“Everyone who sins breaks the law; in fact, sin is lawlessness” (1 John 3:4 NIV).
IF THE GOSPEL OF CHRIST IS ABOUT SALVATION FROM OUR SINS, IT IS IMPORTANT FOR US TO SEE CLEARLY WHAT SIN REALLY IS. If we deny the thing we need to be saved from, we are a long way from accepting God as our Rescuer. Hard as it is, sin is a fact we must face.
To begin with, we need to understand that God has authority over us. As our Creator, He has the right to govern everything about us. He happens to be a benevolent King (and we should be grateful for that), but in any case, He is our King. If we still lived in a sinless relationship to God, our every thought, word, and deed — and even every motive — would be obedient to His will.
But, of course, we have departed from God’s rule. Every last one of us has done this (at least those who are old enough to discern good and evil). Early in our lives, we began pursuing our own will, deliberately setting aside what we knew to be right. This is what sin is, and none of us can claim to be innocent.
Nowadays, we react negatively to words like “obedience” and “disobedience” (and that is one evidence of how much self-will is embedded in us), but the basic idea of obedience is essential to any realistic concept of God. In the final analysis, that is what sin comes down to: disobedience to God. It is a flouting of His law, His rule over our lives. Simply put, sin is “lawlessness” (1 John 3:4). As Benjamin Whichcote said, “Sin is defiance to the authority of God.”
It is important to see that God’s law is an objective standard for our behavior. The thing that is wrong when we sin is not merely that we do something that gives us subjective feelings of guilt, but that we transgress an actual standard of right and wrong, one that originates in the mind and character of God Himself.
Also, it is not just our actions that are sinful but our intentions (Hebrews 4:12,13). In fact, that is the main thing that is wrong with sin. “Sin is not wrong doing; it is wrong being, deliberate and emphatic independence of God” (Oswald Chambers). Only creatures made in God’s image are capable of committing this crime.
“Sin is an affair of the will. It is not a “vestige of our animal inheritance.” That trivial notion comes from an unexamined, too-quickly swallowed doctrine of evolution. Why blame the brute creation? No self-respecting wolf would be guilty of our modern wars” (George Arthur Buttrick).
Gary Henry – WordPoints.com + AreYouaChristian.com
