Category Archives: Sin

After You Have Sinned… Remember This…

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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?

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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?

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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.