WHAT DOES THE BIBLE SAY ABOUT SIN? - PART II
- brittbryan1001
- Feb 16, 2024
- 7 min read
And what does it mean that Jesus died "for our sins," and why does any of this matter?
My last blog was the first of a two-part series on the topic of "sin." Specifically, how we think about it and why that matters. I started with the question: what do YOU mean when YOU say sin? But that just led to more questions, like: What IS sin? And how SHOULD we think about sin? (Check out part 1 for the "answers" to those questions.)
In part 2, I want to build on that groundwork by exploring a few more questions:
What does the Bible say about sin?
What does it mean that Jesus died for our sins AND that we are saved from our sins?
And WHY does ANY of this matter for how I live my life??
WHAT DOES THE BIBLE SAY ABOUT SIN?
The Biblical narrative begins with the creation story and God placing Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, telling them to "be fruitful and multiply" (Genesis 1 and 2). God encourages them to eat from any tree they want with one exception: the “Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.”
Well, we all know how that story ends...and it doesn't take long. By page two of the Bible (Genesis 3), Adam and Eve have eaten the fruit from the one tree which they were explicitly instructed to avoid. And so, human rebellion and "sin" enter and corrupt God's good world, and as a consequence, humans were banished from the Garden of Eden.
Adam and Eve's "sin" was that they misunderstood their relationship to God. They wanted power in their own hands, which separated them from God and expelled them from garden.
Which is not unlike our "sin" today. For all of history, humanity has taken power into our own hands and corrupted God's good creation, causing sin and separation.
In other words, exile.
Exile is a crucial theme carried throughout the entire Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament), so it's worth outlining a brief summary of other exile examples throughout Scripture.
After the initial exile from the garden, humans immediately screw it up again, causing God to regret ever creating people to begin with, so He decides to press the reset button...with a flood.
But first, God makes a covenant with Noah, and tells his family to "be fruitful and multiply" (Eden language). After the waters recede, God promises He will never again destroy the earth with a flood (Genesis 5-9).
Sadly, Noah's crew turns out to be not as righteous as God had hoped. Already, things are not looking real promising for humans....
This story is immediately followed by the disaster of the tower of Babel. In short, humans rebelled AGAIN and their sin resulted in another exile (Genesis 11).
But God hasn't given up on humans yet. He tries the whole covenant thing again, this time with Abraham and Sarah, in the hopes that they will reverse the problem of the sinful human condition and become a new Adam and Eve. (Genesis 12-25).
God tells them that their descendants will be his "chosen people" (the nation of Israel), and if they follow his ways, they will be blessed and given the Promised Land (a New Eden).
Unfortunately, that doesn’t go quite as planned either.
(By now, we should be seeing the parallel between Adam and Eve and the nation of Israel.)
Moving on...
Fast-forward through Isaac, Jacob and Joseph…(Genesis 25-50) and after a brief period of prosperity for the Israelites, they end up in slavery in Egypt. Another exile.
Enter Moses (Exodus-Deuteronomy) to lead the Israelites out of Egypt and FINALLY into the Promised Land that was meant to be a New Eden; a place where people could meet with God’s divine presence again. It’s a happy ending!
Well, not so much.
RIGHT out the gate, the Israelites sin and rebel against God, so it doesn’t last long before they end up in exile again with the Assyrian captivity (2 Kings 17).
And this is just the highlight reel! Can you see how all these examples of sin and disobedience leading to exile mirror what happened in the garden?
Understanding the theme of exile as a natural consequence for Israel’s compulsive sin is crucial to understanding the overarching story the Bible is telling.
Despite Israel's prophets warning God's people that they were going astray, that their hearts had hardened, no one listened. They refused to learn from their mistakes and change course. And no leader that God raised up was up to the task. Until Jesus.
This backstory puts us in a better position to understand Jesus's mission. It also sets up and explains what happened on the cross and what it means that Jesus died “for our sins.”
OKAY SO, WHAT DOES IT MEAN THAT JESUS DIED "FOR OUR SINS"?
Before we get into what it means that Jesus died "for our sins," we need to recall that "sin" occurs when the way things were meant to be is not the way things are.
