Sin By Any Other Name ...


A little girl was asked by her Sunday school 
teacher, "What's the first thing we must do if we want to be forgiven?"

"We have to sin."

Correct. But that isn't our problem. We have all sinned, says the Scripture;
the two questions are, how did we get into that 
condition, and how can we avoid it? If we think 
of sin merely as a long list of things we don't 
want to do anyway, we are missing, not only the 
truth, but also the chance to be forgiven. Sin, 
as Paul says, is both wide and deep. It's not a 
simple thing. It deserves serious thought.

Paul uses two words---trespass and sin. Trespass 
is a willing violation of a known law. When the 
sign says, "Keep off the grass", and I walk on it 
anyway, that is a trespass. We know something is wrong, but we do it anyway.

On the other hand, the most common word for sin 
in the New Testament means: "missing the 
mark."  That seems a little less fearsome. We 
wanted to do right, but we simply failed.  After 
all, we are human. Could it be that we fail 
because we will to do so? We made a choice, and 
the choice was to do something wrong. Then we do, 
indeed, fail, and become frustrated. We sin, but 
perhaps it is also a sin of omission. We know 
what should be done, but the cost of obedience is too great.

On the other hand, sin may appear so glamorous 
and rewarding, that we are tempted to 
disobedience. Granted, we, as Christians, tend to 
blame our human nature for our sin. That is the 
way we are---we "fall short of the glory of God," 
just as Paul said we would. (1 Corinthians 3:23). 
But if we're totally honest, We have to realize 
that most of our failure comes because we 
deliberately trespass---we go against what we 
know. The warning may be ever so slight, but it 
is there. And when we go against it, we miss the 
mark of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.

Much of our sin is our "being," but much is also 
in our behavior. Paul gets to this later in his letter to the Ephesians.

Most errors in personal theology come from 
imbalance. When we emphasize any side of any 
issue and ignore the other, we distort the truth. 
In fact, Paul says that we "change the truth of 
God into a lie." (Romans 1:25). In the question 
of sin, it is easy to emphasize one side of the 
responsibility, and ignore the other. We can say 
that we do what we do because of what we are, and 
that is, in a sense, true. Or we can say that we 
are what we are because of what we do, and that is also true.

The only true balance is that of Scripture, which 
emphasizes both the grace of God and the obedience of man.

Can it be that we have died, and no one has 
bothered to write an obituary? It is only after 
we have been energized by the life of Christ, 
that we recognize the seriousness of our 
condition. When the psalmist talks about the 
horrible pit from which he was dug, he is already 
out of it. At the time, he didn't know that he 
was in a pit; perhaps he thought that "all the 
world" was miry clay. After all, a fish in the 
ocean doesn't know that he is wet.

It is no accident that Paul addressed his letter to the saints in Ephesus.
The other people would not have listened to it. 
Only those pronounced "holy" by the grace of God 
respond to his call to pursue holiness. The 
others don't know that they are unholy, and have no ambition to become holy.

In their deadness, they paint the corpse with flesh tones and imagine that

this is life.  When a popular entertainer commits suicide, all the

couch-potato commentators say, "There was no reason for this, he had

everything to live for."  Everything, that is, but life.

I saw a magazine cover that displayed a well-dressed, beautiful young woman.

She was saying, "I have an ocean-front apartment, interesting, well-paid

work, my sex life is great, and my roller skates cost one hundred dollars.

Why do I feel like I am missing something?"

Why, indeed?  She's dead.  For a few thousand years, Egyptian mummies have

resided in their wooden boxes, looking as lifelike as they did when they

sailed on the Nile. But they are dead.

It is doubtful that the inhabitants of a cemetery argue much about

which one has the most elaborate tombstone.

In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul lists the causes of death.  He conducts

a spiritual autopsy, a post-mortem.  There are two reasons this is important.

First, we can look back and see where we went wrong in the first place, and

then we can look to see where other people go wrong so that we can avoid

their error.  Both reasons are valid.  What is the germ of sin?  How are we

dazzled by its attractiveness and then blinded by its

power to its consequences?

We all know that the more we are acquainted with sin, the less we

know about it.

The world is too much with us, Late and soon.

Getting and spending, We lay waste our powers

(poem The World Is Too Much With Us, William

Wordsworth).

When the poet Wordsworth wrote these words, he 
was not thinking of Ephesians particularly, but 
he certainly voiced a rule that applies whether we are talking

about the believer or the unbeliever. We "walk in the course of the

world" (Eph. 2:2).

What is worldliness?

To my generation, being brought up in a conservative Swedish home in the

Midwest, it was easy to identify worldliness.  Anyone who had a great deal

more of this world's goods, looked stylishly pampered; was worldly.  I shall

never forget the Christmas morning my mother threw a deck of cards into the

stove. They were "Old Maid" cards.

For my mother they symbolized

gambling-and gambling was worldly.

Before I move on, I want to say that I don't think my mother was

particularly wrong.  I am not endorsing gambling or frivolously spending one's

time.  But there is more to worldliness than this.

New Testament writers tell us that we are to "love not the world, neither

the things that are in the world" (1 John 2:15) and "the friendship of the

world is enmity against God" (James 4:4).

This is the battlefield. Jesus seems to say we are to be in the world, but

not of the world (see John 17:11-16).  What did he mean by that?

Certainly the world of nature is not evil---God made it and said that it was

good.  Natural law is not evil.  God made it also.  What, then, is

wrong about the world?

It must be that the world's nearness corrodes our spiritual sensitivity.  It

lets us see so much with our natural eyes that we are not tempted to look

with spiritual vision.  We understand so much with our human minds that the

temptation is to believe that we can understand everything

with our natural minds.

Or is it the aging of our temperament?

The course of the world---we hear the thunder of a thousand feet and cannot

resist joining the parade.  The urge to conform must rise from our basic

insecurity.  We do not trust our inner vision, so we live by

the goals of others.

We live to keep up with the Jones’s and the Jones’s desperately try to keep

with the expectations of those who are trying to keep up with them.  It is a

deadly cycle.  It is the cycle of death.

Gary Moore told me of an experiment made by the French scientist Fabré.

Some processionary caterpillars (so called because of their tendency to follow

each other) were placed around the rim of a saucer.  In the middle of the

saucer were placed mulberry leaves, such as caterpillars love to eat.  But

the caterpillars were busy following each other, 'round and round' the rim

of the plate.  Within sight of food, they starved to death.  Paul talks about

this.  The way of the world is a way of death whether it is the first century

or the twenty-first.

We must live in this world, it is true, but we must not live as though it

were the only one!  Again and again we are reminded of Paul's

other-worldliness.  He had seen beyond the rim of time, both into the past

and into the future and he was never the same.  Whatever trials there may be

in this world, they were not enough to keep him from his goal.  Whatever

glories there were in this world-and certainly Paul must have known moments

of exquisite joy and fulfillment---they were not 
grand enough to make him want to remain in this world forever.

Francis Thompson, who wrote The Hound of Heaven, was once criticized by a

contemporary who said that Thompson never really felt at home in this

present world.  The answer came back that while 
it might be true of Thompson, the shame was that 
too many people who call themselves Christian do feel

at

home in this world.

When we look at past Christian martyrs, we may think, "The church has

finally found its place in the world, because not many are martyred for

their faith today.  The church has finally found its place in the world."

Could it be that the world has finally found its place in the church?

It is possible.