As I continue this study on sin, I need to continue to showcase what happens when we take what sin is too lightly. It is absolutely clear that sin has consequences, but when sin doesn’t mean what it means, the consequences of sin follow. This is a gospel issue, and any model or idea or theology that takes ANY ASPECT of sin any differently than how the Bible treats it is a heretical position. Last week, I described several different false teachings and how they define sin, but I only scratched the surface of what that means if taken seriously. This week, I’ll showcase the consequences of such ideas.
If sin is just a mistake or imperfection, not the intentional, treasonous defiance against God, then there are several things that must follow through. First, it means there really is no absolute, perfect standard by which man is to be held accountable. This is a strike against the holiness, righteousness, and perfection of God. While there is foolishness that comes as a result of youthfulness and the sinful nature, this is not what is being addressed here. If your mom told you to clean your room and you chose not to do that, you cannot pass that off as a mistake. That is deliberate disobedience. A mistake can be a typo or a calculation error, but it cannot be intentional refusal to do what you need to do, or intentional doing what you are not supposed to do.
This view doesn’t just marginalize what the action is; this also puts the blame on God for making us bad. I hear this all the time from evolutionists: “If God created the universe, He made it bad.” This is a charge that God is an incompetent creator, and it’s the same argument that Adam used to blame Eve for his sin. He blamed God for giving Eve to him to begin with: “God, it’s your fault.” Another variation of this is, “The devil made me do it.” It appeals to the brokenness of the world as being inherent to creation from the start and to require no fault nor responsibility upon man for that which was wrong. This is an inherently severe error of every Old Earth creation model. When any person treats sin as a mere mistake or imperfection, said person is not only deflect blame off self, but they are also, intentionally or unintentionally, blaming God for making them “imperfect.” How arrogant for the pot to make demands of the potter on how he was created! Yet, when one messes with origins, this is one of the conclusions that one will make.
When sin is merely treated as a barrier between you and your blessings, sin simply becomes a mountain to climb or a task to defeat. The real challenge here is that this doctrine partly true. Sin IS a barrier between us and what comes with God. But it is a half-truth, because it makes the “blessings” the primary, not God through whom the blessing comes. In the Prosperity Gospel/Word of Faith circles, the purpose of faith is health, wealth, and prosperity – all things that make life comfortable in the here and now, and all things that are the primary categories of temptation in which this world has to offer, what Eve saw in the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and what Jesus was tempted with in the wilderness. Sin is just a barrier between man and these blessings. This makes sin really undefinable, and even more so, it makes the faith a works-based religion. Take notice that when you don’t receive your “miracle;” according to these teachings, it is because YOU lacked enough faith. You didn’t please God enough or give enough or trust God enough. It’s YOUR fault. This is devastating to so many people who have lost loved ones to sickness and disease. This is a result of not taking sin correctly and realizing we all live in a broken world and only Jesus Christ can save it.
Similar to the “mistake” or “imperfection” teachings is the Progressive Christian teachings that recoil at the notion that man is a sinner, a wretch, a worm, evil-minded, rebellious, treasonous, and anything and everything but good. So, to lighten the sting of such descriptions, the Progressives say we might be “misguided” among other things. This again puts the blame on God for the system He set up, rather than acknowledging that man is the problem. While the Old Earth Creationists don’t go as far as to declare it outright, the Progressives actually think that sin never actually separates the bond between God and man, therefore they do not and will not understand the necessity of the cross. They accuse God of “cosmic child abuse” because the Father had the Son go to the cross. They do not understand and refuse to understand the severity of sin. So, because they reject the nature of sin and the due punishment of sin, their solution is the same as the Gnostics: get more knowledge.