How should things be, then?
A great place to learn about the way we are meant to live can be found in Jesus's Sermon on the Mount. Or, read Paul's letter to the Philippians, especially Phil. 4:4-8.
Or, for another perspective, read Matthew 23, where Jesus condemns the religious leaders for appearing on the outside as righteous but on the inside, being full of hypocrisy and wickedness.
Or, in the words of American theologian, Cornelius Plantinga, Jr., shalom is the way things should be.
We think of shalom as peace. According to the Hebrew prophets of the Bible, shalom is the universal flourishing, wholeness, and delight among all God's creation. And because sin disrupts God's design and His law and interferes with the way things ought to be, sin violates shalom.
Plantinga, Jr. says that because God is FOR shalom, He is therefore AGAINST sin, which is why we cannot understand sin or shalom apart from God.
And so, to set things back to the way they should be, something must be done about sin. But....what??
There are some very loud (and angry) voices in the (fundamentalist) Evangelical world who will tell you that God needed to punish someone for the sins of the world. So, God chose his son Jesus to die on the cross instead of us, to take the full punishment that we deserved for our sins.
This comes, in part, from a hijacking of the most famous and most quoted verse in the entire Bible: John 3:16, and gets support from a theory called Penal Substitutionary Atonement.
The word “penal" literally means to prescribe the punishment for an offense under a legal system. Again, this implies that God doled out the punishment, and someone had to take that punishment, and Jesus drew the short straw.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of pastors and well-meaning influential people out there who push that message. And if we believe this, we will go to heaven when we die. If not, we go to the other place...
Photo Cred: fhcsportsreport.com
This theory is problematic for a lot of reasons. The most obvious one is that it leads to a twisted view of God. The kind of God who is so erratic and vengeful that he needs to punish and kill to satisfy his bloodlust...
How do you reconcile that God with the God who created all things and saw that it was all GOOD? The loving Father Jesus talks about? I personally can't.
But I have learned there is a way to shift our thinking of what happened on the cross, and it's a game-changer. (I talk about the different atonement theories in this blog.)
For me, the theory of Representative Substitutionary Atonement, although admittedly nuanced, is a better way to view God, and a better way to view what happened on the cross. Which is to say, Jesus went to the cross NOT to pay a penalty, but rather, he went into battle as our representative. He volunteered for it, like David against Goliath.
By going into battle as our representative, Jesus took all the sin of the world upon himself, let evil do its worst, and conquered it once and for all through his death and resurrection, so that the heavens and earth that were separated in Genesis can at long last be rejoined. He completed the task God’s people clearly could not do for themselves.
Jesus had to come literally save us from our sins.
BUT WHY EXACTLY DOES ANY OF THIS MATTER FOR HOW I LIVE MY LIFE?
Cultivating a healthy understanding of "sin" matters for how we read, understand, and apply the Bible to our lives. And hopefully I have made that case that the entire biblical story is God’s attempt to redeem and restore humans into right relationship with Him, and the life and message of Jesus shows us the way forward.
Understanding the purpose of the cross matters because it opens the door for us to recreate right relationships with one another and with the earth and all of creation. To take part in God's plan to set everything back to rights like things were before sin corrupted the world.
Most importantly, this matters because for Christians, this is our greatest hope. Hope that one day, everything will be made new again. Hope that there will be a new heavens and a new earth that is free of the sin that has separated us from God. It's our invitation to reenter the garden and to once again walk with God in the cool of the day, as was always His intention.
A final return from exile.
On a personal level, this conversation is of great importance because if I had this understanding of sin - and grace - when I was twenty years old, I would have saved myself (and others) a lot of heartache and grief. I would not have turned away from God (a story I tell in part 1).
Because what I now know about sin is that it does not get the final word. We are invited to repent. Which literally means to change direction or course. Instead of turning away from God when we sin, he asks us to turn back towards him.
This matters because it tells us there is no length God will not go to in order to be with us. There is no sin he won't forgive. Not because we deserve it, but because of grace.
What could matter more than that?
Sources I have found to be helpful on the topic of sin:
Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin by Cornelius Plantinga, Jr.
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