In this issue, we will deal with the doctrine of sin. It is impossible to cover every aspect of such a broad doctrine in the space available in this small publication. Nevertheless, we shall present articles covering sin’s nature, its results, its causes, and its solution. The central article in this issue of Christian Chronicles is entitled “The Problem of Evil,” and explores how a good and just God can allow evil in His perfect creation, without Himself being its cause, and how deftly and wisely and graciously He has chosen to deal with it.

Sin is so pervasive in the world, and has caused such a devastating curse to be executed in all the created realm, that we would be remiss if we did not explore the doctrine. Those who are saved ought not have any fear of the doctrine, but should examine it from the standpoint and perspective of citizens of heaven and members of the household of God, recognizing the sin in our own lives that put Jesus on the cross, but reveling in His grace toward those who also love Him.

Most of us start out resenting the chastening hand of God. That is why we are admonished not to despise it. Chastening, by its very nature, is unpleasant. We are already in an unspiritual state when it begins, and we do not start out by thinking that the bad things that befall us are from God. We judge it to be just dumb, bad luck. We grumble and complain, get angry and frustrated, and turn further into our wicked ways. Mostly, we are angry with God because we cannot find happiness. We should rather be angry with ourselves. But that comes later, when the chastening hand yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness. For the moment, everything that we touch seems to bring more misery, heartache, anguish, pain, frustration and sorrow. At some point, however, we begin to realize that God is dealing with us somewhat harshly, and we begin to examine our walk. Even then, we resist making the changes that we need to make until we fully grasp the notion that we cannot out-muscle God. He is bigger than we are.

Once we begin to see that it is God, correcting our walk and directing us onto spiritual paths, we’re on the road to recovery. If we were not so hard-headed, we might avoid much of the chastening. Most Christians have to be forced into God’s will, even though we do not like to admit that about ourselves. We don’t make changes until we are left with no other choice. When we’re in the flesh, we’re constantly trying to see what is around the next bend. On a spiritual pathway, there are no bends. It is a straight path to which we are called.

Intifada is too weak a word for what is going on in the Holy Land. What we have been seeing there for the past couple of weeks is not an uprising or a rebellion, but war. As many as sixty people may have died in the bombing of the Hilton Taba Hotel on October seventh, including women and children. As of this writing, the death toll is not final. Thirty bodies have been recovered, but thirty-eight are still missing. There were hundreds wounded. The Hilton Taba is in the Sinai, but is a resort heavily frequented by Israelis.

Palestinian militants have been firing Kassam rockets into Israeli communities over the heads of the Israeli troops who have been besieging the Gaza Strip. The Jerusalem Post reported on October 8, 2004: “In the past eight days, more than 80 Palestinians have been killed. Troops have hit nine Kassam rocket squads, foiled eight bomb-placing teams, and killed five anti-tank rocket cells. While the army has aggressively targeted Kassam rocket squads and bomb-placing cells and armed infiltrators, about a third of the casualties were reportedly civilians, including many children.” In spite of the increasing attacks by the Israeli Defense Forces, the Palestinians are stepping up the level of their own attacks.

Scores of armored vehicles and tanks patrol the streets of the Gaza Strip, and armed IDF soldiers remain in the area, and the Israeli public thinks that this is not enough. In fact, it is not enough. The land is Israel’s, and does not belong to the Palestinians. The fact that the United Nations partitioned that land in 1948, granting Israel statehood does not have any bearing on the promises of God. It is simply the devil’s own attempt to thwart God’s plan. The Palestinians and other among the Arab states still would like to push Israel into the Mediterranean Sea and do away completely with the Jewish state. It is the modern equivalent of Pharaoh killing the male children of Israel in Egypt, or Herod killing the male babies after our Lord was born in Bethlehem.

When Adam ate the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, his innocent nature became utterly depraved. His heart rebelled against God, and that same rebellion has been passed on to every succeeding generation. There has not been a child born since the Fall who has not been sinful.

Furthermore, every human being has the knowledge within himself that he is a sinner, and that a just God must judge his sins. Because their deeds are evil, men shy away from God, fearing the judgment that they believe awaits them. Those who deny it are generally those who most fear God’s judgment.

