From Jim McGuiggan... REFLECTIONS ON SIN: Sin and its Cosmic Effects

REFLECTIONS ON SIN

Sin and its Cosmic Effects

 We normally think of the effect sin has within us as individual humans and human communities, which certainly makes sense; its polluting effect on us can hardly be overstated. But sin affects more than the human element in creation because Colossians 1:19-20 says that “all things in heaven and on earth” needed to be reconciled to God. 

Here’s what it says: “For God was pleased…through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.” (compare Ephesians 1:9-10 on this.)

Whatever we make of the Colossians text it shows plainly enough that with the entrance and presence of sin the whole creation was thrown into some kind of alienation from God. 

The sinful human condition is sign of a wider derangement and chaos. Dachau and Auschwitz say something about distant galaxies and Jupiter probes and Papa Doc’s Haiti says something about a whole creation that groans and longs for redemption (compare Romans 8:18-21 and Ephesians 3:10), The creation and we are under bondage together. 

Pragmatist and psychologist William James who wouldn’t at all have shared the central proposals expressed in this piece, was shaped more than he knew or cared to admit by the Christian faith. He thought life was worth living, from the moral point of view, since it is what we make it. So he thought our moral struggle had profound worth. He goes on to say this:

          For my own part, I do not know what the sweat and blood and tragedy of this life mean, if they  mean anything short of this. If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels ike a real fight, as if there were something really wild in the universe which we…are needed to redeem.

      All things have been restored and “re-created” in Christ who is the representative of the new and true humanity (the last Adam, the image of God—Colossians 1:15, Genesis 1:26 and 1 Corinthians 15:45). Whatever else we should say about all this, this much is true: our sin in some way unhinged the creation or it wouldn’t have needed to be restored or reconciled to God. Sin affected the farthest star. We’re reminded of this when nations like Babylon, Edom or Judah sinned and God’s response is “uncreation”. In literal fact “uncreation” didn’t take place with the judgment on these nations but the description of undone heavens, an unformed earth, birdless skies and fishless seas points us back to the original loss of life and destruction of the world which relates to our original fall (Genesis 3-11). In principle our sins are the same as those that dragged the creation down. When we sin an individual sin we are simply filling up the cup of all our fathers. This single massive network and narrative of sin is the sin for which Christ came to atone and in atoning he liberates the creation from sin and the curse! [See Isaiah 13 & 14 on Babylon; Isaiah 34 on Edom; Jeremiah 4 on Judah for pictures of “uncreation”.] 

The True Measure of Sin

The cross claims that the true measure of sin is not how we feel about it or how repulsed we are by it or even how much agony it has cost us when others have sinned against us. As I see it, this is one of the places at which the cross appears in its most scandalous light.

God does not hold us responsible for not being God. And when he teaches us (as he does throughout the Bible) that he sees sin more clearly than we do he does not hold us in contempt because that’s true. He understands we can’t know it as he does because no one is holy as he is holy and it is only the holy one who truly sees sin for what it is. So when we feel and speak against it as we do—limited though our sense of it is—he is pleased with the genuineness of our renunciation. Just the same, he insists on our believing that the true and full measure of human sin is seen only in the cross of Christ.

But see how difficult that is for millions to believe. Let me focus on the astonishing evil that exposed itself during the Hitler years. There must be a thousand books that rehearse the crimes that leave us speechless until we feel we must say something if only to keep from saying nothing. And who can forget the images that we’ve seen on television and the moves? Haven’t we at times been on the verge of rising to stick our boot through the television set in irrational fury? And haven’t we once or twice shouted at God, “How could you let this go on?” This is how we who are spectators feel, so how must it have been for those who were actually enduring it.

Now try telling those people that the true measure of sin is not the crucifixion of the Jews and other nations by the Nazis at Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald, and elsewhere. Tell them that the true measure of sin is revealed in the crucifixion of a young Jew on a cross outside Jerusalem some 2,000 years ago. Tell them that and see their response!

Tell that to those who know what has happened in the gulag prison system down the years where on Solzhenitsyn’s conservative figure, 68.7 million people have died after prolonged crucifixions. Tell it to the multiplied millions who lived in the dark nights of Stalin, Papa Doc, Pol Pot, and numberless oppressors ancient and modern. Tell them that that the New Testament teaches that the comparatively humane death of Jesus Christ is the true and full revelation of sin. In unison they will tell you that you’re deranged.  And they’ll feel insulted beyond measure because it will look like you’re minimizing the awfulness of their loss and the twisted malevolent evils that confound adequate description.

