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What offends you? I’m one of those people who really isn’t offended by much, but there are a few things. Being stereotyped into being a “typical” woman offends me, such as when people expect me to be the homemaker who enjoys cooking and cleaning and those domestic things. Cooking is not my strong suit; I’d much rather be solving math problems, laying out electrical circuits, or translating Greek and Hebrew than cooking or cleaning! I’m offended when people disregard the gifts and intellect that God has given me.

But, what offends God? Everything we do that disobeys God (also known as “sin”) offends God. All sins we commit are really against God, even if they appear to be against other people. Why is this?

First, sin offends God because God created both us and other people. When we sin against them, we sin against the God who created them. Proverbs 17:5 says, “Whoever mocks the poor shows contempt for their Maker; whoever gloats over disaster will not go unpunished.” Similarly, 1 Corinthians 8:11-12 says, “So this weak brother or sister, for whom Christ died, is destroyed by your knowledge. When you sin against them in this way and wound their weak conscience, you sin against Christ.” God created us to be His people and to worship Him only (Exodus 20:3); when we sin, we are putting someone or something else as a higher priority in our lives than God. We have no authority to tell our Creator what to do, as it says in Isaiah 45:9.

Sin also offends God because it questions God’s character. When we sin, we’re saying that we know better than God does. It’s similar to a parent-child relationship. If the parent says, “Don’t touch that, you’ll burn yourself” and the child touches it anyway, the child thinks they know better than the parent. Similarly, if God tells me to follow a certain path in my life and I don’t, I am saying I know better than God. God’s character is such that He is love (1 John 4:7-18), and His perfect love means that He really does know best, regardless of what we may think.

Finally, sin offends God because He has redeemed us from it. Christ died for you and me, and Christ died for every other person. We no longer need to live in sin, because we have been redeemed from it by Christ’s death! Romans 6:1-2 says, “What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?” We have been redeemed from our sin, so we no longer need to live in it, but yet we do. Later on in Romans, the apostle Paul says (7:15), “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” When we sin and do what we don’t want to do, we are going against that redemption that we have through Jesus.

Fortunately, in spite of that fact that our sin offends God, His love for us outshines that offense! Because of the grace we have through Jesus’ death on the cross and resurrection, we need not fear God’s offense, but rather rejoice in the grace that we receive when we do offend Him through our sin.