Let us suppose that Adam and Eve had done that immediately after eating the forbidden fruit, even before sewing the fig leaves together. They might have been in the Garden of Eden for millennia before the Fall. We really do not know how long they were in the Garden before they sinned. All those endless ages of worshiping God, of communing with Him, of walking and talking with Him in the Garden of Eden in the cool of the day, as was their custom; all this would weigh the right side of the list heavily in their favor. The list might be might be miles long on the right side, and there would be but one thing on the left side: “We ate the forbidden fruit.” How many sins did they have to commit to outweigh the right side of the balance sheet? One. That is all that it takes to be lost. No matter the weight of the “good” side of our balance sheets, one sin is all that it takes to cancel out all of our good deeds. We take sin far too lightly indeed, not reckoning correctly the infinite righteousness of our God.

But let us suppose that a person was truly honest, and the left side of his balance heavily outweighed the right side. In fact, let us say that he had nothing at all good on the right side, and the left side were miles long. Could that man be saved? Could he get into heaven though he admitted being such a sinner? The answer, of course, is yes. There would have to be one entry listed on the right side that would outweigh all the sins on the left side: “I believe that the blood that Jesus shed at Calvary paid the full penalty of the Law in my stead.” Sin is horrific enough that it required the death of God Himself, in the Person of Christ, to do for man what man could not do for himself. He had to pay the penalty for our sins. When one appropriates that sacrifice for himself, then the right side of his balance sheet contains all of the righteousness of God Himself, and he is thereby saved, the left side being canceled by Christ’s death.

Accusing and excusing. Aren’t we all guilty of that? We accuse those who commit sins that we do not commit, and excuse those whose sins are similar to our own. Big sins and little sins. Can a little white lie be compared to mass murder? Is marital infidelity worse than stealing a package of chewing gum? How do we go about determining which sins are the worst and which aren’t so bad?

Let’s think about it. What was so bad about Adam and Eve eating a piece of fruit? If you were told that you shouldn’t eat an apple (it wasn’t an apple that Adam and Eve ate), and you ate it anyway, would that seem such a great offense that you should be condemned to eternal torment? No, it wouldn’t seem to be that great an offense. And in fact, it wasn’t. It wasn’t the eating of the forbidden fruit that caused them to fall. No, it was the decision that they made in their hearts to defy God, to rebel against Him. God’s righteousness and sovereignty took a back seat to their own reason and their own will, and they put themselves in the position of judging God, making Him smaller than themselves. The character of sin is such that an omniscient God is rendered lower than that which He created.

At the outset, we cannot emphasize too strongly the necessity of understanding the mind of God, as revealed in the words of God. In these apostate days there is an insistence upon a change of evangelical phraseology. Ruin by the Fall, redemption by the blood, are deemed to be out of date. Terms like “sin,” being “lost,” “hell-bound,” “saved by the blood,” are no longer intelligible to the modern, cultured mind. Such language is antiquated. Old truths must be given a modern dress. But no matter how we try to camouflage sin, it is still SIN.

If we honestly desire to know the mind of God regarding any truth, we must examine the words He uses to describe it. This method, of course, brings us to the acceptance of verbal inspiration or the inspiration of the Holy Spirit affecting the very words, as well as the matter of Scripture. Of this we are absolutely certain, that God was very careful in leading men to express sublime truths in the most correct words, even though we now have many translations endeavoring to interpret those words.

Coming to the Bible’s estimation of sin, there is no study so illuminating. And our obligation is to study such a theme, not from the moral standards of society, but from God’s standpoint. Sin occupies a most conspicuous place in the Word. In fact, one is both surprised and appalled at the space given to such an intrusion into God’s universe. Under the divine searchlight of the Word, the ramifications of evil in the human heart are revealed as being varied and intricate. It is only as we discover the heinous nature of sin that we can rightly extol Him who came to save us from its curse and condemnation.

THE NATURE OF SIN…The teaching of the Old Testament on this subject is both solemn and searching. Sin originated with the devil, before he became a devil, and entered the world through Adam, and became universal (Romans 5:12), resulting in physical and spiritual death (Genesis 2:17; Romans 6:23). Man is born to sin (Psalm 51:5); but not born a slave to sin. He becomes the latter by voluntarily yielding to sin (Romans 6:16). Man is a sinner by birth, but is not responsible for this. When he becomes a sinner by practice, then he is responsible to God and others for sin committed.

THE REMEDY FOR SIN. Man’s concept of sin has a direct bearing and influence upon his understanding of the need and nature of salvation. Low thoughts never produce high thoughts of God. The Biblical concept of sin is a kind of rule by which we measure the necessity for a Savior. The revelation of the loathsomeness of the abominable thing God hates, brings with it a realization of a divine deliverance. And such is the rich and full provision for sin God has made, that its power can be nullified. The Holy Spirit makes it so clear that Christ alone is able to counteract the evil of the old nature by the implantation of a new nature. He bore our curse. He provides our cleansing. He is our healer. He is our deliverer. He remakes us. He produces goodness. He is the truth. He is the light. He is rest. He is satisfaction. He is our righteousness.

