Sin, God and That Which Separates

“To say that God turns away from the wicked is the same as to say that the sun hides itself from those who lose their sight”.– St Anthony the Great, desert sage (251–356 AD)“When you shut your eyes, your world goes dark. But it is not because the Sun ceases to shine. God is light; there is no darkness in God. We can close our eyes and cut ourselves off from this light. We can become ‘alienated in our minds’. Yet, God’s love remains consistent, unchanging, unfailing — shining like the sun. If only we would open our eyes again. Then our lives would be illuminated by love.”- Dean Johnston

When I was a young Christian, I was taught the four spiritual laws as a way of explaining the Gospel. The second law was that you are inherently sinful, that your sin has separated you from God and that you are therefore deserving of eternal punishment in hell.

I no longer believe that.

I am convinced that our sin does not separate us from God in this sense. That doesn’t mean that Jesus’ sacrifice was in vain. What it does mean is that the death of Jesus was more because of our sins than for them. And it depends on what we mean by the word, ‘separate’.

The concept that our sin separates us from God eternally comes largely out of Augustinian thinking which promotes the concept of original sin.

Out of this has come a whole theology which is transactional in nature and just doesn’t reflect the loving, personal and relational nature of the God of Jesus.

God is fundamentally a God of relationship. If you have a son or daughter, and that son or daughter chooses to cut off their relationship with you, they are of course separated from you. But it is a separation of the relationship, not a legal transaction that demands punishment if you don’t come back. You are still their parent, and always will be.

Paul reminds the Athenians in Acts 17 that we are all made by God and fumble around until we find God. Paul then explains that God is not far from any one of us, whether we acknowledge God or not. Following that, in quoting their own poets, Paul says that we are God’s offspring and that we are then called to repent and live out the life that God has called us to.

Which part of “nothing” are we missing?

When I was a young believer, one of the passages that completely transformed my sense of who I am was the wonderful news at the end of Romans 8 that nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus. That includes our sin. If it doesn’t, which part of “nothing” are we missing?

In the original Greek translation of the New Testament, the term for ‘sin’ refers to missing the mark. It is good that has gone astray. In that sense we are all marred by sin, and the more we are marred by sin, the less Christlike we are, the less human we are.

When Paul laments in Romans 7 that he doesn’t do what he wants to do and does do what he doesn’t want to do, he says it is the sin in him that makes him do that. It’s not he himself who does it. The true Paul, the true self, is the person made in the image of God with full dignity. As Max Lucado has said, we are to ‘live loved, to live as though we are the people God has made us to be. That is, we are to live as followers of the One in whom God was made flesh, who calls us to love our neighbour as ourselves.

The fact is that when I sin, I certainly feel separate from God. That’s because I’ve gone against my values and the way God has designed me to live. But God has not cut us off and is not beholden to some external concept of ‘justice’ that demands punishment if we don’t come back. God Himself is justice. God actively pursues us, woos us like a lover woos their beloved.

You’re no match for God’s grace

The great news I’ve experienced in my life is that God’s grace is far more powerful than any sin within me. As Jack Miller has said,

Jesus is far better at redeeming than you are at sinning. You are no match for God’s grace.

So you can stop trying to punish yourself for your sins.

This is something I’ve had to come to grips with over many years. I’ve had to deal with a great deal of shame when it comes to how I’ve violated the greatest commandment of Jesus to love God and love my neighbor as myself.

One of the great healing moments I experienced around this was listening to the wonderful Brennan Manning talk about the story of the prodigal son.

In all of the son’s remorse over his straying to a far country, and his preparing a speech for his father upon his return, all the father was thinking and feeling was, “I just want you back”. We don’t need to come back with perfect motivation. God simply says, “Just come back!”.

We are all made in the image of God. While sin has marred that image of God within us all, it hasn’t totally destroyed it. Through the grace of God and surrendering to God, we are transformed more into the image of Christ. We are made more human, more the people who God designed us to be.

The concept of original sin has a lot to answer for. We are not inherently separated from God from birth. We are inherently made in the image of God. Yes, we are marred by sin, but that doesn’t cut us off from God eternally. Jesus didn’t come to save us from a fiery eternal hell. He came to inaugurate his kingdom right here on Earth as in heaven. His kingdom is the reign of God: love, justice, peace, the Jewish concept of shalom. Jesus’ prayer was that God’s kingdom come on Earth as it is in heaven.

That kingdom, that reign of God, is both personal and social. It is personal in the sense that we respond to God’s kindness through turning away from our sin and deciding to follow Jesus in love of neighbor. It’s in that sense that it’s also social because love by its very nature is social.

God loves you and has never been far from you. We just think that God has been far from us because of our sin. All we need to do is decide to follow the call of the One who simply says, “I just want you back”.