Over the last two weeks, I addressed the weight of sin, how it affects us horizontally when we sin against each other and vertically when we sin against God. There is no way we can sugar coat or lighten up the severity of sin without having some serious problems. Paul puts it very bluntly in Romans 6:23: the wages of sin is death (emphasis mine). When we sin, death is the due payment that we earn. It doesn’t matter which commandment we break. Just breaking one is enough to consider us all “law-breakers,” and it’s as though we broke each one of them. Last year, I wrote about how idolatry is displayed in the breaking each of the Ten Commandments, and if you break any of Commandments #2-9, you also break #1. So, ALL sins are a breaking of the first commandment.
Sin comes with a STEEP price, and because we are all sinners and sin is part of our nature, we are reluctant to realize, let alone believe, that we are indeed NOT good people. There is nothing inherent in us that is good. I know we can readily proclaim this when writing a blog post, discussing with other believers, but do we actually believe this in real life? Because – news flash – our sinful nature, our old self, really does believe we are good people. Our modern psychology and our education system treat us like we are good people. Our society is so entrenched with self-esteem and self-idolatry that it’s truly disgusting. And MANY people are finding out that it is not satisfying, but they are so frowned upon in ditching the self-idolatry ideas that it leads to suicide. The homosexual who is miserable (and there are many) is not miserable because they were rejected by their Christian parents or peers. It is because they are living in sin and are tasting the emptiness of it. But in their hardness of heart, they will not acknowledge that it is their sin causing their emptiness, until they are truly broken and hit rock bottom. When they hit that rock bottom, the church needs to be there ready to bring them back up, when they are ready to leave their sin behind.
Sin is pleasurable for a season. People actually enjoy and have fun doing what they do in their rebellion against God. But that’s only a temporary feeling, and there is always a let down at the end. When sin works its course, death will be all that is left in its wake. Death of every kind. Death physically, spiritually, emotionally, relationally, economically, politically, and more than I can think of. Every form of death is a result of sin. And it doesn’t just affect you; there is no such thing as any sin that only affects you. There is always a horizontal collateral damage to every sin we do. “But I just look at pornography. It only affects me.” You sure about that? That body you are looking at is not your spouse’s, and as a result you are cheating your spouse (or future spouse) of true pleasure. Not only that, but you are also helping an industry in which not all who engage it in are willing participants. Sex trafficking is perhaps the biggest industry in the world today with multi-billion dollars being made annually, and it is primarily to satiate the demand for pornography. There is a steep price to your sin.
We all deserve to die, and not a painless, merciful death either. We deserve a very painful, slow, and some might even call it sadistic death. Hell is no laughing matter. Hell is not merely where we will be separated from all the goodness of God, but it will be an eternity where we will be experiencing the very same wrath of God that was poured out on Christ. And it will be eternal. There will be no mercy and there will be no end to it. But even in His wrath, God has offered us a way out. He has no obligation to do so, but He chooses to out of His own will and desire to save us. That is what the cross is for.
The debt had to be paid. The crime had to be punished. There is no avoiding that. So Jesus said, “Let me take the hit. I’ll pay for the crime. Punish me instead.” That’s what He did at the cross, which we remember and honor today on Good Friday. He bore the sins of the world. Being a man, He was able to take the place of a man. But also being the infinite God at the same time, He was able to take the place of ALL men. Being a man, He was able to take the punishment a man deserved. But also being God, He was able to take the infinite wrath in the finite time. That is why the hypostatic union of Jesus being fully man and fully God is a necessary doctrine.
But don’t fall for what many preachers do today. Many preachers turn this into a man-centered message. They will say, “Jesus did all that just for you. You are so special to God that Jesus did that for you. Can’t you give back in kind?” While there is truth to that, let me make clear that you are not a valued treasure that is so precious that Jesus cannot live without you. He got along just fine before you came along, and He has no need for your presence to “complete” Him. He chose to do this. His death on the cross, His beating, His crown of thorns, His mockery, His publicly exposed nakedness (the worst humiliation to a Jew), and even His coming and living as a man was done to showcase how severe and how deadly our SIN is. What Jesus went through, we deserve to get and more. That’s the price.
Our salvation is indeed free to us. There is nothing we can do to earn this gift, but there is nothing truly free. This gift that we spend nothing to get cost Jesus His life. It cost the second person of the Trinity His life. How DARE we trample this? So those who reject this gift, those who snuff their nose back at Jesus and say, “I don’t care about you!” are not going to receive mercy when Judgment Day comes. Because they did not receive the gift freely offered, they will be left out when the party starts. And outside the party hall is darkness, weeping, gnashing of teeth, and a pain for which just a drop of cool water would give some relief. But none will be offered, because it was already rejected.
Because I have that sinful, old self still haunting me, I really don’t take this truth as fully as serious as I need to. One of the things the sinful nature will always seek to do is to get out of that judgment. The way the sinful nature does this is by attempting to diminish and marginalize the crime and its severity. It is the criminal trying to tell the Judge what his crime really was like and to take it lightly. While this may work on corrupt judges here on earth, it won’t work with God. Over the next couple weeks, we’ll examine some of the different ways modern “evangelicals” try to minimize or marginalize the sting of sin.
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