The Biblical concept of sin, therefore, carried with it—

Redemption is a work of undoing and in nothing does the glory of our Savior appear more manifest than in the way He deals with the havoc wrought by sin (I John 3:8). Where sin abounds – grace much more abounds. By His finished work, Christ overcomes all the effects of sin. God the Son alone can deal with the sin of man. Christ came into the world to save sinners. He died for our sins, according to the Scripture. He arose from the dead, and is now in heaven, seated at the right hand of the Father, serving as the Advocate for all who believe.

In the first place, the notion that a thing is evil is a subjective argument. What one person deems to be evil, another might consider to be wonderful. For example, let us assume that a high iron worker falls and breaks his back. Let’s say that he has a family of six, many debts, and no disability income insurance, and that he will be paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of his life. We would consider that a tragic situation. He will never climb the high steel again, nor provide a luxurious lifestyle for his family. The hearts of the world would go out to him, and all the more if he were a nice man. There might even be a fundraiser in his hometown. His friends would commiserate with him and his family would wring their hands with worry.

But suppose that this cripple, after a period of emotional adjustment, discovered a latent talent for painting that he’d never known he had. Suppose that he began painting with an ardor unsurpassed in the last five hundred years, and that he produced a large volume of wonderfully beautiful works that make him a rich man, famous and sought after by every top museum, gallery and collector.

At the end of his life, as he looked back over the years of his life, would he consider that accident a good thing or a bad thing? Clearly, at first, he would have thought it a terrible evil that had befallen him. Did his thinking it was evil make it evil indeed? Did his reconsideration of the event at the end of his life make that which was evil become good? Often, anything out of the norm is considered evil, when it is merely different. Was God evil if He allowed the accident to occur? Or was He kind and beneficent to the man, providing an opportunity that the man would never have availed himself of had he remained “healthy?”

Let’s look at this from another angle. Let us suppose that a fellow worker shoved him off the iron beam because he thought, incorrectly, that the nice fellow had harmed him in some way. After all, an accident may not be considered evil if we assume that an evil intent must exist in order for a thing to be evil, rather than merely random events. If the man simply lost his balance and fell, we might blame God, but if someone pushed him, then there was definitely evil involved, if not in the fall itself, then in the heart of the one who pushed him. Would God become evil for allowing the evil that was in the heart of the one who pushed him? Does the end justify the means? The fellow, after all, went on to become famous even though he was pushed.

What we think of as evil is often serendipitous at worst. Sometimes it is the greatest blessing that we will ever receive. It cannot be said that God cannot exist if evil exists. However, God does claim in the Bible that all things work together for the good of those who love Him. Being eternal, God is not caught up with time the way we are, and He doesn’t arrange His providence according to our schedules. The man may have been twenty-one when he was injured, and fifty-one when he discovered his artistic skills. Or, let us assume that he was never recognized in his own life, but that his name became revered as one of the world’s greatest painters only years after his death, so that among every following generation of his descendants he was proudly remembered, and in the world, his name rivaled Rembrandt’s or Picasso’s. Would that have made the fall an evil thing or a good thing?

Our judgment of good and evil is a subjective thing, based upon conditions existing at the time the judgment is rendered, not considering what may result from the thing. Was the thirty years of suffering, ignorant of his painting talent, too high a price to pay for a name that survived the ages, and for the high reverence and esteem in which his name would be held throughout the generations of his descendants?

But what of the evil in the heart of the perpetrator of this evil deed? How can a just God allow that evil to exist? Justice has no meaning without both good and evil. If there were only good, we could not know what good is, and justice would become an irrelevancy. Without evil, there is no comparison, since any subtraction from good represents evil. Therefore, in a perfect world, we could not know either good or evil.

Is God just, then, to allow evil? Yes, because God judges every evil deed. God can certainly allow evil to exist if He also consistently judges every evil thing. Many assume that, because He has not yet judged every evil deed, God is not just, and cannot, therefore, exist as God. This is based upon the assumption that, because He has not yet judged evil, evil will not ever be judged. As long as the execution of judgment is certain, it does not matter the timing or the sequence of events that brings it to pass. Besides, those who say that God has not judged evil err in their thinking. He judged every evil thought and act of man at Calvary. The angelic realm will yet be judged, just prior to the great white throne judgment at the end of the millennial kingdom. In the judgment before the great white throne, all those who have not accepted the judgment executed upon Christ as sufficient to pay for their sins will be judged, whether their denial of that salient fact was prospective, in failure to offer blood sacrifices prior to the cross, or retrospective, in denial of the sufficiency of the sacrifice of the Lamb of God to satisfy the demands of the Law of Moses.

