God's View of Sin

by Ed Dingess

Sin

Odd as it may sound, it is a word that many churches, if not most churches have dropped from their vocabulary. We just don’t like talking about it these days. The trouble is, we cannot very well talk about Jesus Christ and the good news of the gospel without also talking about sin. Modern churches have turned the gospel of God into a “God is for you” message, God is on your side, God accepts you just as you are with no strings attached, and if you just do what he says, life will be so much better all the way around. While the early church was described as turning the world upside down, the modern American church can rightly be said to have turned the Word upside down. Without sin, there would be no gospel. And without the gospel, there would be no church. So, let’s talk about sin for a few paragraphs. What does God have to say about sin? And does what God have to say about sin accord with what you think about sin?

The Biblical Definition of Sin

What is sin? To answer this question, we turn to the writings of 1 John. There we find this statement: Everyone who practices sin also practices lawlessness; and sin is lawlessness. (1 John 3:4) John tells us that sin is lawless behavior, behaving in a way that is without, apart from, or better yet, against the law. What law you ask? Why, the law of God of course. So sin is defined by God in his word as living without his law. How does God deal with beings that live without his law? What does God have to say about beings that would dare to conduct their life without consulting his law? To answer that question, you guessed it; we must turn to Scripture once again.

The First Sin

In the beginning, God created man and woman perfect. We know this because God looked at man and woman and said that his creation was וְהִנֵּה־טוֹב מְאֹד, and, behold it was very good. The Hebrew phrase literally means “exceedingly good.” Adam and Eve, our first parents were created abundantly, exceedingly, good. But they both failed to honor God’s law as expressed in his covenant with Adam. Adam and Eve wanted to live without submitting to God’s law. They made a choice not to honor God’s covenant. Hos. 6:7 could not be more clear on the matter. “But like Adam they have transgressed the covenant; There they have dealt treacherously against Me.” Adam transgressed God’s covenant and as a result, all of mankind was cast headlong into sin, condemnation, blindness, and judgment. Sin brought pain, imperfection, sickness, disease, doubt, alienation, death, and eternal judgment. Adam and Eve ate of the forbidden tree in violation of God’s sacred command and God cursed both of them, their prodigy, and cast them from the garden. One reason many scholars want to relegate Adam and Eve to myth is that they cannot accept the idea that God would act so harshly toward something they consider to be in reality, a minor offense after all. However, breaking the divine covenant is never a minor offense. And it is a contemptuous and arrogant attitude that would embrace that sort of mindset. Nevertheless, I fear that the majority of us Christians in 2016 have adopted precisely that sort of mindset toward our own sin at least and in most cases toward sin in general. Sin is viewed as an unavoidable fact of imperfect beings, winked at with a shrug of the shoulders, and given very serious thought beyond that. Christians have adopted a defeatist attitude toward sin. We use the crutch that we are all sinners, we sin every day, so what is the point of confronting sin in our lives and waging war on it with every fiber of our being to root it out, to kill it. And so we give up. We move along daily sinning all the while, asking God to forgive us with a half-hearted prayer at the end of the day and get up and do it all over again tomorrow.

The Flood

It didn’t take long for mankind to reach its threshold of evil after the fall. It took humanity all of ~1656 years to once again provoke God to the point that he wiped nearly every human from off the planet with the exception of 8 souls. “Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” (Gen. 6:5) Man, as a creature of God, is still under a covenantal obligation to acknowledge God in all his ways and to submit to God’s law in all he does. Modern man scoffs at this claim. Modern man, if he acknowledges any god at all, only acknowledges a god that pleases him, not the God whom he is under strict obligation to please. The same was true in the time of Noah. Now the earth was corrupt in the sight of God, and the earth was filled with violence. God looked on the earth, and behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted their way upon the earth. Then God said to Noah, “The end of all flesh has come before Me; for the earth is filled with violence because of them; and behold, I am about to destroy them with the earth. (Gen. 6:11-13) God hates sin so much that he destroyed all of humanity excepting Noah and his family.

Sodom and Gomorrah