“How good is that?”
If you could count all the sins committed on any given day on earth, and represent each one by tossing a tennis ball into those big freight train carriages, how many miles long do you think that train would be by days end? Some would insist, “‘Not that long. Only despots and moral deviants sin. Everything else is either poor judgement or accidental.” People typically react to sin in very simple terms: They Protect themselves. Denial is usually the first reaction. This may mask a sin, but it does not remove its existence. Blame is usually hard on the heels of denial. This may shift some of the initial embarrassment, but like all unpaid debts, ignoring it will only intensify the wrath to come.
One must ask why a generation so dismissive of the existence of sin spends so much time and effort protecting itself against it? Denial and blame are but two internal layers of defence. We lock our doors, we police our streets, and we protect our boarders against others who do us harm. “But that is ‘evil,’ not ‘sin,’” they argue. Which is a good point. When does evil become sin? However, that question assumes that evil is defined in human terms. And the more evil the act, the further along it is on the scale of bad behaviour; its scale being defined by cultural norms. This, of course, is evil ‘without God.’ Which begs the question, ‘How do we set moral norms—by what standard—if there is no moral absolute?’
The Bible does not hold back. God is holy and sin is described and laid out technicolour from one page to the next. Sin is said to alienate us from God. None of us, old enough to know better, are excused. We can deny it, we can blame others, we can mitigate its effects, but in the eyes of God we are all sinners—and proficient in the act thereof! Jesus didn’t die for righteous people, there are none. “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom.5:8). Confession, repentance and baptism will reconcile us to God. “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1Jn.1:9). Jesus is our only hope: “To Him who loves us and released us from our sins by His blood” (Rev.1:5b). He took the punishment for our sins upon himself on the cross. How good is that? No amount of carriages can exhaust his forgiveness.
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