There are immoral people who say that sexual immorality is perfectly fine for Christians to engage in. After all, “it’s how God made them.” Therefore, for us to deny them who they were made to be, we are fighting against God. This is blasphemous. God did not make us sinful. We are sinful because we are in Adam and because we have chosen to sin. This again blames God for their choices and seeks to deny responsibility for their lifestyle. Nobody suggests that a thief is a thief by birth, nor suggests a murderer is a murderer by birth, but somehow, we think it is fine to suggest that a sexual pervert is one by birth. It’s “part of their nature.” That’s a direct result of evolutionary teachings, that man is an animal, and we act on instinct rather than morality. But it’s also true: they are “born that way” as having a sinful nature, which is why we need to be born again. This is another reason why we cannot mess around with origins. The Old Earth creationists usually don’t go to this point, but they have let THESE people in the door to the church. I hold them responsible for it. Because according to their position, whether they recognize it or not, they have no argument against this sexual perversion movement because they have rejected God’s account of creation as written.
There were others I addressed last week, but I think we get the point. It doesn’t matter who does it, what angle they use, or what argument they use; any teaching that diminishes the nature of sin also diminishes the weight of sin. By diminishing the weight of sin, there is a denial of the necessity and the work of the cross. Jude tells us there are two primary types of false teachers: those who teach an immoral thing as being moral; and those who deny our Lord Jesus Christ. If we unpack these for all they contain, anyone who teaches ANYTHING that God commands against as being “good” is on this list. Anyone who denies ANY aspect of Christ Jesus, not just who He is but what He did, is on this list that Jude says are false teachers. What does that mean? It means the pastor who says that God created via Evolution or any form of Deep Time is also teaching that death and corruption existed PRIOR to Adam (contradicting Romans 5:12) and thus the problems with this world are on God, not man. That means that man is not responsible for sin, God is, and that means that the cross does nothing, and Jesus’ death meant nothing. This is not a “secondary” issue. That’s just analyzing ONE of these false teachings regarding sin. The rest are pretty obvious, or they should be.
We cannot mess around with sin, because if we do that, we mess around with Christ, and our message and our faith are completely worthless, making us the most pitiful of all men. I’ve mentioned the cross multiple times in this post, and so we need to take this one step further and showcase how these false views of sin and false views of the weight of sin, also produces a false view of the cross and the ultimate day of judgment.
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by Steve Risner
"For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb." -Psalm 139:13
I’ve recently been in a conversation with some unbelievers concerning “information.” This is an interesting topic. The existence of coded information within the genome of every living thing (highly complex and specified information that dictates the development and maintenance of the most sophisticated machines known to us) is something no evolutionist I’ve encountered can adequately respond to. They will try. They will make up weird and embarrassingly silly things to “debunk” this idea, but it’s a fact that coded information—which is both complex and specific—can only come from an intelligent source. On the other end of that, there must be an intelligent recipient to decode the information and use it to build and maintain these highly complex machines (I’m speaking, of course, of living things here). These are very detailed instructions we’re referring to within genetic material.
As I’ve said, I’ve seen very silly and really remarkable things shared on this topic in response to information being a key factor in the debate on origins between Biblical Christianity and atheism. Unfortunately, there are way too many Christians who fight for the side of atheism, but that’s another topic for later.
DNA is a storage medium that houses the instructions for building and maintaining the most sophisticated machines known to us. The source of this highly specific, very complex, and sophisticated information seems to be an issue for someone claiming that natural and mindless processes birthed it. How do coded instructions for the development and maintenance of extremely complex machines (like living things) arise, if not from an intelligent source? These are some of the amazing things people who want to discard the Biblical narrative on creation will say in response to this issue about the information housed within the DNA of every living thing on earth. These are direct quotes from people online:
“I have a geology degree and can read information directly from an exposed rock face.”
“Because in reality, information did not come first and was produced by natural processes.”
“What is needed is time and space, not intelligence.”
“It [information] comes from all over the place.”
“All information moves or is stored in the form of some code or other.”
“Yes, it’s called code… that doesn’t make it code though.”
“A weathered rock has information. Show me the mind that produced it.”
I hope we can all see how most if not all of these statements are just silly. Saying you can take “information” from a rock or from “all over the place” and suggesting this is even similar to the instructions found in DNA is absurd. Determining what a rock is made of or how it got where you’ve found it has nothing to do with coded information that details how to build complex machines. This seems to be the best they have in response, which is not good for them.