But that’s not what the New Testament is doing. That’s not at all what the cross of Christ does! It doesn’t make less of human suffering—it makes more of it! We see all that as moral evil and the cross says it’s more than that—it’s sin! When my child is raped or my family tortured I want you to tell me that my feelings matter and that my pain is a measure of the sinfulness of sin. But I want you to tell me it’s worse than that! I want you tell me that God thinks it’s worse than that. I want you to tell me that there aren’t enough words in the entire world or enough passion in the whole of humanity to damn it with. When my personal pain is multiplied by tens of millions and we stand in speechless rage and utter bewilderment at the sights and sounds of it we want someone to say, “Yes, the eternal God agrees with you. It’s as bad as you feel. Your devastation and your ceaseless fury-filled protests are a measure of it all. But it’s worse even than that.”

That’s what Christians mean to do when they say the cross of Christ is the true measure of sin. Minimize the world’s hurt and the oppressor’s wrong? God forbid! And the cross forbids! When Judas betrayed Christ that night something more profoundly serious had happened than a friend turning against a friend. A “world spirit” was defying eternal holiness. Spiritual hosts of wickedness were weighing in against holy love. Cosmic corruption and pollution was showing itself and coming to focus in that specific moral crime and in that specific person. That’s what Luke meant when he said Satan entered Judas! At the cross it was more than religion and politics and realism in a deadly mix doing away with an innocent man (as they have so often done). It was sin against God himself. It was human evil as part of a corruption that reaches beyond the stars. The monster that swelled in the nineteen thirties and forties in Europe until it blocked out the sun is beyond our comprehension. As inexpressibly vile as these crimes are, they are only the ulcers generated by a galactic predator that has ravaged worlds seen and unseen. Sin!

At Calvary, Christ was saying to every sufferer down the ages, “What has happened to you is more sinister than you know. It is part of creation’s self-destruction; it’s part of creation’s sinful alienation from its God and you in your awful agony have exposed its hind quarters.” But we could never have known this except via the cross of Christ for that is where the alien power fully exposed itself. We could stutter something legitimate about moral evil but we couldn’t see it as “sinful” because the word “sin’ only makes sense when God enters the picture.

Make less of our astonishing cruelty and inhumanity? No, Golgotha is Auschwitz and Africa and Cambodia and every other hell-hole seen through the eyes of God. We don’t mean to diminish evil and savagery when we speak the cross. We have another agenda in mind. So while we pile up the phrases and pour out the rhetoric, we live out and speak out and act out-in our ordinances—the cross of God. We catch the sparks that fly from God’s confrontation with Sin and our eyes are opened a little to what it is. 

Here’s how Thomas Guthrie described it in his Gospel in Ezekiel:

Look now at Sin; pluck off that painted mask, and turn upon her
 face the lamp of God’s Word. We start, it reveals a death’s head…
 It is a debt, a burden, a thief, a sickness, a leprosy, a plague, a poison,
 a serpent, a sting—everything that man hates it is; a load of curses and
calamities beneath whose crushing, intolerable pressure, “the Whole creation groaneth.” Name the evil that springs not from this root—the crime that lies not at this door. Who is the hoary sexton that digs man a grave? Who is the painted temptress that steals his virtue? Who is the murderess that destroys his life? Who is the sorceress that first deceives and then damns his soul?—Sin. Who with icy breath blights the fair blossoms of youth? Who breaks the heart of parents? Who brings gray hairs with sorrow to the grave? Who…changes sweet children into vipers, tender mothers into monsters, and their fathers into worse than Herods—the murderers of their own innocents?—Sin. Who casts the apple of discord on household hearts? Who lights the torch of war and carries it blazing over happy lands? Who, by divisions in the Church, rends Christ’s seamless rob?—Sin. Who is this Delilah that sings the Nazirite asleep, and delivers up the strength of God into the hands of the uncircumcised? What Siren is this, who, seated on a rock by a deadly pool, smiles to deceive and to lure, kisses to betray and  flings her arms around our neck, to  leap with us into perdition?—Sin. Who petrifies the soft and gentlest heart? Who hurls reason from her throne, and impels sinners, mad as Gadarene swine, down the precipice, into the lake of fire?—Sin. Who, having brought the criminal to the gallows, persuades him to refuse a pardon, and with his own insane hand to bar the door against the messenger of mercy? What witch of hell is it, that thus bewitches us?—Sin. Who nailed the Son of God to that bloody tree? And who, as if it were not a dove descending with the olive, but a vulture swooping down to devour the dying, vexes, grieves, thwarts, repels, drives off the Spirit of God? Who is it that makes man in his heart baser than a beast and him who was once but little lower than an angel now little better than a devil—Sin. Oh! Sin. Thou hast insulted his holy Majesty; thou hast bereaved him of beloved children; thou hast crucified the son of his infinite love; thou hast vexed his gracious Spirit; thou hast defied his power; thou hast despised his grace; in the body and blood of Jesus, as if it were a common thing, thou hast trodden under foot his matchless mercy. Brethren, surely, the wonder of wonders is, that sin, is not that abominable thing which we also hate. 

