Sin is all pervasive, ubiquitous. Like oxygen, in a fallen world it is everywhere.
In my first 5 plus years as a Christian I tried very hard to be more moral, to do what is right and be obedient to God, but I wasn’t very good at it. Thus, guilt was a constant companion. Then in February 1984 I was exposed to Reformed theology, soteriology to be exact, and realized my self-focus was a kind of morbid introspection. Christianity for me had been a matter of will, and if I could just determine strongly enough that I would overcome sin, by golly, I would overcome it! I knew I was a sinner and that perfection was not possible, but I guess I felt like it should be. I knew very well of forgiveness, the cross, and Christ as my Savior, so I had what the famous hymn calls blessed assurance. Nonetheless, there was always this nagging thing called sin that dogged my every step.
When I was introduced to Calvinism the best way I can explain it is that it was upside and down and inside out from how I had been looking at Christianity and my Christian life. Simplistically put, my focus shifted from me to God. My journey since, over 40 years, has taught me a lot about myself and sin, and specifically that sin is my constant companion. As my title implies, there is something terribly freeing about that. I came to call what I had been doing previously the fatal externalizing of sin, as if sin was merely what I do and not who I am. Or more accurately according to the Apostle Paul, sin inheres in my flesh, in Greek, sarx-σάρξ, and thus it is inescapable.
One conclusion I came to fairly early on is that if we see sin merely as something we do, and that it is primarily a matter of our will, then what we’re in effect doing is trivializing sin. Viewed this way, sin isn’t a mystery, terrible and profound beyond our comprehension, but something with enough effort we can control. That’s why I came to call it a fatal externalizing of sin because when it becomes as an issue of our will, we are trivializing both sin and God’s salvation of us in Christ. The more profoundly deep and disturbing and powerful sin is, the more profound is the salvation from it. We can’t defeat sin by our will power, ever, as Paul makes abundantly clear in Romans 7. The struggle makes us a complete conundrum to ourselves, as Paul says, I don’t understand what I do. What I want to do I don’t do, and what I don’t want to do I do. He comes to the end in complete turmoil declaring himself a wretched man and asks, “Who will deliver me from this body of death?” And he replies, “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” He alone is our hope. But what exactly does that mean for how we live our Christian lives?
Before I get to that, I started thinking about all this when I came across this passage on sin from Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion. He’s basically making a point about the profound nature of sin:
If we search the remotest past, I say that none of the saints, clad in the body of death (cf. Rom. 7:24), has attained to that goal of love so as to love God “with all his heart, all his mind, all his soul, and all his might” [Mark 10:30 and parallels]. I say furthermore, there was no one who was not plagued with concupiscence. Who will contradict this? Indeed, I see what sort of saints we imagine in our foolish superstition; the heavenly angels can scarcely compare with them in purity! But this goes against both Scripture and the evidence of experience. (VII, 5)
Calvin delineates three uses of the law and is speaking here of the law as a mirror that makes us painfully aware of our own sin compared to the holy law of God. The word concupiscence is not used anymore, but it means ardent desire, often sexual, but it’s much broader than that. What Calvin has in mind is the Tenth Commandment:
You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.
The Tenth Commandment reveals to us that sin is a matter of desire as much as a matter of action. We can possibly get away with coveting without our neighbor knowing, but God knows, and in due course it will destroy us. No sin stays hidden or internal for long, which is why God warns us against it.
Daily Repentance
It wasn’t too many years ago that I realized the significance of Martin Luther starting his 95 Thesis with the foundational nature of repentance to the Christian life:
(1) When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, “Repent” [Matthew 4:17], he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.
How could the Christian’s entire life be one of repentance unless their entire life was one of sin? Repentance is only necessary where there is sin. Most Christians, however, don’t appear to be rank sinners, anymore than they appear as disheveled and dirty bums. I’ve remarked to my wife many times over the years how incredibly kind and decent Christians are who I’ve come across at churches over 45 years, yet to our secular Christ hating elites Christians are hypocritical, narrow minded, homophobic, self-righteous bigots. I’ve never really met any of those, but I suppose one day I might.
Before I get to this ever present dynamic in the Christian life, I want to share the next two of Luther’s 95 thesis that clarify Luther’s meaning:
(2) This word cannot be understood as referring to the sacrament of penance, that is confession and satisfaction, as administered by the clergy.
(3) Yet it does not mean solely inner repentance; such inner repentance is worthless unless it produces various outward mortifications of the flesh.
First, Luther was just beginning to question the Catholic Church, of which he was a priest in good standing, so he needed to differentiate repentance from penance. He still believed in the latter at this point, but it was important not to confuse the two. Repentance doesn’t require a priest or someone else’s forgiveness because it is a requirement of right relationship to God in Christ. We might even say that the forgiveness in Christ is conditional. I know that will give some Christians pause, but it is simply biblical. One example is a verse all Christians should have memorized, 1 John 1:9:
If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.
If we do not confess our sins to God, that is agree with Him that whatever it is we have done or think or feel, is sin, then He will not forgive and purify us. It means forgiveness is conditional.