For the instructions we’re talking about, they are coded. To be coded means there is a system of symbols that are used to represent something of an assigned meaning. This code is highly complex, of course, and is more sophisticated than any code we’ve developed. It’s far more complex than the binary computer code every computer on earth utilizes – much more complex, in fact. There are 4 nucleotides or bases that are found in DNA or RNA (RNA is just a single strand of DNA). These are guanine, cytosine, adenine, and thymine. They are frequently represented as G, C, A, and T, respectively. Certain arrangements of these bases in a strand of DNA codes allow for certain things to be made—namely proteins but other highly complex molecules as well. The fact that the genetic code is, in fact, coded information, is beyond debate at this point. It’s called the genetic code. It has bases found within it that do not mean anything except when they are assigned meaning in specific groups. DNA stores these instructions and accesses the specific parts of the code that are needed at the right time to generate the right molecules in the right amount. It’s amazing. DNA will “unzip” into a shorter strand of RNA. It will then read the strand of genetic code forwards or backwards or sometimes will splice different pieces together to generate the needed biochemistry.
These instructions are specific. This seems obvious, but I’m always asked when I suggest this, “What does specific mean?” Well, the definition is to explain or describe something clearly and exactly. The instructions for building proteins are long and detailed. They must be precisely built in order to do their predetermined job. Here are some basics for building a protein.
Proteins are made of amino acids. There are 20 different amino acids. Three bases or nucleotides (the G, T, A, and C we discussed earlier) are needed to create one amino acid. Most proteins we’ve found are between 50 and 2000 amino acids. This means a length of DNA (which has been “unzipped” into RNA) 150 bases long is needed to make the simplest protein—which is highly complex and must be built exactly the right way. There are a number of folds that each protein has that must be correct or the protein is not right. All the amino acids that make these proteins are “left-handed,” which just means of the two mirror images of any given structure, the “left-handed” version is the only one we use for life. That’s an important hurdle for evolutionists as well, but that’s for another time.
But many of the proteins of life are much larger than that. A protein with 2000 amino acids would require bases in a length and specific order of 6000 nucleotides! Two thousand 3-letter combinations that are all exactly in the right order to generate one protein. Keep in mind some of these proteins are required for protein manufacturing, so there’s another hurdle for the evolutionist who believes in abiogenesis. How do proteins that require other proteins to be built find their way into existence? Which ones came first? When does the job of building a specific protein end? Why does the system “turn off” when it’s got enough of whatever protein it was manufacturing?
Genetic material is also complex. That, too, seems to have a very basic definition but, again, I am asked what that means. Most of the time when atheists are bringing up these questions, it is to trip you up or confuse you. Don’t fall for their games. They’re in a losing battle here and they know it, so they need to distract as much as they can. Complex simply means that the whole is made up of complicated or interrelated parts.
This is very easily demonstrated with genetics. There are countless molecular machines involved in the work of our genes. According to Dr. Bruce Alberts at cell.com, “We now know that nearly every major process in a cell is carried out by assemblies of 10 or more protein molecules. And, as it carries out its biological functions, each of these protein assemblies interacts with several other large complexes of proteins. Indeed, the entire cell can be viewed as a factory that contains an elaborate network of interlocking assembly lines, each of which is composed of a set of large protein machines.” This is exactly what complex means. This statement is speaking more broadly about cellular function, but the same is true just for the work that goes on inside the nucleus (or very close by to the nucleus) of a cell.
Each of these molecular machines can be built out of multiple proteins, which are themselves built out of dozens to hundreds or even thousands of amino acids. The spliceosome, for example, is a molecular machine that is comprised of some 50 proteins and 5 snRNA molecules. It’s enormous. If it’s built incorrectly, it doesn’t work. It has numerous interrelated parts that work together. We can easily see how the inner workings of a cell and, more specifically, what genetic material is doing inside a cell, are highly specific (it’s not randomly performing functions willy nilly) and complex (the intricate network of interworking parts is mind-boggling).
Next time, I’ll get into what information is and why the coded instructions found stored in the DNA molecules of each living thing on earth is very ordered, complex, specified data containing the instructions for building and maintaining a living thing—a highly sophisticated machine.
