How to Not Fall Off a Cliff

One of the "Enrichment Activities" that I intend to take up the bulk of our class time is to depict a man walking toward the edge of a cliff. Obviously, the man is putting himself in great danger, but the danger is lessened somewhat by a guardrail that would be drawn in front of him. This is supposed to illustrate how having pure thoughts (the guardrail) can protect us from spiritual danger (falling off the cliff), but if falling off the cliff represents the commission of potentially serious sin, then I have a huge problem with this analogy.

While it may be fine to teach children that it's safe to approach cliffs as long as they stay behind the guardrail, this is terrible advice when we apply it to committing sin. We should not teach our kids or anyone, including ourselves, that it's safe to approach sin as long as we have a guardrail to keep us from falling into it. There are certain situations and temptations that we should avoid, even if we have strong protections against committing sin. We shouldn't think, or teach our kids to think, that it's fine to go to bars as long as we don't think about drinking beer. We should stay as far away from temptation as we can, and we should teach our kids to do the same.

So, rather than using pure thoughts as a guardrail in this falling-off-a-cliff analogy, I'm going to use the man's distance from the edge of a cliff as a scale of how far away he is from committing that sin. If he's in the bar, he's already pretty close to the cliff. If he thinks about ordering a beer, he's even closer. If he orders the beer, he gets closer. If he picks the beer up, puts the glass to his lips, and lets the beer into his mouth, each of those represent the last few steps toward the edge of the cliff, with the last one possibly counting as that last step off the cliff. On the opposite end of the scale, we have a person who doesn't spend a lot of time near bars, who never goes anywhere near bars if he can help it, and who is actively doing something else somewhere else.

Theoretically, one can avoid the sin of drinking beer despite going to a bar, ordering a beer, and raising the beer to one's mouth, but why let it go that far? Even if you have a guardrail, why test it? Personally, I think it's wiser to stay as far from the rail as possible rather than counting on it standing as the last line of defense against sin.