The Poison You'd Never Drink: The Danger of Presuming upon God's Grace

Imagine someone sets a glass in front of you. The liquid inside is clear, odorless, tasteless. But you know, with absolute certainty, that it is lethally poisonous. One sip and your heart will stop within minutes.

Now imagine they slide a check across the table. A million dollars. Ten million. A hundred million. Name your price.

Would you drink it?

Of course not. Not for any amount. The question barely deserves consideration. You'd push the glass away, maybe laugh at the absurdity of the offer, and walk out of the room. No sane person trades their life for a paycheck they'll never live to spend.

Now change the scenario. Imagine someone tells you that a particular act, a particular choice, a particular indulgence will deliver a mortal wound to your soul. Not your body. Your soul. The deepest, most essential part of who you are, the part that was made for eternity, the part that bears the very image of the living God.

Would you still push it away with the same instinct? Would you laugh at the absurdity? Would you walk out of the room?

If you're anything like me, the honest answer is unsettling. Because the truth is, most of us treat threats to the body with far greater seriousness than threats to the soul. We wear seatbelts. We avoid dark alleys. We wouldn't dream of stepping barefoot into a nest of vipers. But when it comes to sin, real sin, the kind that Scripture describes as bringing death to the soul, we can be shockingly casual. Almost indifferent. We flirt with it. We entertain it. We tell ourselves it isn't that serious, that grace will cover it, that God understands.

And in doing so, we commit one of the most ancient and dangerous errors in the spiritual life: we presume upon the grace of God.

 

A Wound That Goes Deeper Than the Body

Scripture does not treat all sin as identical. This is not a popular thing to say in an age that prefers to flatten moral categories, but the biblical witness is clear. There are sins that wound, and there are sins that kill.

The apostle John writes with striking directness: "All wrongdoing is sin, but there is sin that is not mortal" (1 John 5:17, NRSV). The very fact that John distinguishes between sin that is mortal and sin that is not mortal tells us something important. There is a category of sin so grave, so destructive, that it doesn't merely damage the soul's relationship with God. It severs it. It brings death.

This language of death is not metaphorical window dressing. Paul, writing to the Romans, is equally blunt: "The wages of sin is death" (Romans 6:23). And to the Ephesians, he describes the state of those living in grave sin as being "dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once lived" (Ephesians 2:1-2).

Dead.

Not merely injured, not slightly off course, not in need of a minor tune-up.

Dead.

Jesus himself makes the distinction between lesser and greater offenses. He speaks of those who will be "liable to judgment," those "liable to the council," and those "liable to the hell of fire," each escalation corresponding to a graver offense (Matthew 5:22). He warns that there are sins so serious they imperil not just the body but the whole person: "Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell" (Matthew 10:28).

There it is. Jesus himself draws the line we so often blur. The body can be killed, and that is terrible. But the soul can be destroyed, and that is infinitely worse. If we truly believed this, wouldn't we treat mortal sin with at least the same horror we feel when someone puts a loaded gun to our head?

 

The Strange Logic of Self-Preservation

Think about how fiercely we protect our physical lives. We go to doctors. We take medications. We avoid reckless behavior. If someone told you there was a snake in your living room capable of killing you with a single bite, you would not casually walk in and sit on the couch. You would not say, "Well, hopefully it won't bite me." You would call for help. You would get out of the house. You would treat the threat as exactly what it is: deadly.

Yet how many of us walk casually into occasions of mortal sin?

How many of us sit down on the couch, so to speak, knowing full well the viper is there, telling ourselves that this time we'll be fine, that grace will handle it, that God is merciful?

He is merciful. Overwhelmingly, incomprehensibly merciful.

But mercy is not the same as permission. And grace is not a safety net designed so that we can keep leaping off cliffs.

Here is a thought experiment that has, in moments of real temptation, pulled me back from the edge. When the pull toward serious sin is strong, I ask myself a simple question: Would I sit here right now and drink that glass of poison? Would I willingly, knowingly end my physical life in this moment?

The answer, of course, is no. Absolutely not. Life is precious. I cling to it instinctively.

Then why, I ask myself, would I even consider doing something that inflicts a mortal wound on my soul? If I would never choose the death of my body, why would I choose something worse?

That reframing has stopped me more than once. Because it exposes the lie that sin always whispers: This isn't that serious. You're overthinking it. You can always repent later.

 

The Presumption That Poisons

This is the sin behind the sin: presumption.

It is the quiet, corrosive assumption that because God is gracious, we are free to be reckless. It takes the most beautiful truth in the universe, that God forgives sinners, and twists it into a license for spiritual self-destruction.

Paul saw this temptation clearly and addressed it head-on: "What then are we to say? Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin go on living in it?" (Romans 6:1-2). The rhetorical force of Paul's Greek here is worth noting. The phrase mē genoito, translated "by no means," is the strongest form of negation available in the language. It could be rendered, "God forbid!" or even, "May it never be!"

Paul is not gently correcting a misunderstanding. He is recoiling in horror at the very idea.

To presume upon grace is to treat the cross as cheap. It is to look at the agony of Gethsemane, the scourging, the nails, the slow suffocation on a Roman cross, and say, "Yes, but I'd like to keep sinning, and I expect that sacrifice to cover it regardless."

It is, in a very real sense, to re-crucify the Son of God for the sake of our own convenience.