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“You have not come to a mountain that can be touched and that is burning with fire; to darkness, gloom and storm; to a trumpet blast or to such a voice speaking words that those who heard it begged that no further word be spoken to them, because they could not bear what was commanded: ‘If even an animal touches the mountain, it must be stoned to death.’ The sight was so terrifying that Moses said, ‘I am trembling with fear.’
But you have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem. You have come to thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly, to the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven. You have come to God, the Judge of all, to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.” -Hebrews 12:18-24
In the sections before this in the book of Hebrews, the author has been talking about various aspects of Christian living. So you may be wondering, why is he suddenly talking about mountains? This is another aspect of living the Christian life – he is contrasting the Jewish life, represented by God giving the Israelites the law on Mt Sinai, with the Christian life, represented by Mt Zion.
The author does not specifically mention Mt Sinai, but it is clear in verses 18-19 that this is what is being referred to. We see the fire of God burning on Mt Sinai in Deuteronomy 4:11-13. The things that are mentioned in these verses can all refer to the presence God appearing on Earth – fire (Judges 13:20, 1 Kings 18:38), darkness (1 Kings 8:12), storms (Nahum 1:3), and the trumpet (Exodus 19:16-19, Matthew 24:31, 1 Corinthians 15:52, 1 Thessalonians 4:16).
This is not the presence of a calm, gentle God but one that should strike fear and terror into our hearts. The next element we see confirms this – “such a voice speaking words that those who heard it begged that no further word be spoken to them” (verse 19). The people of Israel experienced this in Exodus 20:18-21 and Deuteronomy 5:25-27. The fear of the Lord was so great that the people of Israel simply could not handle it and didn’t not want to hear God’s voice anymore!
Verse 20 provides a quote from Exodus 19:13. The people were so fearful of God and they lived in fear of God’s commandment that anyone (man or beast) who touches the mountain should die. This shows how holy and separate God is from the people. God made the mountain so holy that the people could not even touch it!
In the passage from Exodus 20:18-21 referenced above, the people were terribly afraid of God, but Moses was not afraid to approach God’s presence. But in verse 21, the writer tells us that even Moses was trembling with fear at God’s presence. This is not a direct quote from the Mt Sinai experience that Moses had, but it does happen during the golden calf incident (Deuteronomy 9:19). The author is portraying a situation where God is greatly to be feared – even by Moses, the Old Testament figure who was known to have the closest personal relationship with God (Exodus 33:11)!
But! Verse 22 begins with this strong contrasting conjunction, indicating something completely different is about to be written. We now see the contrast to the great fear of God at Mt Sinai with the great joy of Mt Zion. Mt Zion is one of the hills on which Jerusalem was built, so Zion and Jerusalem are often considered synonymous to each other. This is considered the “home” of God’s people. This is the city where God dwells. This refers back to Hebrews 11:10 where the author refers to “the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God.” This is a living city, home to the living God. The people have come by the thousands to experience this joyful assembly that takes place in God’s presence! They have come to give God the glory and honor which He is due.
Verses 23-24 continue to list the reasons that the people have come to this holy city. They have come to celebrate the triumphant church, the assembly of those “whose names are written in heaven.” This may refer to the early martyrs of the church, or some scholars believe it refers to angels; we do not know for sure. The people have come to see God, who is the great Judge of all people. He has made the righteous people perfect through the sacrificial death and resurrection of Jesus.
Jesus is that “mediator of a new covenant” which has been thoroughly described earlier in the letter. The blood Jesus was shed as the perfect sacrifice for all people in all times and in all places; Jesus is the only one who could open up the way to having a relationship with God as no mere human could. Abel’s blood is the first human’s blood recorded to be shed in the Scriptures, and the author shows how much greater Jesus’ blood sacrifice was than Abel’s.
This passage shows the great contrasts that happen simultaneously in our relationship with God. We should have great fear and awe of God, knowing that He is sovereign over everything and has the power to strike us down in death. But we also know that we should have great joy in God because of what Jesus has done for us! The God of the Old Testament and Mt Sinai is still the God of the New Testament and Mt Zion. He is still the same God who we worship today, and we are still commanded to fear Him and also experience joy in His presence to give Him glory.
