Scripture: 1 John 1: 5-10, 1 Samuel 15: 22-23
Jonathan Edwards said, “Sin is the ruin and misery of the soul; it is destructive in its nature; and if God should leave it unrestrained there would need nothing else to make the soul perfectly miserable.” Edward’s classic sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, paints the picture of the gaping maw of Hell’s fiery pit, over which all humanity is suspended, in mid air. It is an exquisite and precarious picture; if you allow yourself to imagine what he is saying you are likely experience dreamlike vertigo, where you are falling with no end or flying and cannot come down. There are no gory images of torture in Edward’s description of Hell, only the chaos of our own sin and the consuming fire of God’s wrath. And in the midst of this vision is the hand of God, protecting us from our iniquity and His righteousness at the same time. The consuming fire is the natural result of our own sin, it is not a punishment visited upon unwitting pawns. You see in the world too many examples of utter wickedness and depravity to imagine that somehow the Devil needs anything other than the chaos in our own diseased souls to make a perfectly awful Hell.
Modern ears have a hard time with the medieval imagery of hellfire and brimstone and Edwards was a full blooded child of the enlightenment. He is in nowise the backwards and superstitious type, haunted by visions of dark dungeons and fiery chains. Jonathan Edwards was an educated man, an eloquent writer and preacher, whose primary considerations ran decidedly in a philosophical vein. But he also had faith in a righteous God, who could not abide human sin. He had the catechism in his heart from boyhood and he learned that sin was: “any want of conformity unto, or transgression of any law of God, given as a rule to the reasonable creature.” Therefore he knew that we are sinners, all of us. He was particularly pointed in his sermon to those who might have been sitting in his very pews that morning who were there for the wrong reasons, who were there feeling smug and secure in their “faithfulness.” These were the ones who committed the gravest sin, hearing the word and the law of God but thinking and living outside of the grace of Christ.
It shouldn’t take very much deep analysis to understand the inherent connection between Hell, the Devil and Sin, a sort of unholy trinity, perverted reflections of God’s triune goodness. They are inseparable and they function inversely to God’s action in the world. Sin is the unholy spirit, which resides in us and the only thing that can drive it out is the presence of God’s Holy Spirit. Christ is the savior, who ransoms us from Sin, Satan is the one who would consume us if we remain in Sin. Hell is everything outside God; it is by definition the absence of His presence. God is consciousness, creativity, will, intention, the presence that holds the universe in existence. Hell’s only desire is consumption, to devour, to destroy, its goal is to undo everything that God is and does and return to eternal chaos. In Sin we are aligning ourselves with that force, is it any wonder that God is angry with us?
Sin is things that we know we should do but do not; sin is things we do that we know we should not. God gives us ample information about what is right and wrong, even in the patterns of nature and in the shape of our consciences there are things that pan out into truth that crosses cultural divides. There are many different ways of enforcing moral and natural laws but the underlying principles are remarkably consistent: the sanctity of human life, the value of community, and a righteous desire for justice. These are important attributes of our Creator and they are revealed in what he has made. In all creation we are the only creatures who have the audacity or even the ability to violate them. Because we have the law of nature, the moral law and the law of Moses, any of them separately being enough to convict us of sin, we ought to know better but we go on in sin.
The Catechism has summed up the definition of sin but we live in a world where the concept of sin has been dismissed by many and poorly understood by nearly everyone. The fact of the matter is that if Jon Edwards got up and preached Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God in front of most modern American churches people would tune him out or leave thinking that he was a terrible bummer and then probably never go back. Never mind that it is probably one of the most skillfully crafted sermons you will ever read or hear, never mind that it is grounded in scripture, tradition, philosophy and literature, never mind that it speaks the word of the Gospel loud and clear and presents the audience with a clear choice between salvation and damnation. Too many people would negate the assumption that we are all sinners deserving of such punishment.
A study done by Ellison Research found that 87 percent of Americans believe, at least, in the concept of sin. Only 81 percent considered adultery to be a sin, 52 percent felt that homosexual activity was a sin, the same percentage felt that underreporting income to the IRS was a sin. Only 30 percent thought gambling was a sin followed closely by 29 percent who felt that telling a little white lie was a sin. Statistically that means that almost one in five people either don’t believe in sin at all or have such an underdeveloped sense of morality that adultery doesn’t exactly count as sin. These are probably the people who think everything’s pretty much okay as long as you don’t kill someone. Only a shade over half of us have anything close to a biblical conviction about sinful behavior. Less than a third of us would agree with Paul when he says that, “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God,” or John when he says, “if we say we are without sin then we lie and the truth is not in us.” Interestingly enough 74 percent of those surveyed felt that Racism was a sinful behavior, when Racism, as a moral category of right and wrong has really only existed for about 200 years, prior to say 1800 Racism was called patriotism or loyalty to ones tribe or people, the other two majority categories: use of hard drugs and abortion, are also fairly recent developments in the world of sin.
As old categories of sin seem to fade away, new ones come to take their place. It is as though the earth moves beneath our feet. But what if we were able to lock in on a fixed point with regard to sin? What if we could find a reference point that was not dependent on the legal codes and social mores of any given moment? What if we could find a more reliable benchmark than the malleable human conscience? We can but only by adopting the assumptions that God is our Creator and that our Creator has given us the capacity to understand Him as more than a set of religious regulations. Only if we understand that God has worked throughout the entire span of linear progression that we call history in order to resolve the “problem” of sin without removing our individuality and free will, will we be able to have the sort of bearings it’s going to take in order to experience eternity in a reality that is defined entirely by the presence of that Holy and terribly specific God.
Indeed if you try to enter God’s presence with the notion that you have somehow been good enough, you will experience the consuming fire in a way that is not at all pleasant. You will feel what Satan felt in Milton’s Paradise Lost when he saw angels talking: “Abashed the Devil stood and felt how awful goodness is.” But we have been given a choice and the choice is not at all difficult or oppressive. The option is to accept God as a gracious and loving God who was indeed willing to stand with us and to suffer even unto death on a cross. We can accept the offer of grace in Jesus Christ, which calls us to admit our sin, to admit our lack of conformity to God’s will, our violations thereof and to lean not on our own righteousness but to rest secure in the hands of an angry God because we know that His anger is born out of His majestic and unending love for us. If we trust that love then we trust that Jesus has redeemed us from the unending death that we deserve and has brought us into the eternal presence of God, not to be terrified for eternity but to be loved and perfected and finally to be free from all sin.
