Oh sin, wherefore art thou?

The general misconception of sin in our world, saddens me. Legalism and religion reduced it to a red mark on your copy book and not much more.

That trivialized the issues, into a petty religious invention of do’s and don’ts.

Catholicism tried to get creative with the cardinal sins, which graded sin and solved nothing.

Orthodox Jewry added a raft of regulations to the laws of God, which made compliance un-achievable but kept the coffers full.

Paul said he had every desire to do good (Romans 7:18). So our implied lists of sins and the opinions surrounding that, over-simplifies the issue. Paul came nowhere near the normal don’ts but still felt wretched, because while sin episodes are easier to manage, they are incidental to God.

I accept that Jesus died for our past incidents, but it was hardly His prime focus. In saying he desired to do good but couldn’t and desired not to do wrong, but did, Paul confessed to a force greater than what ticking religious boxes could ever do. Jesus came to deal with that: the power of Sin.

You can sit in church and sing songs, pay tithes, go through every motion of piety and flagellate your wretched self, but looking the part will never cut it. Paul would have outplayed us at that game any day. As a deeply religious and educated Rabbi, he really tried to be good.

Jesus went to the cross to deal with SIN, not sins. Sure His death forgave our past offences, but all the forgiving in the world won’t change the destructive force that is at work in all of us.

Worse yet, Hebrews 9:14 says that as long as our consciences are seared, we will never be free of religious dead works. As such we cannot get on with pleasing God, so it is all self-defeating.

Rather maintain pretenses but remain under the slave-master of sin.

Thus Paul said, “If I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me”.

He realized that trying to keep score and trying to live a good life was by the way, because the nature of sin was at work in him and that had a life of its own.

I need to be a bit vulnerable to illustrate the point.

I used to rehash every pain in my life. It ran around in my mind as I weighed every scenario for dealing with it all. I didn’t do it consciously, it just happened. I did not know better.

The reliving of past pains ate away at my soul and wore me down, resulting in a loss of focus and energy, confusion, and health problems. Yet I had no awareness of any of that, no objective means to change it and no appreciation of how it was eating away at my life.

Or rather, if I had any awareness of my problem, it was limited to a regretful acceptance of my limitations and capitulation to my own weaknesses. In fact, my spiritual teachers told me to accept myself and to normalize what was really not normal or of God.

I resented such sentiments, because it is so easy to tell people to live with things, when you don’t know what they have to live with. It is so easy to go through the motions of people management and all the platitudes of moral teaching, but it is another thing to offer people real solutions.

Did going to church and doing all the right things over a period of 40 years change any of that? Sadly no, because church-life tends to evaluate externalities, as in whether we fit in, pay our tithes, attend meetings and avoid certifiable offences. The cry of our hearts is rarely heard. We cope.

I could have gone through my whole life and never be found out, yet deep down I was desperate. Something was wrong, but I lacked the objective means to question the only norms I knew.

Worse yet, my SIN isolated me. It left me misunderstood and often at odds with others, but I also failed to see what sin’s deception was obliging me to accept as life.

The greatest upshot of all was that ministers were happy to dust off the cross, bring it down from the mantle-piece and celebrate it from time to time, without casting that historic tree into the bitters waters of the current era. It was nice that Jesus died, but so what.   

Then the risen Jesus stepped into the fray to show me that what I thought was normal, was sin at work in me. It had a life of its own, which I could not change through philosophical methods.

I had to bring the issue to the light. I had to let Him do what He was sent to do – to destroy sin, not patch it up.

I had to tear away the rocks that filled the mouth of my cave, the debris of my childhood and every coping mechanism that I had used to rationalize childhood hurts and contradictions, but which were keeping God out of my inner world. Only then could He do what I could never do.

My prayer is that you will come to a fuller appreciation of the power of sin at work in us, that you would grasp the deception of sin, that every pain and limitation of your life is how life is and will remain (sorry for you) and that Jesus is not a relic of the past, but a real and present savior.  

(c) Peter Missing: bethelstone@gmail.com