Great was the fall of it

Why “fall” is the right word — how it happens, and how to avoid it

On the twelfth of June, a preacher sat down with the Pennsylvania State Police and admitted he had been sending explicit images to a fifteen-year-old boy.

Nine days later his father stood in front of their congregation and said that Pastor Kenny was having a spiritual battle right now, that the devil was attacking him. He mentioned mental battles. He mentioned long COVID.

I am not going to stand over a father’s grief and mock it. I do not know what that man knew when he said it. But I have to tell you what that sentence did, because it is the reason I am writing any of this. It protected nobody. It made a great many people furious, and they were right to be furious. When the church has no honest vocabulary for sin, it borrows one. A medical one. A mystical one. Something from a counseling brochure. Spiritual battle. Attack. Long COVID. Anything at all except he did this.

And in the weeks since, I have watched people start swinging at a different word. A biblical one. All over the comment sections and the podcasts and the group chats, the same sentence keeps surfacing: stop calling it a fall.

I want to tell you why I think they are half right. And why the part they are missing is more accurate and important to understand.

The Objections

The objection goes like this. A fall is an accident. A fall is what happens on ice in February. This was not an accident. This was more than a year of deliberate decisions aimed at a child, and calling it a fall is how our crowd has always softened these things until they go away.

I am not going to argue with that.

When Jack Schaap was convicted in 2012, something like a hundred and forty letters went to a federal judge asking for leniency. A great many of them described him as a God-loving Christian leader who had taken one major misstep.

So when a survivor tells me the word “fall” has been used to launder wickedness in many churches, I believe him. We taught people to hear that word as oops. We did that, and I am not going to defend the word without first admitting we abused the word.

But here is where I push back. The problem was never the word. The problem is that we quit using it the way the Bible uses it.

One of the heaviest words in the book

Somebody will say I am reaching for a gentle word. I am reaching for the heaviest one Scripture has.

Notice first that the King James keeps these things separate. It already has a word for a stumble.

Overtaken in a fault. That is the slip, and the prescription for it is gentle restoration by men who are spiritual. It also has a word for the daily grinding reality every honest man lives with.

All of us. Every day. Paul said as much about himself in Romans 7 and never pretended otherwise.

And then it has an entirely different word for a collapse.

Read that again slowly. Five deliberate I wills. The most premeditated act of rebellion in the history of the universe, and the word the Holy Ghost chose for it is fallen. Nobody slipped. Nobody stumbled. Lucifer knew exactly what he was doing, said so five times over, and Scripture calls the result a fall.

There is more. In Hebrew the word is naphal, and it is the ordinary term for men killed in battle. The battlefield is where the word lives.

Which is worth sitting with, because Saul’s death at Gilboa was a literal military defeat, and the Chronicler tells us what it actually was.

Trace it backward and you find the unlawful sacrifice in 1 Samuel 13. The half-obedience at Amalek in 1 Samuel 15. The javelin in 1 Samuel 18. Years spent hunting David instead of Philistines. Then Endor in 1 Samuel 28, where the man who had driven the mediums out of the land went crawling to one in the dark. Then the mountain.

Gilboa was the last step, not the first one.

So here is what a fall is

Sin is an event. A fall is a structure giving way.

Every fall is made out of sins, but not every sin is a fall. Telling a lie is sin; it is not a fall. Looking at something I have no business looking at is sin; it is not a fall. A fall is what that lie becomes when it is never confessed. A fall is what that look becomes after it has been fed quietly for twenty years and has finally come out.

Which means calling this a fall does not make it lighter. It makes it heavier. It means somebody chose every step on the way down, and there were more steps than anyone watching from the outside will ever count.

The staircase

James lays out the formula for falling and it is in birthing terms.

Drawn away. Enticed. Then lust conceives. Then it brings forth sin. Then sin, when it is finished, brings forth death. Nothing about conception and gestation and delivery is instantaneous, and notice who is responsible in the first clause. His own lust. Not the devil’s. Not his wife’s. Not his circumstances.

You can watch it happen to David, and I would ask you to notice where it starts, because it is not where we usually start telling the story.

He was not defeated. He was not present. Twenty years a soldier, a man who had killed a giant and a lion and a bear, and the one battle he was actually assigned to that spring is the one he skipped.

Then the roof, and the seeing.

That may have been an accident; men have seen things from rooftops since there were rooftops. But the next verse is not an accident.

He asked. Somebody went and came back with the answer, and the answer was that she was married, and married to one of his own soldiers. He had every fact he needed in order to stop, and he had them before he did anything at all.

He did not stop.

And between the sin and the murder sit the cover-ups, which is the part I cannot get past. Bathsheba sends word that she is with child, and David sends for her husband and tries to get him to go home to her. Uriah will not do it while the army sleeps in tents. So David tries something else.

When hiding it failed, he escalated.

A man will kill to protect a secret he refuses to confess, and David proved it with a letter carried by the very man it condemned.

Then roughly a year of silence. He is still the king. Still hearing cases. Still leading the worship of Jehovah. And Psalm 32 tells you what was happening under the robe the whole time.

