Sin, God, Us

Sin has marred everything. That’s what I started this journey explaining. Sin has messed up everything. It’s infected as a virus, as a pungent smell of rancid meat, feel free to come up with your own illustration, whatever it is for you the fact remains it marred the face of creation.

Our relationships with everything changed the moment that sin entered the world. Our relationship with God, self, nature, and others all changed.

God.

Genesis 3:9-10 “Then the LORD God called to Adam and said to him, ‘Where are you?’ So he said, ‘I heard Your voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; and I hid myself.’”

How had the relationship changed so badly? This was Adam, the one who had walked with God, who had communed with him, who got to hang out in God’s creation, and now he was hiding from his friend, his creator … his God. What a shift. It feels like my last date ;-) … you know the kind ... things are great and poof it turns on ya, and your like “what changed??” God had to be hurt at the shift of relationship. His creation had turned on him seemingly instantaneously. But this was worse than “Aaron you’re a great guy but I just want to be friends …” no this was “God you’re ok, but we want to control our own lives.

And now Adam is scared of God. He’s naked and hiding from the one who sees him more clearly than anyone else. The relationship is suffering because Adam is pulling away, and it starts in motion the dangerous effects of sin. This really is the root of our problems. We have a marred image of God. Look a few verses earlier as Satan tries to get eve to eat the fruit, what does he use? He tries to change her image of God. When our view of God is messed up, then our are quick to follow.

Self

Genesis 3:11-12 “And he (God) said, ‘Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?’
Adam finally realized that he was naked. He noticed that there was something wrong with this state. Odd that it didn’t bother him before sin, but now he was shamed and he hid. This is the second state that sin corrupts. We first have a corrupted view of God and we subsequently have a tarnished view of self. No one had to tell Adam that he was naked now, he just knew it. And something inside of him said he should hide because God was coming.
So many “worm theologies” want to show us how small we are, and how big God is. And in a sense they are right, however there must be a balance. We were created in the image of God, and we are something special. We are the only beings I am aware of that get to commune with God of our own free will. We get to love him and have him love us. We get to worship him and have him inhabit our praise. I am not advocating a false sense of grandeur for humans, nor am I advocating we all run around naked; however I am advocating a healthy sense of self worth. Not only were we created by God to be in his image but when that image was marred he crafted an elaborate plan to bring us back.
When our concept of God is marred, then we immediately move to a poor concept of self. At this point the sin cycle is out of control. God becomes this judgmental, all-powerful, all-judging critic. He is the all-seeing eye of Mordor from Tolkien’s Ring trilogy, looking for one sin so he can smite us as the all-mighty smiter. Once we start to view God like in this way, we become these little slugs who always have to look over our shoulder for our salt wielding creator. Any time our view of God becomes marred we immediately have a marred view of his creation, starting with ourselves.


(Next post Creation and others.)

Of Sin and Hamburger

With the recent fall of Ted Haggard, I believe the issue of sin has been brought the forefront of the Christian and moreover Evangelical mind like never before (or at least since the last scandal). A man at the front lines seemingly fighting against sin and its consequences gets caught up in the very sin that he preached so strongly against.

My heart breaks for a man like that. One who got swept away into the darkness of sin and became addicted to the secretive nature of living a life that was not consistent with what he was preaching. As I waded through the stories and news articles images of past leaders, friends, and mentors flashed across the movie reel in my mind. Each memory still painful and dreamlike, yet very real.

Sin affects everything. That is where any discussion on holiness or full salvation must start. Since the fall of man sin has infested every relationship, thought, concept of self, action, natural object, and concept of God. All of these have been marred by sin entering the world.

A few weeks ago I was given a task, an objective, a mission that was pressed upon whether I chose to accept it or not. The plan was to take six tubes of hamburger meet out of our freezer at home, maneuver them into a plastic bag and transport them from my house to my grandmother’s house five blocks away. Accordingly, I counted out six tubes of hamburger, placed them in a plastic bag and into the back of my mothers van, and transferred them to my grandmother freezer, once again counting out all six tubes. My task was completed … or so I thought.

Four days later my father asked me to take my mothers van to church and put gas in it on the way back home, so my mom would be able to drive it to work the next day. As I stepped into the van I noticed a certain … aroma, which was permeating the air. Perhaps “aroma” is not the proper word. I feel as if “nasty stench of rancid meat” would more aptly describe the odor.
I couldn’t figure out what could have made the smell, therefore I drove to church and led worship for the youth group not giving the smell another thought. After service my father was in the parking lot, and I explained to him that there was a certain aroma in the van and I felt as if, perhaps, we should check it out. My uncle asked what it smelled like and I replied something to the effect of “much like rancid meat.” As Uncle Jim opened the door he confirmed that “Yes,” the smell did smell “much like rancid meat.”

After a thorough search, we found the culprit. It was a seventh tube of hamburger meat that somehow snuck into the van (I am presently blaming it on Zoe … my year and a half old black lab). The package was swollen with hamburger juice ebbing from the top. The smell was awful and the look was almost as bad. I threw the package away and felt as if my job was done. However, I found 3 days later when I got in the van, that my job was not done. Although the meat was gone the stench still lingered. And what a stench it was. Seven bottles of Febreeze and two cans of air freshener later, I still had a problem. Finally, I had to shampoo the entire carpet. I had to unbolt the seat and remove all of the nasty juice that had soaked into the carpet. Just removing the meat was not enough; I had to get to the root of the problem.

I believe that sin is the same way. We should not and cannot be content with just forgiveness (getting the meat out of our lives). There must be a deeper cleaning that makes the smell go away. If all God was capable of doing was getting the meat out, but the stench of sin and decay was always there, we would not believe in a very powerful God. Sin must be dealt with on all levels because it infects all levels of life.


(next blog the four fold problem of sin)

Virus

My dad’s computer caught a virus … like a bad virus. I don’t really know how. There is a bit of speculation as to how the virus got on the computer, but the fact of the matter is it did. It’s there and there is nothing we could do to get it off. Oh and we tried. We deleted things, downloaded things, reloaded and restored things, but it was there set in and actually getting worse. You see this particular worm multiplies and gets in so deep that there is nothing that you can do to fix it. Even if you turn off the computer and tap F10 when the computer comes back on, to try and make it go to factory settings … nada. So how you ask do I get this stupid worm out of my computer … this worm that has infected everything, every program registry, system, and causes my computer to act in ways it shouldn’t … how do I fix that problem?

Apparently there is a disk. A disk that comes from the outside. A disk that in a sense is connected to my computer and is an embodiment of my computer programs, in that it has the code of the programmer on it. When you put this disk in, the computer goes back to what it was created to be without the virus. A fully functioning complete computer.

To me the doctrine of Original Sin (OS) was odd. I couldn’t really grasp why it was so important to understand that nothing good could come from me. I took me a while to understand that I was infected with the virus of sin. So much so that only when something (moreover someone) from the programmer was inserted would I become a fully functioning complete human. We weren’t made to be a mess. We weren’t made to be incomplete. However when sin entered the world it dirtied everything. Every program, every restore, every system, became infected. However, God in his mercy came down and was “inserted” into the world, and although he was connected with the world and embodied all it meant to be human, he conquered the virus.

So what does that mean? How much of the virus could God conquer? I don’t know how long I will be doing this but I think I’m going to use my next few blogs to put my thoughts on “Full Salvation” down before I move on with a few more sections of the Peter Book. Thanks for indulging me.