How are you relating to God today? Are you experiencing great fear of God’s awesome power? Or are you rejoicing in His presence? Both are good! We should have balance between those two – being both joyful and fearful of God’s awesomeness all at the same time.
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Wherever God goes to showcase the weight of sin and the price of sin, the enemy comes along to corrupt it and to diminish the weight and the severity of sin. In this post, I’m going to address several of the ways that the doctrine of sin is being diminished in our culture today.
The most common way I have seen sin being diminished in many evangelical churches is to not call “sin” to be rebellious treason against God, but merely “mistakes” or “imperfections.” This notion treats sin as an “oops,” not as treason against a thrice-holy God. This approach does not describe sin as what it is but rather treats it as, “We just aren’t perfect, but we mean well.” It’s a very common trend; the idea is to soften the sting so that people will receive the message without being so readily offended. But this is not the Gospel. Jesus did not come to die because some of us are “imperfect.” He died for something far more serious than that. I brought this up when Hugh Ross took this approach in his One-Minute Gospel presentation. A defender of Hugh Ross told me I was just being petty on definitions, though in another discussion, this same person said that definitions matter in defense of his position. I don’t care if you use the specific words I am using or not; I care about the image and message being given, because God does, too. If we are sloppy with our wording, we are being sloppy with our duty as God’s ambassadors here on earth and that is not something we want to be doing.
The Prosperity Gospel preachers rarely use the word “sin” in any of their messages. Joel Osteen is infamous for never preaching against sin, and he even boasts about not preaching against sin. But anytime he does mention sin, it is never in a Biblical context of violation of God’s commands. Rather, sin is viewed as a mere “blocking of your blessings” that God intends to give you. This is selfishness. It proclaims that God is merely a means to an end – an end to serving self. Sin does not “block you from your blessings” as a primary. That’s only a side effect. The primary issue is much deeper – it separates you from God.
The “Progressive Christian” movement has gone as far as describing the sinful nature as mere “misguidance” and that it may damage our relationship with God but doesn’t actually sever our relationship. Many of these speakers even go on to say that we have inherent “goodness” or “deity” within ourselves. This is a Gnostic teaching resurfacing that teaches that even though we are corrupted, we still have an inherent “divine spark” as part of our being. As a result, sin is reduced to mere moral deeds, but never vertical against God. This is blasphemy because it puts man on the level of God. It is the root of the “little gods” doctrine that we see very frequently among the Word of Faith teachings.
Matthew Vines, who I wrote about several years ago, and many LGBT+ “Christians” attempt to justify sexual sin (namely homosexuality) by making it part of their nature, that they were born that way. This again takes the responsibility off the person for their lusts and puts it on God for making them that way. The severity of this teaching is too much to unpack here, but to put it simply, they are accusing God of being an immoral monster Himself in an attempt to justify themselves. It is all about trying to justify sin while claiming a spot in the Christian community. Jude warns against such people as those who take the grace of God for a license to sin.
A cult name that I did not learn about until very recently is the Sandemanians. While the name will not be familiar to most, the teachings they give should be. When my pastor was alerted to them, he realized how dangerously close my church was to going in that direction. I, too, recognized the symptoms of these teachings in those around me and in myself. The Sandemanians completely disavowed any emotional connection to salvation and the Gospel, and they taught that the whole thing is only intellectual, giving little more than mental ascent. While there MUST be the intellectual aspect, there is a tendency to diminish the weight of sin because it’s merely treated as “theoretical” and “out there,” but when this line of thought is carried out, it diminishes our understanding of the weight of sin. We will not take the issue of sin seriously when it is just intellectual and hypothetical. There has to be an emotional component to this that will make us want to do something about it.
A final one I’ll deal with here is a total denial of sin. This is similar to the one the Progressive Christians used above. In the latter case, the Progressive Christians do acknowledge there is a thing called “sin” and that the world is actually broken. They diminish it, just call it “corruption” or “misguidance,” but they do acknowledge to some degree that it is there. But some people flat out teach that man is good and that people are not broken.
