Genesis 3:1-7
Did God Really Say That?
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Category Archives: Sin
Sin, Righteousness & Judgment
“And when he comes, he will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment: concerning sin, because they do not believe in me; concerning righteousness, because I go to the Father, and you will see me no longer; concerning judgment, because the ruler of this world is judged.” – John 16:8-11
Why Sin is Such an Issue
If I take a key out of my pocket and use it to scratch a rock found by the roadside, I have broken no law and I will not face any consequences.
If I go to an abandoned car dump site and take my key and scratch a trashed car there, people might say “hey, what are you doing?” but that’s about it…
If I go to a used car lot and use the key to scratch a used car, now I am guilty of a criminal offense.
But if I go to a Ferrari car lot and take the same key and scratch a brand new Ferrari, my punishment will now be WAY bigger – my guilt is intensified – and so is the punishment I will face.
Why?
Because of the value of the thing I sinned against… the value of the thing I scratched.
God is infinitely holy, infinitely valuable
There is no way to convey in human language the worth and value of this infinite God
Therefore any sin against an infinite God carries with it, infinite punishment.
And this is why, the value of Christ’s atonement for sinners on the cross is infinite.
- Adapted from an illustration from the movie documentary “American Gospel – Christ Crucified”
After You Have Sinned… Remember This…
Adriel Sanchez is pastor of North Park Presbyterian Church, a congregation in the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA). In addition to his pastoral responsibilities, he also serves the broader church as a contributor on the White Horse Inn radio program. He and his wife Ysabel live in San Diego with their three children. Here is an article he wrote entitled, “4 Things To Remember After You Have Sinned” – original source here.
Have you ever felt like God turned his back on you because of your sin? Our failures, especially when they’re repeated, can leave us in a place of confusion. After we sin, we can begin to feel as if the light of God’s grace is no longer shining in our lives. Here are four things that God does when we have failed:
1. When we sin, God is advocating for us.
An advocate is someone who stands beside you and supports you. According to the apostle John, it’s precisely when we feel as though God has left us that he’s right there beside us!
My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. (1 John 2:1)
When we sin, we have Christ in our corner as an advocate, pleading our case before the Father. This should give you comfort that God is for you and your repentance. If God heard the voice of Moses when he pleaded on behalf of the Israelites after they had committed idolatry by worshipping a golden calf (Exod. 32:11), will he not listen to the pleadings of his beloved Son on your behalf?
2. When we sin, God is praying for us.
The shame that accompanies sin sometimes makes it difficult for us to approach God in prayer. It feels as though “God has wrapped himself with a cloud so that no prayer can pass through” (Lam. 3:44). Take comfort in the fact that there is One who is holy, innocent, undefiled, set apart from sinners, and exalted above the heavens, who always lives to make intercession for you (see Heb. 7:24–25). Above the iron clouds that seem impenetrable, Jesus stands praying. Through him you can approach God in prayer even after you have failed (Heb. 4:16); and since he lives to make intercession for you, even when you are silent, Jesus speaks (Rom. 8:34). And not only Jesus, but God the Spirit also intercedes on your behalf:
Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. (Rom. 8:26–27)
3. When we sin, God disciplines us.
At first this can sound frightening, but it is meant to remind you of how much God loves you.
My son, do not despise the LORD’s discipline or be weary of his reproof, for the LORD reproves him whom he loves, as a father the son in whom he delights. (Prov. 3:11–12)
The sense of heaviness that often accompanies our sin may very well be God’s fatherly hand leading us to repentance. David, the king of Israel, wrote of his experience prior to confessing his sin.
For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. (Ps. 32:3–4; italics added)
When David came to the point of confession, however, he could proclaim, “You forgave the iniquity of my sin!” (v. 5). When God disciplines you, it is for your good, so that you might share in his holiness (Heb. 12:10) and not be condemned with the world (1 Cor. 11:32). Don’t let the discipline of God lead you to despair, but let it be another indication of his kindness over you.
4. When we sin, God offers to feed us.
One of the most heartbreaking stories in the Bible is the story of when Peter denied Jesus. Jesus had never turned his back on Peter, but during Jesus’ hour of greatest need, Peter abandoned him. When a crowd confronted Peter about whether he knew Jesus, “[Peter] began to invoke a curse on himself and to swear, ‘I do not know the man.’” Peter then remembered that Jesus had foretold his sin, and began to sob (see Matt. 26:74–75). While Jesus was dying, Peter hid in cowardice.
