What's the Big Deal About Sin - Conclusion

I began this series several months ago by admitting that for most of my life until my conversion at age 40 I could recite from memory that ‘the wages of sin is death’ (Rom 6:23), but that I never really understood why. Why did a single bite of fruit warrant the death penalty? How, I secretly wondered, could God be so petty? What’s the big deal about sin?

No gospel messaging or teaching I heard had ever convinced me that I deserved to die. The Gospel sounded (though I would never have said it out loud) like an extreme remedy to an extreme over-reaction. I would accept God’s remedy to get out of the hell I wasn’t convinced I deserved, and I would try to stay, as much as possible, on his good side. But nothing in me wanted to give this overly severe God the keys to my heart. And so, with every  “sinners’ prayer” I prayed, and every altar call I responded to, my repentance remained as shallow as my understanding of sin.

My own conversion would not come until I began to see that my shallow view of sin was a direct result of a gaping hole in my understanding of the character of God and of my relationship to him. These deficits in my understanding were, in turn, largely a result of the same holes in many of our popular approaches to sharing the gospel. These gaps, I am convinced, not only helped keep me from faith for decades, but are also contributing to the mass exodus from Christianity that we are witnessing today. As I said in Part One, too many people are leaving a gospel they never fully understood to begin with.

To recognize the gospel as the good news that it is, we need to begin to see sin as God does—which is how we should—and to recognize that His penalty is perfectly just. So long as we distrust God’s character, thinking him harsh, extreme, unreasonable, and unfair, we will never trust him.

To have faith in God—to trust him, not just believe in him—requires us to completely recalibrate how we think about ourselves and about our place in this world. To do this, we went back to the beginning, to Genesis 1-3, which were written for exactly this purpose. Too often we fly through these chapters completely missing what God expects us to take from them: who God is and who we are in relationship to him. These chapters establish God’s glorious character as the backdrop against which we are to recognize the offensiveness of sin. The creation narrative is intended to show us not how supposedly petty God is, but—and I’m putting it mildly—how petty we are. In displaying the wealth, honor, and dignity God bestowed on humanity, Genesis expects us to be stunned by how much we were willing to throw away and in exchange for how little.

The creation account shows us that there is a God and that we are not him. God is infinite. We are not. We are specks on a speck on and endless sea of specks, dependent for our very existence upon a Being beyond our control. We owe God our life and every breath we take is a gift directly from his own nostrils (Gen 2:7). (From this alone we should recognize death as the natural outcome of rejecting the Source of our life.)

But Genesis takes us beyond simple indebtedness and beyond awe of the splendor and might of the Creator. It stuns us further as we find our tiny selves the focus of the Almighty’s attention. God stooped down, shaped us by hand in his own glorious image, and entrusted us with dominion over everything he had made. There is no greater honor under heaven. There is also no greater responsibility.

The fact that God issued a command to Adam makes it clear that God was not relinquishing his ultimate authority. Man’s dominion is that of a vice-regent. We rule on his behalf, not our own. From this we see that God retains his right as creator to judge mankind for how we represent him in his world.

But we also see in this creation account that something so much richer than mere rule and authority is on God’s mind. The language of “image” is the language of parenthood (cf. Gen 5:1b-3). When God shaped a man and a woman in his own likeness, he was setting into motion his grand plan to grow a family, a plan that would ultimately culminate in his beloved eternal Son of God taking on flesh to become the firstborn among many brothers (Rom 8:29). Here we see the heart of our almighty Creator, generous and eager to lavish his vast store of love upon a people, to make them like his eternal Son.  And we see ourselves as God does—the focal point of this generosity, treasured above all creation and honored with dominion over it—his own children shaped in his likeness to enjoy and reflect his glory throughout creation. There is nothing greater God could bestow upon any creature than his image. The family language God uses is not the language of raw power and authority—of command and obey. It’s the language of love.

With this in mind, we focused (in Part 5) on what I see as one of the main contributors to a shallow view of sin, the classic formula: Sin = Disobedience. The reason I find this definition insufficient is (at least) twofold:

1) Though disobedience to God is a sin, sin is not limited to disobedience. Rather, specific acts of disobedience—sins or transgressions—are the outward expression and evidence of a sinful disposition in the heart.

2) It’s possible to obey God outwardly and still be utterly consumed by sin. Satan and his demons obey God. Job (1:12, 2:6) and the Gospels (e.g. Lk 4:35-41, 8:31, 10:17) give plentiful evidence of the grudging obedience of the demonic realm.

The problem with the Sin = Disobedience formula is that it ignores the heart—the heart of man and the heart of God. Sin is an attitude of the heart that can only be understood in the light of the glorious love of God. Its wickedness can only be measured by the infinite worth of the One it is willing to reject to get what it really wants: the “freedom” to grasp at whatever speck in the universe it is forbidden to have.

And so, my hope is that we will take to heart the apostle Paul’s assertion “that God's kindness is meant to lead you to repentance” (Rom 2:4b). What is the nature of your own repentance? What gospel have you accepted?  Are you motivated by the love of God the Father and Christ who died for us? Does your heart long to obey him because you’ve seen the beauty of his kindness toward us? Does your sin against God horrify you because it is an offense against One so good, so glorious? Or, like the demons, does your “obedience” stem primarily from fear of judgment?

You’ll notice I’ve begun with us. That’s because we can only offer to the world what we ourselves have believed. Is the gospel that you bring to others dripping with the same lavish grace of God that you’ve joyfully received? Is it a call from your heart  to see others know the love of the One who is infinitely loveable, or is your gospel call content with the grudging obedience of mere terror? You see, how we think about sin really does matter.

You can read the rest of the series here:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5