During spring break, I went to the Shepherds’ Conference. When we had time to kill the day we arrived, my group decided to visit the Walk of Hollywood. Unlike the videos I have seen of these very famous blocks, all I could see was total depravity. I saw the idolatry of man and even beyond that, I saw and smelled the decadence of drunkenness, drugs, and all sorts of stores you’d expect in a “red light district.” My spirit was provoked. But in our walk, we passed by two buildings of the Christian Scientologists (the cult that Tom Cruise is part of). A friend of mine began to witness to one of them as they passed out fliers. In the discussion, this young man, who was from Ukraine, shared how every road leads to God, there is no need for “salvation” because people are not broken, etc. His thinking was totally post-modernist. He couldn’t even process the Russian invasion of Ukraine as being evidence of the world being broken. He could not see his sin, let alone general sin.
Let me be clear: man in his sinful, unregenerate self loves sin and despises anyone pointing out that they are wrong. And even for those of who are saved, we all have some of the sinful, old self that simply isn’t dying away anytime soon. Some of you may say, “You don’t know my heart.” My response to that is: “Actually I do know your heart. It’s the same as mine: deceitful, wicked, and hopelessly perverted.” That’s not me speaking; that’s God through the prophet Jeremiah. It is so wicked that only God understands how utterly depraved it is. We don’t understand our own hearts. I don’t have any special insight; I’m only declaring what God said, and He DOES know your heart and it’s not a good report. So, no matter what circle you are in, no one is immune to attempting to diminish and marginalize the weight of sin. And when you mess with the nature of sin as the teachings I exposed here do, you mess with the consequences of sin, and that changes the solution to sin. We’ll explore that more next week.
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by Eric Hansen
If you’ve been a Christian within the last 2,000 years, I’m almost certain the experience of a spiritual valley has hit you at least once. I’m not referring to those fleeting bouts of annoyance with your church or brother in Christ but the real deep valleys – those times where you sit there in your chair, staring at your Bible and just say to yourself, “Why am I even doing this?”
These are some testing times, and to put it bluntly, they suck. You can feel like there’s no hope, rhyme, or reason for things to be going on. If you’re in a disagreement with a fellow Christian, you can even start thinking, “If this is what Christianity is then forget it.” Even just having faith for a few years now, I’ve experienced these emotions more than once. In this blog post, I want to recap those experiences so far, and then address ways that I went about handling the situation. Along with that I’ll share some experiences in hindsight. While I might sound like I’m complaining in describing the events, I truly am not, but that’s one of the things you may realize once you start getting out of that valley.
The first time I experienced this was back in January of 2020. I was going in for some major surgery (a heart cath) and was afraid. Luckily everything turned out fine, but the recovery from it was kind of brutal. My wife was going through some things on her own, having to quit her job not long before, and she was probably more afraid than I was during the procedure since I did have a risk of dying. But, at no point before, during, or after did my church show any support or love to us. The pastor offered some comfort before, but he was on vacation while I was gone and didn’t reach out to me after he returned. None of the elders reached out to us to see if we needed anything or how we were doing. Only one time did anyone reach out (besides the kids we were pastoring to at the time, God bless them), and that was to just say, “Hope to see you in church soon.” For a month, we dealt with fear and depression, and it just intensified immensely the last 2 weeks of that. We felt alone, unloved, and unimportant. After we got out of this valley, though, my wife confessed that she was afraid I was going to give up on my faith. Sometimes that thought crossed my mind, but then I reminded myself that my loyalty is to Christ, not to the church. But it took a long while to even want to pick up my Bible again.
Even though I haven’t yet experienced such a deep valley again, the intense dread of the matter recently crept up again. I won’t go into the details much as I don’t want to support gossip. However, things came to a head when I started realizing just how a person I had asked to mentor me had changed in their theology since the start. They became a different person to me, and I wasn’t the only one to see it. But this being the 3rd person I’ve held in high regard on a personal level, I basically felt abandoned and hurt. I’m very much for showing and extending love and grace to others, but we can’t be selective on who we extend that to. From my perspective, the situation became very hypocritical, and that was the very thing this person has been adamant about not being. I could also be wrong on my observation, and I hope so, but I remember after speaking my emotions out to them, I was thinking, “Man, if this is what I gotta deal with as a Christian, is it even worth it?”