Maybe you have shared in those tears and experienced the pain of betraying the Lord who has never done you wrong. It’s in this moment that we expect Jesus to say, “I’ve had enough of you!” But what did Jesus say to Peter and the rest of the disciples who had deserted him after his resurrection? “Come and have breakfast” (John 21:12). The apostle John tells us that Jesus cooked a meal for his fickle followers and invited them to eat with him. After you have sinned, Jesus offers to feed you, too. When the church gathers to take communion, Jesus is setting a table for you to come and be nourished by Him once again—a table where you can experience his love and forgiveness anew.
If you have been tempted to believe that God is done with you because of your failures, consider your advocate, Jesus, who is praying for you and guides you with his pierced hands. Hear Jesus inviting you to breakfast: “Come, and eat!” The food he gives is not bacon and eggs but body and blood; his body and blood, given to nourish you even after you fall.
May the knowledge that God is still for you give you the grace to get up and give thanks, even when you feel weighed down by your sin.
Why Did Adam Choose To Sin?
R. C. Sproul: Excerpt from this source.
But what about man’s will with respect to the sovereignty of God? Perhaps the oldest dilemma of the Christian faith is the apparent contradiction between the sovereignty of God and the freedom of man. If we define human freedom as autonomy (meaning that man is free to do whatever he pleases, without constraint, without accountability to the will of God), then of course we must say that free will is contradictory to divine sovereignty. We cannot soft-pedal this dilemma by calling it a mystery; we must face up to the full import of the concept.
If free will means autonomy, then God cannot be sovereign. If man is utterly and completely free to do as he pleases, there can be no sovereign God. And if God is utterly sovereign to do as he pleases, no creature can be autonomous.
It is possible to have a multitude of beings, all of whom are free to various degrees but none is sovereign. The degree of freedom is determined by the level of power, authority, and responsibility held by that being. But we do not live in this type of universe. There is a God who is sovereign—which is to say, he is absolutely free. My freedom is always within limits. My freedom is always constrained by the sovereignty of God. I have freedom to do things as I please, but if my freedom conflicts with the decretive will of God, there is no question as to the outcome—God’s decree will prevail over my choice.
It is stated so often that it has become almost an uncritically accepted axiom within Christian circles that the sovereignty of God may never violate human freedom in the sense that God’s sovereign will may never overrule human freedom. The thought verges on, if not trespasses, the border of blasphemy because it contains the idea that God’s sovereignty is constrained by human freedom. If that were true, then man, not God, would be sovereign, and God would be restrained and constrained by the power of human freedom.
As I say, the implication here is blasphemous because it raises the creature to the stature of the Creator. God’s glory, majesty, and honor are denigrated since he is being reduced to the status of a secondary, impotent creature. Biblically speaking, man is free, but his freedom can never violate or overrule God’s sovereignty.
Within the authority structure of my own family, for example, I and my son are free moral agents; he has a will and I have a will. His will, however, is more often constrained by my will than is my will constrained by his. I carry more authority and more power in the relationship and hence have a wider expanse of freedom than he has. So it is with our relationship to God; God’s power and authority are infinite, and his freedom is never hindered by human volition.
There is no contradiction between God’s sovereignty and man’s free will. Those who see a contradiction, or even point to the problem as an unsolvable mystery, have misunderstood the mystery. The real mystery regarding free will is how it was exercised by Adam before the Fall. Continue reading
Does God Predestine Sin?
God brought the greatest good the world has ever known out of the most horrifying sin the world has ever seen. And it was His plan from before creation.
Audio Transcript
So we want a handle on how to manage this paradox or mystery, that God forbids things he brings about, and God commands things that he hinders from happening — that in one sense something is the will of God and in another sense that same something is not the will of God. Without this category of thought, I don’t think you can make sense out of the Bible or the God of the Bible, so let’s look at these two kinds of “willing.”
God’s Will of Decree
Here’s number one. Let’s call it either the sovereign will of God or his will of decree. It means God’s sovereign control of everything that comes to pass. It’s one of the clearest teachings of the bible. Let’s look at some verses. Matthew 26:39, Jesus is in Gethsemane and he prays like this: “Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me. Nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will.”
