Can You Solve This Problem?

Question

A person is a vessel in which good or evil grows. Over time, a person could polarize toward good or evil, or could sit still and hide out. This movement toward or away from good is a product of a person's free will and the influences on them. For this problem, I represent sin as a small dot that catches a person's attention. Some people are drawn into that dot, and it grows into a circle that surrounds them. They are corrupted and polarize to evil. Assume two brothers, like any brothers, have some similarities and some differences. But, in some ways, these two brothers are identical. Both of them are good men. They avoid sin. They place God first in their lives. And, while we wouldn't really know this - for our purposes here, assume we know their hearts. They are both bound for heaven. However, their paths are about to diverge. The brothers share another trait. They both will falter if shown that small dot of sin. They have a vice, it's waiting to get them both. It has the power to make them abandon everything that would result in salvation and become absolute evil over time. And, it all starts with the small dot. One of the brothers encounters an influencer, who draws his attention to the dot. The other brother doesn't have this encounter. Over time, the two brothers slide to opposite poles of good and evil. Two identical brothers in all the ways that matter, but one bound for heaven and the other destruction, not by their free will, but completely as a result of circumstances outside their control - one a victim of circumstance?

Answer 1

"It has the power to make them abandon everything that would result in salvation and become absolute evil over time." This is an untrue statement if your previous caveats are also true. A child of God, one filled with the power of the Spirit of God, is free from the power of sin. The power of sin was broken at the cross of Jesus Christ. There is, for the Christian, no sin that has "the power to make them abandon everything that would result in salvation." It may appear that way on the surface, but either sin has power over a person (Ephesians 2:1-2) or they have been set free from that power (the rest of Ephesians 2).