Now, this isn’t to say that the road was paved in death the whole way through. There were definitely bouts of sunshine and rainbows spread throughout the journeys. But, when we’re in those valleys, it’s hard to remember them let alone look back and see it.
I can’t honestly explain how I recovered from the first instance. I remember waking up on February 1, 2020 and feeling like an immense darkness had been lifted. Now, during that month of the valley, I prayed and tried to keep a relationship with God as best as I could. So I can always say God lifted me from the depths of my own personal hell. But, at the same time, almost all of those prayers felt like they were bouncing off walls and satellites. I also hadn’t been reading the Bible, so it was much more of a one-way conversation, unfortunately. But, the fascinating thing to me is that my wife, who had been struggling just as bad as me, shared the same thoughts on the same day.
As for the second trial of fire, it’s been a really different experience. Between the first valley and now, I’ve gained a much deeper understanding on how the Spirit directs me most often. When something is God’s will and not just my own will, I sense an incredible feeling of peace about it. Unfortunately, what brought me that peace was accepting the difference in theological views and realizing that for my personal growth to not be stunted, I needed to step away from such a deep relationship with them. I love them dearly, but I love them enough to know when it isn’t healthy as well. This is probably one of the biggest lessons I learned from this valley.
Both times, and with all the other more minor valleys I’ve had, perseverance was definitely key. It’s very easy to walk away from God when things get tough.
Some would say to be in the Word, read it more, etc. But, I can’t sit here and suggest that because each situation is going to be different. But, I will suggest finding a Christ-focused, Bible-believing person and talk with them about your valley. Keep in mind to not start gossip, and the easiest way is to only focus on “I.” If you can read the Bible, then by all means do it. But, if we’re being practical about these situations, it’s not always comfortable to read such a book, especially when you’re already at the point of doubting your faith. Even as an introvert, I’ve found much more success in this most recent valley talking to others about my emotions than I did keeping everything internalized during the first one.
A passage I held close to my heart during this last valley is from 1 Thessalonians 4:1-2: “Finally, dear brothers and sisters, we urge you in the name of the Lord Jesus to live in a way that pleases God, as we have taught you. You live this way already, and we encourage you to do so even more. For you remember what we taught you by the authority of the Lord Jesus.”
The book of 1 Thessalonians is one of the few epistles that has deep praise for keeping true to the Christian faith even during turbulent times. It reminds me of what the book of Jude was meant to be originally (Jude 1:3: “Dear friends, I had been eagerly planning to write to you about the salvation we all share. But now I find that I must write about something else, urging you to defend the faith that God has entrusted once for all time to his holy people.”).
I know that I was on a righteous path to Christ before I got tossed into the valley. While I tumbled my way to the bottom, it wasn’t impossible to rebound. The opportunity granted me the time to understand that my faith was unstable. The way back to Christ was to build my faith on a sturdier foundation than I had previously. So the first book I reached for from my bookshelf was What Every Christian Ought to Know by Adrian Rogers. The next book I’ll be reading is Worldview Warriors’ very own Charlie Wolcott’s Biblical Foundations. While my faith is still building firmer, these resources from a biblical perspective have helped me explore the Bible deeper (such as digging into 1 Corinthians 14) and to learn what is needed to grow further with God.
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“Therefore, strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees. ‘Make level paths for your feet, so that the lame may not be disabled, but rather healed.
Make every effort to live in peace with everyone and to be holy; without holiness no one will see the Lord. See to it that no one falls short of the grace of God and that no bitter root grows up to cause trouble and defile many. See that no one is sexually immoral, or is godless like Esau, who for a single meal sold his inheritance rights as the oldest son. Afterward, as you know, when he wanted to inherit this blessing, he was rejected. Even though he sought the blessing with tears, he could not change what he had done.” -Hebrews 12:12-17
In the previous section, the author of Hebrews talked about the importance of having discipline in our lives as followers of Jesus. We need to be corrected when we’re not on the right path. This next section is an extension of that thought, encouraging us to live upstanding lives, living as a witness to our God.