What does “as you will” mean? What kind of “will” of God is that? Well, it means His plan for Jesus to be crucified. “If there’s no other way, Father, if that is the infinitely wise way, the infinitely loving way, the infinitely just way, do what you must do.” And he did it.
A Script with Sin
And here’s the crucial thing to observe: it was shot through with sin and could not have happened without sin. It’s a sin to kill the son of God. It’s a sin to mock the son of God. It’s a sin to whip the son of God with the stripes prophesied in the Old Testament (Isaiah 53:5). It’s a sin to be expedient and wash your hands and hand Jesus over (Matthew 27:24).
And yet we all know from Acts 4:27: “Truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever your hand and your purpose predestined to take place.”
The script was written for Jesus’s betrayal in Gethsemane and Good Friday in great detail in Isaiah 53, and Psalm 22, and in many other passages. The script was written. The will of God is a fixed, determinant purpose to bring about the death of his son. Isaiah 53:10, “It was the will of the Lord to bruise him,” and it was full of sin, which means we must have a category of thinking that says God can ordain that sin happen without being a sinner.
If you don’t have that category in your mind, you can’t handle the cross and the prophecies. God ordains that there be sin in the particulars of the death of his son because he couldn’t have been crucified without it, and he is not himself a sinner in ordaining that sin be.
Exposing Sin (Whitefield)
The following excerpt is taken from The Evangelistic Zeal of George Whitefield by Steven Lawson.
Whitefield was convinced that any presentation of the gospel must begin by exposing the listener’s sin and his dire need for salvation. This necessitated the preacher’s confronting his hearers’ rebellion against God and warning of the eternal consequences of their rejection. Whitefield plainly understood that none rightly desire the gospel of Christ until they know of their own condemnation before God. Whitefield preached those truths that reveal sin, namely, the holiness of God, the fall of Adam, the demands of the law, the curse of disobedience, the certainty of death, the reality of the final judgment, and the eternality of punishment in hell.
When addressing the unregenerate masses, Whitefield sought to ensure that their depravity was fully laid bare. Martyn Lloyd-Jones aptly stated, “No man could expose the condition of the natural unregenerate heart more powerfully than George Whitefield.” Only when confronted with their sinfulness, Whitefield insisted, would unbelievers seek to embrace Christ as their Savior and Lord. He peeled back the outer layers of people’s self-righteousness in order to bring about self-awareness of their sinful hearts.
The work of evangelism mandated that he address the eternally devastating effects of sin in his preaching. Whitefield, like a watchman on the tower, warned of sin, death, and judgment. He sought to disturb his listeners with their lost condition before a righteous Judge in heaven. “The sin of your nature, your original sin, is sufficient to sink you into torments, of which there will be no end,” he preached. “Therefore unless you receive the Spirit of Christ, you are reprobates, and you cannot be saved.” He believed the lost must be driven to the brink of utter desperation before they will come to faith in Christ.
Whitefield was a master at sweeping away all useless rhetoric in order that the unconverted would recognize their desperate need to repent. He implored them, “You are lost, undone, without Him; and if He is not glorified in your salvation, He will be glorified in your destruction; if He does not come and make His abode in your hearts, you must take up an eternal abode with the devil and his angels.” None who heard Whitefield were put to sleep with a false sense of security.
Pointing back to Adam’s transgression, Whitefield emphasized that all are born with an inherited sin nature from the first man. He declared, “We all stand in need of being justified, on account of the sin of our natures: for we are all chargeable with original sin, or the sin of our first parents.” It was this strong belief in original sin and total depravity that caused his every sermon to drive his listeners to grasp a sense of their desperate condition in sin. All humanity is born spiritually dead, he believed:
Can you deny that you are fallen creatures? Do not you find that you are full of disorders, and that these disorders make you unhappy? Do not you find that you cannot change your own hearts? Have you not resolved many and many a time, and have not your corruptions yet dominion over you? Are you not bondslaves to your lusts, and led captive by the devil at his will?
Whitefield’s sermons were filled with vivid warnings of the horrific dangers of remaining in a state of sin. In his sermon “Walking with God,” he warned that hell may be but one step away for them: “For how knowest thou, O man, but the next step thou takest may be into hell? Death may seize thee, judgment find thee, and then the great gulf will be fixed between thee and endless glory for ever and ever. O think of these things, all yet that are unwilling to walk with God. Lay them to heart.” Whitefield understood that gospel preaching must include the threat of hell, which is intended to drive men to flee to Christ and escape His terrors.
