found a blog entry about the quote and this comment that followed, including a lengthy quote by Hugh Nibley, a noted LDS scholar:
I was impressed with something I just read from Nibley’s volume 17. He spoke about the Second Law of Thermodynamics and entropy — how things go from a higher state to a less ordered. In nature this phenomenon is irreversible. Entropy is the measure of how far this deteriorating process has gone. Sin is like entropy. It is like a car rolling along a road that has kinetic energy and performs work. But mortality and sin, like friction, slow the car down and the ability to progress further is lost.
Brother Nibley wrote of syntropy, the opposite of entropy. The atonement of Jesus Chirst is syntropy. This is a restorative process and reverses the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Through repentance this process of syntropy becomes effective in our lives as we go from a disordered to an organized state. Everything we see in the universe follows this second law, but Christ is the mediator and author of change who is able to reverse decay, death, and take away our sins. Incredible!
Read President Kimball's talk here. Read the entire blog entry here.
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