The “therefore” at the beginning of verse 12 links what’s coming with what just preceded it. Because of the discipline that God provides to us, we need to do our best to live our lives in a righteous manner. If our arms are feeble and our knees are weak as the passage says, we need to strengthen them to do the hard work of living rightly! The Greek word used for “strengthen” also means to “make upright” or “make straight,” giving the idea of living in an upright manner.
In verse 13, the author quotes from Proverbs 4:26. This builds on the idea from verse 12 of strengthening our bodies to do the good works that honor God. If our paths are level, we’re better able to walk on them. This is connected to the idea of discipline among believers in Jesus. We’re meant to live as communities of believers, not to go it alone. When some are feeling “lame” or “disabled” and struggling with doing what is right, the community is to come alongside them to encourage them and provide spiritual healing. While we are not saved by the good things that we do, they do show God’s glory and demonstrate our faith (see James 2:14-26).
Starting in verse 14, we see the author giving more specific ways of how to live in a righteous manner. The Greek verb that’s translated as “make every effort” really has a meaning of pursuing or chasing after, so this verse starts out by saying, “Pursue peace with everyone.” This is a common idea in the New Testament, as we also see in Matthew 5:9, Mark 9:50, and Romans 12:18 just to name a few. Some scholars have debated whether this verse means to try to live at peace with everyone or just fellow believers, but the general consensus is that we are called to live at peace with all people, though peace within the Christian community is important for our witness to those who do not yet believe.
The structure of this verse indicates that we are to pursue both peace and holiness. What is holiness? It means being set apart and striving to be more like God. When we strive to live our lives in a way that is holy and glorifies God, others will be drawn to Him and see Him in and through us.
We see the community of believers at work in verse 15. While we are only responsible for our own actions, we are also called to live in community with one another. This ties into the idea of discipline from the previous passage. When we see a fellow believer pursuing the wrong things and headed down the wrong path, we need to lovingly provide them with correction.
But what’s the deal with the “bitter root” in the second half of verse 15? This is the same idea expressed in Deuteronomy 29:16-18. If people turn away from God, they will be like a bitter root - perhaps it will grow slowly, but its true colors of bitterness will be seen in time. A seed of bitterness can be sown in a faith community, and while it may not be visible right away, if left unchecked it will eventually defile the whole community.
The next warning in this passage is in verse 16 and has to do with sexual immorality. Again, the community of believers is called upon to help keep each other living in right ways and not falling into this temptation. The author next refers to Esau as being godless. The word for “godless” can also mean unholy or profane, which implies that Esau was more focused on the things of this world than on Godly things. Esau did not recognize the value of his birthright but instead gave it away to fulfill an immediate need (see Genesis 25:29-34 for the story). Unlike Esau, we are to look at the big picture that God sees as much as we can rather than focusing on the immediate needs we experience here on earth. Anyone who turns away from God doesn’t care about God’s plan; they only care about their own needs being met.
Verse 17 continues the narrative about Esau and how he did not receive the blessing he was to inherit. There was a finality to Esau’s actions; he could not undo what he had done. There are choices we make in life that cannot be undone. There’s a song by my favorite band called Bullets that has lyrics that say, “Can’t put the bullets back into the gun / Can’t undo what we have done.” While we can always receive forgiveness, some actions are more final than perhaps we would like them to be, just as Esau’s was.
The main ideas we can take from this passage are that we are all to pursue righteous living, both individually and in our communities of faith. We are to strengthen ourselves and one another in the faith so that we can more easily understand and follow God’s commands to us so that we honor and glorify Him. We are to lovingly discipline and correct one another in the context of our faith communities because we know that we can’t live this Christian life on our own. We are better together than by ourselves, to both encourage one another and help one another stay on the right path of honoring God with our lives.
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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.
This forum is meant to foster discussion and allow for differing viewpoints to be explored with equal and respectful consideration. All comments are moderated and any foul language or threatening/abusive comments will not be approved. Users who engage in threatening or abusive comments which are physically harmful in nature will be reported to the authorities.