Second, Luther is saying in thesis 3 that “inner repentance” by itself is worthless if it is not accompanied by outer holiness and obedience to God’s law, i.e., “mortifications of the flesh.” Faith without works is dead is Christianity 101 (James 2). In Romans 6 Paul expresses his horror at the notion some were pushing that grace gives us license to sin. Christianity if it is real, and real in our lives, must make a stark difference in how we live, even if for some people it doesn’t appear much different on the outside, in their moral lives. Even the nicest little old ladies and the respectful young men that help them across the street are rank sinners deserving of hell, or sin isn’t sin. For those of us who don’t have the problem of appearing better than we are, there is hope for real change, which I will address below.
In my own Christian walk as I learned all this, and not too many years ago, I began to practice daily repentance every morning. It was probably around the time, 2012, when I made a commitment that every morning I would read the Bible and get on my knees and pray, one that I have kept ever since. I hadn’t come across Luther’s take on repentance yet, but part of my daily routine was a passage of Scripture I learned as a teenage Catholic in Mass one Sunday, Luke 18. Even at 16 or 17 years old I knew I had a lot more in common with the tax collector than the Pharisee. Like him I could beat my breast and ask, “God have mercy on me a sinner.” I remember the thought popping into my mind: “I can do that!” Given I knew I was a sinner and proficient at it, going away justified was appealing to me.
Christ is Our Righteousness and Sanctification
Which brings me to Christ as our righteousness. Sometime after I started daily repentance, I heard someone say something I’d known pretty much all my Christian life, but which struck me with a force I hadn’t felt before: The wrath of God was fully satisfied in Christ. This meant God could no longer be angry with me. The word propitiation is used four times in the epistles, Romans, Hebrews, and twice in I John. Here is one of the latter:
In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
The Greek word is defined as:
(a) a sin offering, by which the wrath of the deity shall be appeased; a means of propitiation, (b) the covering of the ark, which was sprinkled with the atoning blood on the Day of Atonement.
Some translations use atonement instead, but that word doesn’t convey the concept of wrath or magnified anger. Sin is so horrific in its destructive effects on God’s creation, especially his greatest creation, man, that anger is the only appropriate response.
A critical point must be made in this regard. We live in a moral world of right and wrong, good and evil, justice and injustice. Every human being knows wrongs must be punished for justice to reign, and if they are not that is terribly morally wrong. In a court of law, if judges decide not a punish a law breaker because they just don’t feel like it, everyone knows that judge must be terminated or society will fall apart and chaos will reign. We don’t have to be taught that justice is required for peace, which requires punishment that brings atonement, reconciliation, or restitution, paying back for the wrong committed. How much more is this dynamic required for a holy infinite God and his rebellious creatures! If God simply forgives man without punishment, there is no justice and God would be like the judge who deserves to be fired. The entire earth would be filled with chaos because people would have no incentive to change; God will forgive me, no big deal. But the wages of sin is death because all sin does is bring death and destruction, its horrible wages.
To get a better grasp on just how serious God takes all this sin business, take some time to read again (and if you haven’t read it yet, you need to read it, now!), Isiah 53. This was written 700 years before the passion of Christ, and it is brutal. Only God himself in the person of his son could pay the infinite price He required, and in order for God’s justice to be met and his wrath satisfied, appeased, it had to be done exactly this way.
Transformation is God’s Job
Which brings us to I Corinthians 1:30. I was aware of this verse much of my Christian life, but at some point post 2012, it struck me with a force I’d never encountered before:
And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption.
The standard which God requires for right relationship to Him, perfect righteousness, or always doing right as Calvin describes love, is Jesus. We trust that he is that impossible standard for us, no more guilt, shame, or needing to measure up to a standard we can never match anyway. And that’s only the beginning. Christ is also our sanctification, or the process of progressively becoming more like God Himself in Christ.
This was really the mind blower for me because as born-again, Protestant Christians, justification, how we’re made right with God, is the doorway into the Christian life. Once we talk through that, we’re in. The challenge though, is as soon as we hit the foyer, Romans 7 slaps us upside the head. Or at least it should, if we understand that sin is more than merely outward conformity to the law. I will say it as clearly as I can: We cannot overcome sin. That brothers and sisters is impossible. But you know who can? In Paul’s response to this dilemma: “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” It is he who can rescue us from this body of death, both now in this life, and in the forever resurrected life to some.
This reminds me a something I read in Charles Hodge’s Systematic Theology very early in my Reformed journey: Christianity is the work of God in the soul of man. Which means it is a supernatural work, a work beyond the natural, beyond what we ourselves can do. In a lightbulb moment talking to a family member some years ago I said our transformation is God’s business. I can’t change myself, not possible. If I think I can, I’m in for frustration and disappointment. Because Jesus is my sanctification, however, I am promised a real change in my being only the Holy Spirit living in, with, and through me can accomplish. All the pressure is off, and daily repentance reminds me that it is “not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit says the Lord Almighty.” (Zech. 4:6)
Lastly, the deeper and more profound the nature of sin, the deeper and more profound is the forgiveness, mercy, and grace of God I experience in the love He has poured into my heart by the Holy Spirit (Rom. 5:5). I am totally unworthy, yet receive the lavish riches of his grace. Knowing this experientially in my life, not only am I compelled to love others, but God is making me able to love others, helping me to want to love others, especially those I don’t want to love. This is how we change the world.
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