That’s quite a claim for such a little word, but it’s a word that contains multitudes, a phrase coming from Walt Whitman’s famous poem, “Song of Myself,” in a collection called Leaves of Grass. It comes specifically from this passage which will make a good introduction to our topic:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
Whitman gets at something about the nature of sin connected to the nature of man: it is a mystery, one human beings have been trying to solve since the beginning of recorded history. We know it as the problem of evil.
Most people think this is a problem primarily for Christianity, but in fact it’s a problem for every person trying to make sense of our messed up world. Human beings have been asking the same question for all of history: why? Why is there evil, suffering, and death? Why does it exist? What does it mean? How can we solve it? Every religion and philosophy has tried to find answers, speculating endlessly because without revelation, without God the Creator giving us the answers, all we’ve got is guesses, conjecture based upon conjecture, speculation upon speculation. Only Christianity via Judaism tells us why sin and evil exist, and only Christianity offers us a solution to our dilemma that is not a dead end, which we’ll explore below. A correct understanding of the problem will help us make sense of our existence, and finding real answers will also help us live better lives amid the chaos and turmoil. That is the key to which I refer in the title.
Unfortunately, we live in a thoroughly secular culture where God has been disinvited from the societal dinner table. The cultural messaging is that at best we can either rage against the meaningless machine of existence, or just ignore it, and do our best to mitigate the suffering brought about by evil, but there are no answers. Evil just is, a brute fact of existence, deal with it. That people have not been satisfied with such a non-answer throughout all of history tells us it’s not a satisfying one. In our day I believe we’ve reached the end of the road for the usefulness of secularism and its lies. Western man thought he could create a society without God, and it hasn’t worked out so well. Living in a universe with no transcendent reality or reference point is deeply unsatisfying to most people. Every human being knows there has to be something beyond our material existence, something above, outside of it that gives some kind of meaning to it all.
The metaphysical poverty of secularism is like lukewarm water, or flat soda, or another blockbuster movie sequel; it’s unfulfilling and disappointing. People are thirsty and hungry for meaning, purpose, and hope, yet secularism is dead end. That realization is driving many people who are currently looking for answers to find them in Jesus. As I never tire of quoting ex-atheist C.S. Lewis in this regard,
I believe in Christianity as I believe the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
While we will never fully understand everything, something impossible for finite creatures with limited knowledge, Christianity does offer us real answers and real solutions. As an atheist, Lewis realized it offered no answers at all, and in fact made the problem worse. Eventually he realized Christianity had the answers he was looking for, and the nature of Christianity as a revealed religion will tell us why.
The Christian Idea of Revelation
If we’re to truly unlock the meaning of the universe in our understanding of sin and the suffering it brings, we’ll have to assume the concept of revelation from God is possible. This is critical. Think of it like this. The universe is a room, and we live inside the room. That’s easy enough to imagine. But we have to make a decision about this room, and in our scenario we have only two choices. One option is a room with no opening, no door, no windows; just four walls and a ceiling. No matter which way you look, bare walls, ceiling, and a floor. That is the no revelation option; we’re stuck in the room with no way to know what if anything is outside of the room, and no way to know what anything inside the room means or why it exists. One guess is as good as another. The other option is a room with a door and windows so we can get answers from outside the room despite our limited view of things. In fact, we’re dependent on the answers from outside the room.
Which brings us to something we need to understand about the nature of Christianity: it is a religion of revelation. The answers are not something we can discover on our own; they must be revealed to us, shown to us. They must come from outside the limits of our minds and experience, outside of the guesses we come up with being stuck inside the room. So we start with a biblical fact, a biblical assumption, that as human beings we don’t find God, or the answers. We don’t work our way to him, but rather God is the one revealing and disclosing himself, and the answers, to us, or else he and the answers could not be found.
The reason it works this way is because as sinful human beings we do not seek God. As guilty sinners, both before our own consciences and before a perfectly holy God, he is our judge, jury, and executioner. No wonder we want nothing to do with him in our natural, sinful state. Rather, we hide when God shows up, as Adam and Eve did after the fall. Revelation itself tells us why, but human experience makes this perfectly clear as well; we can’t live up to our own standards, let alone those of a holy God. That doesn’t keep people from trying to find meaning in the conundrum that is existence, as we see in every permutation of religion throughout human history. By contrast, many Enlightenment thinkers wanted to rid the world of religion, so they insisted we could find meaning without revelation; human reason was all we needed. But Christianity counters that the only way we can understand the true nature of reality is revelation; we can’t get that from man-made religion or reason alone. God must take the initiative to tell us the nature of things, or life is endless confusion.
The history of philosophy is a testimony to such confusion—endless speculation and conjecture that contradicts and confuses, as do all world religions, save one. As Winston Churchill said of the Soviet Union, life without revelation is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. B. B. Warfield in The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible tells us why:
The religion of the Bible announces itself, not as the product of men’s search after God, if haply they may feel after Him and find Him, but as the creation in men of the gracious God, forming a people for Himself, that they may show forth His praise. In other words, the religion of the Bible presents itself as distinctively a revealed religion. Or rather, to speak more exactly, it announces itself as the revealed religion, as the only revealed religion; and sets itself as such over against all other religions, which are represented as all products, in a sense in which it is not, of the art and device of man.
