What's the Big Deal About Sin? (Part 5)
Previously in this series I’ve explained how an insufficient understanding of sin was a major reason why it took me—a life-long “Christian”— four decades to truly “repent and believe the gospel” (Mk 1:50) and finally become a Christian without quotation marks. My thesis for these articles has been that a shallow understanding of God’s character leads to a shallow view of sin and a shallow response to the gospel.
My shallow view of sin came in large part from what I was taught it in Sunday school and in church, which could be summed up like this: sin = disobedience. Explained, it sounds something like this: God is perfect and demands perfect obedience; anything short of perfect obedience means death. “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Ro 3:23) and “the wages of sin is death” (Rom 6:23). Well, I’m hardly one to argue with Scripture. But what does it mean to “fall short” of God’s glory. Who is this God; what is so perfect and glorious about him; and why or how would he expect me to measure up to the standard of his own perfection? I was particularly baffled by the idea that an offense so seemingly insignificant as eating a piece of fruit would warrant the death penalty.
This is why I’ve asked you to spend so much time meditating on Genesis 1 and 2. I fear we too often fly through these chapters without considering what we are really expected to take from them: who God is, what’s so glorious about him, and who we are in relationship to him. Genesis One is intended to leave us in awe of the power and splendor of the Creator of the cosmos, and even more stunned to find ourselves the focus of his attention, created in the image of God himself, placed in the position of highest honor, entrusted with dominion over it all.
Genesis 2 stuns us further as we witness how the Infinite stooped down to plant a garden and dirty his hands, so to speak, in the intimate and tender act of shaping clay into humanity—male and female in his own likeness—to tend to it. We ought to marvel when we hear this language of sonship applied to little clay figures like ourselves and even more when we consider that it was for us, a tiny family, that Almighty God expended universes worth of creative energy.
I hope and pray you are catching the vision: the eternal God, almighty Creator, generous and eager to spend his love. And us, honored above all creation, entrusted with dominion over it, the focal point of all that generosity, his own children shaped to enjoy and reflect his glory. There is no higher calling, no greater honor that God could bestow upon any creature. Man had it all.
Except for one thing. The fruit of a single tree in God’s fruit-filled garden was off-limits, a daily reminder of Who God is, the God and Father upon whom mankind is utterly dependent and to whom we owe all our allegiance. A daily opportunity to honor him as Creator, to love him as Father, and to trust him as Provider. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was aptly named, it stood as a litmus test of the attitude of the man’s heart toward God.
With all this in mind, I hope we will come to Genesis 3 better able to see Adam’s transgression as God sees it. I hope we are, as I said in Part 3, “stunned by how much we are willing to throw away and in exchange for how little.” And hopefully you are ready for me to explain why I suggested that the sin = disobedience equation is insufficient.
First, though disobedience to God is a sin, sin is not limited to disobedience. As Paul put it, “for sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law. Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come” (Rom 5:13-14. Lord willing, we will return to discuss that last clause in a later article!). In other words, it’s possible to be a sinner even when there is no command to disobey. Commands can only expose the condition of the heart, not change it. Specific acts of disobedience—sins or transgressions— are the outworking and evidence of a sinful heart.
Second, it’s possible to obey God outwardly and still be utterly consumed by sin. Satan and his demons obey God. In Job, we see Satan’s face-to-face disdain for God, yet twice we see that even he will not transgress the boundaries set for him by God (see Job 1:12 and 2:6). In fact, one of the great evidences of Christ’s deity was that demons obeyed him: “But Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Be silent and come out of him!” And when the demon had thrown him down in their midst, he came out of him, having done him no harm . . . And demons also came out of many, crying, ‘You are the Son of God!’ But he rebuked them and would not allow them to speak, because they knew that he was the Christ” (Luke 4:35-41). The demons, hateful though they be, obeyed Jesus out of raw terror, not from hearts of love and adoration—"they begged him not to command them to depart into the abyss” (Luke 8:31). No doubt the heavenly beings, good and evil, are stunned by the mercy God extends toward rebellious humanity.
The problem with our equation is that it leaves out the heart—the heart of God and the heart of man. Sin is an attitude of the heart. Its wickedness can only be seen in light of the glory and love of God, and its evil can only be measured by the infinite value of the One it is willing to trade away to get what it really wants: “freedom” to grasp after whatever speck in the universe it is forbidden to have.