The writer of Hebrews puts it in terms that should make us tremble: "How much worse punishment do you think will be deserved by those who have spurned the Son of God, profaned the blood of the covenant by which they were sanctified, and outraged the Spirit of grace?" (Hebrews 10:29).

Outraged the Spirit of grace. That is what presumption does. It takes grace and outrages it.

 

But God Is in the Resurrection Business

And yet. And yet.

If the story ended with the gravity of mortal sin, we would all be without hope. Because every honest soul knows the experience of falling, and falling hard. There may be the rare saint who has managed to avoid mortal sin, but that's not most of us. It's not even most saints.

For many of us, the path back from the grave of sin is paved by the examples of the great penitents. We look to St. Mary Magdalene, out of whom seven demons were cast and who became the traditional icon of the reformed sinner; St. Peter, who denied the Lord three times in His hour of greatest need; St. Paul, who breathed "murderous threats" and facilitated the killing of the first Christians; St. Augustine, who lived a life of deep impurity and fathered a child out of wedlock; St. Moses the Black, a violent gang leader and murderer; St. Mary of Egypt, who lived as a harlot for seventeen years, driven by the pleasure of seduction; or St. Bartolo Longo, who was once a satanic priest and occultist.

These stories are invaluable life-rafts for the drowning soul because they prove that no depth of sin is beyond the reach of grace.

However, as helpful as those stories are, I’ve found a different kind of strength in that "rare" example: St. Thérèse of Lisieux. Her confessor once told her she had never committed a single mortal sin in her entire life. That sounds intense, right? But Thérèse didn't view her purity as her own achievement; she saw it as a "preventative" mercy. She understood the gravity of sin so deeply that on the day of her religious profession, she carried a prayer against her heart that said:

"O Jesus, my Divine Spouse, grant that my baptismal robe may never be sullied. Take me from this world rather than let me stain my soul by committing the least wilful fault. May I never seek or find aught but Thee alone! May all creatures be nothing to me and I nothing to them! May no earthly thing disturb my peace!"

Thérèse never wanted to presume upon God's grace because she knew what it meant to be loved, and to love God in return. She didn't avoid the "poison" because she was afraid of the pain; she avoided it because she wouldn't dream of hurting the One who gave her everything. To her, even the "least wilful fault" was a stain on the relationship she cherished most.

Every honest soul knows what it is to have chosen the poison, to have sat down among the vipers, to have done the very thing we swore we would never do.

But death, whether physical or spiritual, does not have the final word. Because death has no hold on Christ.

"God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ" (Ephesians 2:4-5). Even when we were dead. Not when we had cleaned ourselves up. Not when we had earned our way back. When we were dead, God made us alive.

This is the astonishing, scandalous, breathtaking truth at the center of the gospel: God raises the dead. He raises dead bodies, and he raises dead souls. He is, as it were, in the resurrection business.

Mortal sin can be forgiven. The wound can be healed. The soul that was dead can live again.

But this restoration is not automatic, and it is not cheap.

It comes at the cost of the Son. 

Every mortal sin forgiven was paid for with blood, with suffering, with the death of the One who knew no sin. To receive that forgiveness rightly requires genuine contrition, a real turning of the heart, not merely regret at getting caught or fear of consequences, but a sorrow rooted in love. It requires repentance, a deliberate turning away from the sin and back toward God. And it requires grace, which God provides freely but not so that we can exploit it.

Grace is given so that the dead may live, not so that the living may play at dying.

Remember when Jesus rose Lazarus from the grave in John 11? What if, immediately after that, Lazarus said, "Wow! Thanks Jesus! That was fun, let's do it again!" and he immediately jumped off a cliff. Talk about absurd, right? But that's the way we often treat our sins, when we receive mercy, and continue to return to the very thing that wounded us.

 

Living with Holy Caution

So what does this mean for the daily, practical business of following Christ?

First, it means taking an honest inventory. What sins have you been treating casually? What spiritual poisons have you been sipping because you assumed the dose was too small to matter, or because you trusted that grace would neutralize the effects? Name them. Look at them clearly.

Second, it means cultivating a healthy fear. Not the cowering terror of a slave, but the reverent awe of a child who knows that fire is beautiful and also deadly. "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom" (Proverbs 9:10). We have largely lost this holy fear, and our souls are poorer for it.

Third, it means using the test. When temptation comes, and it will come, ask yourself: Would I drink the poison? Would I step into the nest of vipers? Let the instinct that protects your body teach your soul to protect itself.

Fourth, and finally, it means running toward mercy when you fall, not away from it. If you have committed mortal sin, do not despair. Despair is the opposite error from presumption, and it is equally deadly. Instead, turn back. Repent. Confess. Receive the grace that God offers, not as a license to sin again, but as the breath of resurrection filling dead lungs with life.

God is in the resurrection business. But let us not make him bury us more often than he must. Because true freedom isn't a "license" to do whatever our flesh wants. It is a freedom to live in righteousness, in purity, in holiness. It is a gift we've been given. But if we're spending our entire lives washing off the grave dust from every time we've returned to the grave of our sin, we may not truly live our lives in the joy we've been created for.

Despair is the enemy's ultimate goal. It's why he keeps tempting you according to the same weakness you've shown yourself vulnerable to time, and time, again. It is his goal to ultimately lead you to the point of giving up hope, of either presuming upon God's grace or falling into complete despair. The narrow way is the path that leads to the narrow gate. It is returning to mercy when we must, but living in the freedom His mercy has granted us.

 

God Bless,

Judah