He did not repent until Nathan walked in and cornered him.

“But by the grace of God”

When this news broke I said what a lot of preachers said. I said, but by the grace of God, there go I. And I got pushback for it, some of it from people who have been hurt badly by men like the one in the headline.

So let me be as clear as I can. I am not saying that any one of us might molest a child. I do not believe that and I have never believed it, and if that is what you heard then I do not blame you for objecting, because that would be a grotesque thing to say.

Here is what I am saying. I have a nature. So do you. And that nature, left alone, unconfessed and unguarded, will carry a man somewhere he never planned to go. Not necessarily his road. Mine. Whatever mine happens to be: the temper, the pride, the money, the thing I have decided is nobody’s business but my own. The destinations are not the same. The road works the same way for everybody.

So when somebody says you do not fall into becoming a predator, they are right. You do not. Nobody stumbles into that. It took a year of choices. But that was never the claim. The claim is that you do not stay where you started.

“That could be me” is a statement about the first step down. It is not a statement about the last one.

And I will grant something else, because I think it is true. That sentence really can be a red flag. It depends entirely on what the man is doing with it. If he says that could be any one of us in order to lower the consequences, to soften a sentence, to shorten somebody’s road back to a pulpit, then flag it and watch him, because he is not being humble. He is negotiating. But if he says it and then goes home and looks hard at his own phone and his own private hours, that is not a red flag. That is Galatians 6:1, and it is not a suggestion.

Same words. Opposite hearts. The test is whether it makes a man more careful or more lenient.

And while we are here, let me state what I think many in our crowd get wrong. “Sin is sin” is not a biblical statement. Scripture grades these things, and it does it plainly.

Ezekiel is shown greater abominations, and then greater ones after that, twice more in the same chapter. Some servants are beaten with many stripes and some with few. There is a millstone reserved for a very specific category of offense.

When we flatten everything to one weight we are not being humble. We are being unbiblical, and we are proving the critics right.

The way of escape

Somebody will read all of that and conclude it sounds like a trap nobody could get out of. It is not, and the next verse says so.

Verse twelve is the warning. Verse thirteen is the promise, and no man gets to separate them. Go back through David’s year and count the doors. There was a door on the roof, before he ever sent anyone to ask her name. There was a door when the servant came back and told him whose wife she was. There was a door the morning he sat down to write that letter to Joab. And there was a door every single morning of the twelve months he spent saying nothing about any of it. That is exactly what makes it guilt and not tragedy.

It is also worth noticing that Paul says stand, not win. Three times in one passage.

That is a defensive posture and it assumes a man who is already under fire. Solomon put the same idea another way.

A city like that does not have to be conquered. Nobody storms it. They walk in.

And Amalek, you will remember, did not attack the front of the column.

The hindmost. The feeble. The ones who were faint and weary and straggling along at the back where nobody was looking.

Both houses got hit

The Lord ends the Sermon on the Mount with two builders, and I never noticed until recently that He describes the storm twice in identical words.

Verse twenty-five and verse twenty-seven. The rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house. Word for word, both times.

He takes the weather out of the equation so that nobody can blame it. Same rain. Same flood. Same wind. The only difference in the entire story is what was underneath.

The temptation was never the issue. Both houses got hit. One stood.

And read what comes immediately before it, because it will keep you up at night.

Public ministry. Real results. Nothing underneath. I cannot tell you which house this particular man was, and neither can you.

Grace is not only for the day you got saved

This is the part I think we seem to have stopped preaching, and it is the reason “but for the grace of God” is not a platitude.

Paul tells Titus that grace does more than save a man.

Grace does not only save a man. Grace teaches him. And what it teaches him is how to live today, in this world, this week, in a body that still wants what it wants.

Paul holds both halves together and dares us to drop one.

The working in is the grace. The working out is the guarding. Verse thirteen is not permission to coast; it is the only reason verse twelve is possible at all.

Beset. Every man has one. It is not the same one, and the writer plainly assumes you already know what yours is.

Seven times

I want to close where Solomon does, because he says something we might skip right past.

Both men fall. That is not the difference between them. The just man goes down seven times, not once, and the wicked man falls into mischief and stays in it. The difference is entirely in the rising. The just man is not the man who never went down. He is the man who never stayed down, while the wicked man made a lifestyle out of it.

So I am not writing to the man at the bottom of the staircase. He is not reading this. I am writing to the man on the second step, who has one thing he has never told anybody and has decided it is contained.

It is not contained. It is a foundation being poured. Nobody builds a house on sand in an afternoon; he hauls it in one bucket at a time over the course of years, and every single bucket felt like nothing at the time.

Psalm 51 has never been closed. But understand who wrote it. A man who had to be cornered by a prophet before he would pray it, after adultery and deception and murder and a year of pretending.

You do not have to wait for Nathan.

He is able to keep you from falling. Which means that apart from His keeping, you fall. That is the whole doctrine behind “but by the grace of God, there go I,” and it is not a dodge and it is not a platitude.

It is Jude 24, said in the first person.

This article accompanies the Unfeigned Faith podcast episode of the same name. All Scripture quoted from the Authorized King James Version.