We must also understand the nature of biblical revelation. According to Herman Bavinck, revelation is God’s self-revelation. “He is the origin, and he is also the content of his revelation.” This is an important point because if we primarily see revelation as mere knowledge, God revealing certain things to us, we will miss what makes biblical revelation so, well . . . . revelatory. God has primarily revealed himself, and continues to reveal himself, his being and nature, in three ways: creation, Scripture, and Christ. We see all three in the first two verses of the book of Hebrews:
In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, 2 but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe.
God’s ultimate revelation, that which defines everything else, is Christ. He spoke to us not only through the prophets, but also through the apostles, our New Testament. We also notice that revelation is spoken communication. God speaks, which shouldn’t surprise us given we’re made in His image; and we too speak. Revelation comes to us primarily in the words of God’s redemptive acts in history. We learn this in the first sentences of the gospel of John:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.
God’s words speak through the Word that speaks through creation even as He speaks through the stories, propositions, and reasoning we find in Scripture. The Bible is a profoundly human book precisely because it is a profoundly divine one—not a book (or 66 books by 40 different authors) of mere human invention, despite what the critics claim.
Those who reject this possibility have no ground on which to stand. Theirs is a completely arbitrary assumption based on nothing but a rank anti-supernatural bias. Christians, on the other hand, have solid logical, rational reasons to believe in the possibility of revelation. Sadly, I can’t establish that here, but trust me, revelation is not only possible, but actual, and because it makes sense of everything a la Lewis, sin, evil, and suffering are no longer a mystery we just have accept. If there is no revelation, sin and the suffering associated with it, make of life an absurdity. With it we’re given meaning, purpose, and hope in the midst of it. Let’s take a deeper look at sin from God’s perspective.
The Nature of Sin and Its Answer
We might think this is obvious, but unless God tells us what it is, what the nature of the problem is, we’ll always see sin as all about us. The best definition I’ve come across is from Agustine and Luther who define it as, Incurvatus in Se, or Latin for being turned or curved inward on oneself. We are by nature inveterate navel gazers—it’s always about us. Or as it’s perfectly described in a song by George Harrison, I Me Mine. But in fact, sin is fundamentally an offense against Almighty God. Even our sin against others or ourselves is primarily a sin against God, or else it has no meaning. We can see this most clearly in King David’s committing adultery with Bathsheba and having her husband killed to try to cover it up. He says in Psalm 51:
3 For I know my transgressions,
and my sin is always before me.
4 Against you, you only, have I sinned
and done what is evil in your sight;
so you are right in your verdict
and justified when you judge.
What is striking is David saying it is only against God that he’s sinned. Surely it was also against Bathsheba and her husband, which it was, but the point is that sin has no meaning, evil is not evil and morally wrong, apart from it ultimately being against God. He defines what is good and what is evil in his very nature.
A very lot could be written, and has been written, about sin and its nature, but I want to focus on one thing that infects our understanding of sin more than any other in our day. . . . . happiness. You might wonder what sin has to do with happiness, or happiness with sin. If we go back to the definition of sin as being curved in on ourselves, our tendency will be to see sin as about what makes us happy or not. In other words, we define our life by our circumstances. If they are to our liking, then we think God likes us, if not, God must hate us. Everything becomes about us, and we fail to understand what David said, that in fact it’s all about God.
In the end, we have two stark choices in life. We either start with our desires and work up toward God, which distorts everything, or from God’s being, his character, to our desires. Charles Hodge explains these choices wonderfully:
Order and truth depend on things being put in their right relations. If we make the good of the creature the ultimate object of all God’s works, then we subordinate God to the creature, and endless confusion and unavoidable error are the consequence. It is characteristic of the Bible that it places God first, and the good of the creation second.
Hodge zeroes in on the heart of the issue and argues something that will not go over well with sinful human beings, especially with we moderns who live in the ubiquitous iEverthing culture:
Few principles . . . have been so productive of false doctrine and immorality as the principle that all virtue consists in benevolence, that happiness is the highest good, and that whatever promotes happiness is right.
He further says, that if we live this way, with this orientation, “every question which comes up for decision, is answered, not by a reference to the law of God, or to the instincts of his moral nature, but to the calculations of expediency.” In other words, we become calculating and manipulative, and the only issue is how it affects me, whether it makes me happy, whether it’s something I want or not. In the worst cases, the most important issues becomes how something makes me feel. Whether it’s right or wrong, whether God has commanded it or not, is irrelevant.
If we go back to the title, and sin helps us unlock the key to the meaning of the universe, what we see in human nature is exactly what we would expect to find if the story we read in our Bible is true. Right from the very beginning it all becomes so predictable. After man rebels against God in the garden, wanting to be his own God, to call the shots, what happens? Everything goes to hell. In the very next chapter, Genesis 4, Cain becomes jealous and angry and kills his own brother! Ultimately his anger is against God, but since he can’t kill God, he takes it out on his poor brother who hasn’t done anything wrong. Thankfully, in the biblical story God himself provides the answer. In other religions we have to work our way up to God, but in Christianity God himself came down to solve the problem of us ruining our lives with the fatal inward curve. Now we can practice true love that blesses us and others, and glorifies God.
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