Clear thinking is a virtue, and murky thinking is a sin. Muddy confusion is one of the characteristic sins of our unhappy age. Now some with a pretense to clear thinking draw sharp and crisp lines in all the wrong places, and that folly is then pointed to by advocates of fuzzy thinking as a refutation of any clear thinking whatever, which kind of figures.
After our first parents fell into sin, and God gave them the promise of the gospel, right along with it He gave them the reality of the un-gospel. He told them that there would be perpetual enmity between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent. This means there is no gospel clarity where there is not equal clarity over what is not gospel.
Fuzzy thinkers like to pretend that this is a matter of high theology, but it is nothing of the kind. There is a stark clarity between God and the devil, between malice and love, between sheep and goats, between black and white.
The fear of the Lord is to hate evil. But to hate it properly, we have to see it, and to see it we have to turn to the Scriptures in a spirit of humility. And this, of course, reminds us of our responsibility to confess our sins.
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