By such strong statements, Whitefield shined a sin-exposing spotlight into the dark crevasses of depraved hearts. Only then would sinners flee to the foot of the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ to hear about a Savior who died for their guilty souls.
The Origin of Sin
From REFORMED DOGMATICS – Volume 3: Sin and Salvation in Christ by Herman Bavinck
The fallen world in which we live rests on the foundations of a creation that was good. Yet, and at the same time it is not excluded from his counsel. God decided to take humanity on the perilous path of covenantal freedom rather than elevating it by a single act of power over the possibility of sin and death.
Genesis 2:9 speaks of two trees, the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Both are integral to the Genesis narrative, and attempts to discount one or the other destroy narrative meaning. Similarly, efforts to explain the meaning of either of the trees in terms of progress and development (tree of life as awakening of sexuality) ignore the plain reading of prohibition and punishment associated with eating the trees’ fruit. No, the story is a unity, and it is about the fall of humanity and the origin of sin. Genesis 3 is not a step of human progress but a fall.
This fall, however, is not simply human effort to achieve cultural power as a means of becoming independent from God. The Bible does not portray human cultural formation as an evil in itself so that rural simplicity is preferable to a world-dominating culture. The point of the “fall” narrative in Genesis is to point to the human desire for autonomy from God. To “know good and evil” is to become the determiner of good and evil; it is to decide for oneself what is right and wrong and not submit to any external law. In short, to seek the knowledge of good and evil is to desire emancipation from God; it is to want to be “like God.”
The entry into sin comes by way of the serpent’s lie. The serpent’s speaking has often been mistakenly considered an allegory for lust, sexual desire, or errant reason. The various mythical interpretations and even attempts to explain the narrative in terms of animal capacity for speech before the fall all fail to meet the intent of the passage and the teaching of Scripture as a whole. The only appropriate explanation is to recognize, with ancient exegesis, the entrance of a spiritual superterrestrial power. The rest of the Bible, however, is relatively silent about this, though its entire narrative rests on this spiritual conflict between the two kingdoms. Sin did not start on earth but in heaven with a revolt of spiritual beings. In the case of humanity, the temptation by Satan resulted in the fall. Scripture looks for the origin of sin solely in the will of rational creatures.
The Christian church has always insisted on the historical character of the fall. In our day this is challenged by historical criticism as well as evolutionary dogma. Those who would challenge this notion attempt instead to accommodate it by demonstrating the reality of the fall from experience, thus validating Genesis 3 as a description of reality rather than as history. This rests on a misunderstanding; it ignores the fact that we need the testimony of Scripture in order to “read” our experience aright. Neither the Genesis account nor its historical character can be dispensed with. In fact, objections to the reality of the fall are themselves increasingly under review by more recent trends in the biblical and archeological/anthropological sciences. The Genesis account, especially of the unity of the human race, speaks positively to our conscience and our experience.
Though no true parallel to the biblical account has been found, it is clear from the myths of other ancients that underlying the religious and moral convictions of the human race are common beliefs in the divine origin and destiny of humanity, in a golden age and decline, in the conflict of good and evil, and in the wrath and appeasement of the deity. The origin and essence of sin, however, remain unknown to them. The origin of sin is sometimes found in the essence of things, its existence even denied by moralists and rationalists, treated as illusion or desire as in Buddhism, or dualistically traced to an ultimately evil power. Philosophers have treated sin as hubris that can be overcome by human will, as ignorance to be overcome by education in virtue, or even as a fall of preexistent souls. However, outside of special revelation sin is either treated deistically in terms of human will alone or derived pantheistically from the very necessary nature of things.
Both views also found their way into Christianity. The British monk Pelagius rejected all notions of original sin and considered every person as having Adam’s full moral choice of will. The fall did not happen at the beginning but is repeated in every human sin. Though the church rejected Pelagianism in its extreme form, Roman Catholicism maintained the notion of a less than completely fallen will, limiting the fall to the loss of the donum superadditum, which can only be restored by sacramental grace.
When the Reformation rejected Roman Catholic dualism, streams within Protestantism, notable rationalist groups such as the Socinians as well as the Remonstrants robbed Christianity of its absolute character by dispensing with the need for grace in some measure. The image of God is regarded as the fully free will, which, like that of the pre-fall Adam, remains intact. While we are born with an inclination to sin, this inclination is not itself culpable; atonement is needed only for actual sin. Suffering is not necessarily linked to sin; it is simply part of our human condition.