The Relational Nature of Sin

It can’t be said too often that reconciliation is not a legal matter. It is not the restoration of a person to a status though to use such speech is legitimate. It is the restoration of a person to the Holy Father. And it can’t be said too often that sin is not a legal matter even though it involves the breaking of what we sensibly and rightly call moral law. The moral law—despite Biblical use of court and juridical metaphors—is the law of a Father. Since atonement deals with sin in order to restore a broken personal relationship we need to get the relational nature of sin clear in our minds.

It’s right to insist that the Holy Father is a judge but it is never right to say that when he acts as judge he has ceased to be the Holy Father. God’s judgment is real and his righteousness is as genuine as any earthly judge’s but it is always a father dealing with his (wayward)) children. God certainly punishes when he sees the need to do so but it is always as a father dealing sternly and in holy love with his (wayward) children. And the man or woman who doesn’t know the difference between how a judge functions as an officer of the court and how he is as a father at home needs to spend time either at court or at home or both! God didn’t create mere “creatures”. He created us as sons and daughters (Luke 3:21, 38 and note Acts 17:24-29) so when we rebelled and “left Home” it wasn’t a court judge we were leaving or a code of ethics we were abandoning, it was our Father.

When we rebelled it wasn’t a set of rules we turned against it was a Holy Father. When we broke his commandment we broke his law and so in a sense we committed a “legal” crime but that isn’t the real nature of it. Sin is relational infidelity. In scripture when he speaks to us in juridical terms and metaphors: God isn’t misleading us; he is using familiar categories to get through to us. He also expects us to get “the big picture”. No father that we have any respect or affection for speaks of his child’s misbehavior at home as “breaking the law”. It isn’t “illegal”; it’s something else, something that goes down to deeper roots. The child hasn’t done wrong against a set of rules nor is she facing an officer of the courts, a stranger who is somehow unrelated to her. This is her father for pity’s sake! Family relationships are not to be reduced to “law abiding” connections. 

What difference does it make if we see sin as legal or relational? It has profound ramifications for how we see the atonement and reconciliation. If sin is a legal matter then atonement must have a legal character and reconciliation also. Believing these things are legal issues, our atonement theory and the result of the atoning process is a legal process and a legal result has consequences. Status rather than relationship is what we talk about and relationship becomes a matter of bookkeeping. Because juridical speech and metaphors have been given center stage for centuries it isn’t surprising that our dominant atonement theory is legal to the core and retributive justice the primary motif in explaining the cross. Atonement is to reconcile and restore persons to a personal God and the way in which personal relationships are restored is by a relational atonement process.

Have we got rid of sin when we call it relational rather than legal? Why would we even think that? Does wrong committed against the family disappear because we won’t call it “legal”? Are hearts and relationships less wounded because we deny that they are “juridical”? And in our fight against it, do you think we’d fight harder against the betrayal of our beloved or the breaking of some law? Would we feel more or less remorse if we broke a law that mattered or broke a heart that mattered? Can we generate more passion to keep laws or to honor and serve the beloved? And anyway, how much do we care about a law that we think doesn’t have the welfare of persons behind it?  Our law will always remain only a law until it becomes the heart’s desire of someone we’re devoted to! Seeing sin (and righteousness) as relational will affect how we understand reconciliation and give added strength in our ongoing brawl with sin.

It’s important that we see the other side of the coin. Righteousness is not conformity to a code of ethics though uprightness and moral rectitude are involved. Righteousness is relational fidelity;it is personal! It’s the way people respond to their personal relationship with God. It has nothing to do with law-courts or legal status. Moral law has no independent existence though what we mean by “moral law” is profoundly real. But moral law has its source and shape in the personal Holy Father—it is a profile of God. However limited, it ultimately reveals God himself as he relates to his children and when we “obey the law” we are living in the image of God as his beloved children. And that’s million miles from courthouses and juridical categories. See Ephesians 5:1-2.

©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.

Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com