What's the Big Deal About Sin? Part 3
Have you ever looked at a picture of the earth from outer space and come away feeling small and insignificant? I know I have, and I know I am not alone. I’ve heard that reaction over and over from all kinds of people in various belief systems. But long before the days of telescopes and space travel, people that we might consider primitive were marveling at the same thing. Yes, ancient humans—people without telescopes or satellites—were keenly aware that the universe is vast and the earth miniscule by comparison. And they recognized that man was even tinier. Take David, for instance, who wrote circa 1000 BC*:
“When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,
what is man that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man that you care for him?”
Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings
and crowned him with glory and honor.
You have given him dominion over the works of your hands;
you have put all things under his feet” (Ps 8:3-6).
Previously in this series I described how for 40 years as a professing Christian I secretly thought that God was overreacting to sin. Why, I wondered, would God, for a bite of fruit, sentence all humanity to death? How could he be so petty? My low view of God and my resultant low view of sin is at the heart of what took me so long to be transformed by the gospel I claimed to believe.
In the last installment, I encouraged you to take time to meditate on Genesis 1-3, carefully considering the greatness of our Creator God and the honor it is to be the only beings in all of creation who bear his image. (If you have not done so, I encourage you to do it now, either before you read what I have to say or immediately after.) The reason I asked you to do this is that these chapters are the Bible’s introduction to God, to his character, and to the nature of sin. In them we find God’s explanation for the world and for the condition it is in today. And it is in the context of these chapters that we are expected to see clearly, not how supposedly petty God is, but, to put it much too mildly, how petty we are. In showing us the wealth God has bestowed on humanity, Genesis expects us to be stunned by how much we are willing to throw away and in exchange for how little. But I am getting ahead of myself.
Genesis 1 is intended—both for the ancients and for us—as a call to worship. “In the beginning,” we are told, “God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters” (vv1–2). The scene is meant to evoke from us the same kind of wonder as a glimpse of our “pale blue dot” from the camera of Voyager I. Yet it demands the exact opposite of Carl Sagan’s famous response: “the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, [is] challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity—in all this vastness—there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us.”
Genesis 1, contra Sagan, expects us to see the scale of creation not as an argument against God, but as a testimony to his magnificence and power. The response it expects is awe. The immensity and power of the Being responsible for this creation should fill us with a reverent horror. It should make us feel infinitesimally small and utterly vulnerable and dependent because this is what we are. This is why the Scripture tells us “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge” (Prov 1:7). And the fear of the LORD is exactly where the Bible begins. Our understanding of God and ourselves must start here: There is a God. We are not him. God is infinite in every way. We are not. We are specks on a speck in an endless sea of specks, dependent for our very existence upon a Being beyond our control. This is our first dose of wisdom. But it is only the first, and from the vantage point it gives us we are prepared for the next dose, or you might say, the next phase of worship.
Unlike Sagan, the creation account of Genesis tells us there is nothing lonely about our place here. Of all the specks in his vast creation, God turned his attention to this one. Here his Spirit hovered. And here, on what might as well be the head of a pin or the nucleus of an atom, Almighty God stamped his own image:
“Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’
“So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.“And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth’” (Gen 1:26—28).
Genesis 2:7-8 narrows the focus further: “the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed.”
The Infinite did the unimaginable: stooping low to the ground, he scooped dust from this speck of dust in the middle of his vast creation. He shaped from it a likeness of himself and breathed his own breath into his lungs. Only mankind, of all creation, bears the image of God. Tiny though we are, we could not be more highly privileged, and like David, from our tiny place on this tiny speck, our hearts should cry, “What is man that you are mindful of him?”
In the next installment in this series, we will delve further into what Genesis 1-3 teaches us about sin. In the meantime, I pray that you will be meditating on these things yourself.
*David, for his turn, was reflecting on the creation story first recorded in Genesis 1 and 2, penned by Moses 500 years earlier (and many thousands of years after the fact of Creation).