Interesting attempts have been made to reconcile Pelagius with Augustine. Ritschl agrees with Pelagius that the human will and actual sin precede the sinful state or condition. But he also then insists that these singular sinful acts mutually reinforce each other and create a collective realm of sin that exerts influence on us, a reinforcing reciprocity that enslaves all people. Others combine Ritschl’s approach with evolutionary theory. When this is envisioned in strictly materialistic and mechanistic terms, all notions of good and evil, the possibility of a moral life, vanish behind physical and chemical processes. A more acceptable route is to see the evolution of moral life as one in which human beings rise above their primitive animal nature as they become more humanized, more civilized. From this evolutionary viewpoint, sin is the survival of or misuse of habits and tendencies left over from our animal ancestry, from earlier stages of development, and their sinfulness lies in their anachronism. The remaining animal nature is shared by all people; sin is universal, but so is moral responsibility and guilt. Continue reading
Degrees of Sin
From an article at ‘You would have no authority over me at all unless it had been given to you from above. Therefore he who delivered me over to you has the greater sin’” (Jn. 19:11).
James 2:10 tells us that “whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it.” In other words, then we must be perfectly obedient. To fail in one point is to fail utterly and completely, for our Creator’s perfect holiness demands justice for even the slightest transgression. We need the righteousness of another to be put on our record because none of us has ever kept the standards of the Lord flawlessly. When we trust Christ alone, His record of perfection is imputed to us, and so we can enter into eternal life as those who have a record of obedience to the Father (2 Cor. 5:21). This is wholly by grace since Jesus credited our account with His obedience and we have done nothing to deserve it.
That one sin is enough to condemn us to hell, however, does not mean that all sins are evil to the same degree and that the consequences for our errors are all the same. God may condemn even the smallest sin, but the punishment of the “virtuous pagan” will be less severe in hell than the one who puts every immoral thought and desire into practice, because the scope of the former person’s sins is not as large as the latter one’s. To be sure, hell will be awful for both, but as one theologian has noted, all the sinners in hell would move heaven and earth if they could remove but one transgression from their record and have their punishment even barely alleviated.
Many portions of Scripture, including today’s passage, tell us there are degrees of sin, guilt, and punishment. The Jewish authorities who turned Jesus over to Rome were guilty of a greater evil than Pilate was because they had greater access to God’s revelation and had less reason for refusing to acknowledge Christ’s identity (John 19:1–16). Punishments under the old covenant civil law were meted out according to the circumstances of the crime (for instance, see Ex. 21:28–32). Those who are ignorant of the Master’s will receive fewer lashes in the end than those who know the Master’s will and are disobedient (Luke 12:35–48). Note, however, that even though ignorance may alleviate the consequences for sin, it cannot excuse sin entirely. Our representative, Adam chose his path — apart from the knowledge of God — and we all follow suit. Thus, we are culpable for our ignorance (Rom. 1:18–32; 5:12–21).
Coram Deo
That there are degrees of punishment in hell according to the extent of one’s sin means that there are also degrees of reward in heaven according to how we obey. Our obedience, to be sure, cannot earn eternal life, but once we are admitted into the kingdom by grace alone through faith alone, what we do in service to Christ earns for us, by His grace, rewards in heaven. Let us serve Him that our rewards might be even greater (1 Cor. 3:1–15).
Dr. R. C. Sproul in his book “The Holiness of God” explains why the concept that all sins are equal in God’s sight, is actually incorrect. He writes:
“The sins listed (in Galatians 5:19-21) may be described as gross and heinous sins. The New Testament recognizes degrees of sins. Some sins are worse than others. This important point is often overlooked by Christians. Protestants particularly struggle with the concept of gradations or degrees of sin. . . we tend to think that sin is sin and that no sin is greater than any other. We think of Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount that to lust after a woman is to be guilty of adultery. We are aware that the Bible teaches if we sin against one point of the Law, we sin against the whole Law. These two biblical teachings can easily confuse us about the degrees of sin.
When Jesus said that to lust is to violate the Law against adultery, He did not say or imply that lust is as bad as the full act of adultery. His point was that the full measure of the Law prohibited more than the actual act of adultery. The Law has a broader application. Continue reading