However, if God were God, He would not be subject to our weak reasoning. Neither would He be bound by our considerations of time. For, in order to be God, He would have to be eternal, else He would have been created by some still higher Being, in which case He could not be God, but the other Being would be God. As long as God eventually judges the perpetrator of the evil deed, He remains a just and good God, both using the evil in the other man’s heart to bless the one who became the artist, and judging the one who performed the evil deed. And how wise is God, who not only is just in judging evil, but who is also the Justifier of the one who has faith in the sacrifice of Christ? Who also works all things for the good of His children. What a great God we serve so poorly.

Thus, God not only can exist while there is evil, but He can be just while executing judgment upon sin, and still not executing that judgment upon the one who actually committed the evil deed, but upon Himself in the sinner’s stead. How much more good shall our God be, who executes judgment upon our evil deeds, not upon us, but upon Himself? We see, then, that God is both just and good, existing at the same time as evil, judging the evil, but offering redemption to the evil-doer.

Not only can God exist while there is evil, He must allow at least the possibility of evil to exist. Since any God who is actually God would necessarily be worthy of the worship of His creation, it is necessary that He allow for the possibility of that worship not being accorded Him. Otherwise, everyone would be forced to worship Him by a nature that had no choice in the matter, and that would not be worship at all, but the operation of a machine, or a puppet. Involuntary worship is not worship at all. When God created the angels, He had to allow for their rebellion, else there would have been no glory in their creation. And when God created Adam and Eve, it was also necessary for them to have a choice as to whether or not they would worship Him. While it was not necessary that either the angels who fell or the humans who sinned afterward should make the possibility of evil become a reality, it was necessary for that possibility to exist if there was to be any meaning in the creation at all. For, without the possibility of evil, there would be no yardstick of the good, and all would lose its meaning.

C.S. Lewis states the case for God co-existing with evil for a time this way:

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man doesn’t call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man isn’t a water animal: a fish wouldn’t feel wet. Of course I could have given my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that then my argument against God collapsed too—for the argument depended upon saying that the world was really unjust, not that it just didn’t happen to please my private fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God didn’t exist—in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless—I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality—namely my idea of justice—was full of sense. Consequently, atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as if there were no light in the universe, and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know that it was dark. Dark would be a word without meaning. (The Case for Christianity [New York: Macmillan, 1943] pp 34-35)

 

Bob and Gretchen Passantino state their objection to the skeptics’ position thus:

...we need to consider the consequences of accepting the skeptic’s alternatives: Suffering proves that God does not exist, or He is not all-powerful, or He is not all good. If God does not exist, then all of existence, including our suffering, has no enduring value, purpose or goal. If God is not all-powerful, then we have no hope that suffering will ever be eliminated. If God is not all-good, then to pain and despair we must add the threat of immanent divine sadism. Each of the alternatives is at least as problematic as the Christian alternative, so the skeptic has merely exchanged one answer he doesn’t like for others equally unpleasant. The skeptic has not solved the problem of suffering merely by refusing to solve it. We should judge answers by truth, not emotion.

(http://www.answers.org/Apologetics/suffering.htm)

 

God, when He created the angelic realm, did not create any sin in them. He saw that His entire creation was good. However, as earlier shown, in order for the angels’ worship to truly be worship, they had to possess the ability not to worship God if they so chose. The angelic creation was made to be God-centered. When their thoughts turned self-centered, they rebelled against God, making themselves His enemies. God was not surprised by this event. Being an eternal Being, God knew every detail of the entire span of time before He created it. He knew from the deepest, darkest reaches of eternity that the angels would sin. Why did He then proceed with the creation? Was God responsible for the sin that entered the universe by the creation of beings whom He knew would sin? No. For if one has a choice, a prerogative that is his alone, another cannot be held responsible for the exercise of that prerogative, though it results in something evil. There is a difference between causing evil and allowing it. Lewis Sperry Chafer, in an extended quote, remarks:

The problem of evil in the world is a problem created, not by the hand of God, but by the hands of those whom He created in perfection and righteousness. It was necessary for God to create both angels and mankind with the capacity to do evil, in order that they might have the opportunity to do right willingly. As long as every evil deed is judged, God remains both just and good, and His merciful lovingkindness is demonstrated in His judgment of the evil deeds of man upon Himself and not upon mankind.