I have been led to delve deeper into the question of ‘What is sin?’ over the past few weeks, what it means to God and how does He view it and what does He expect from us and also what He has done for us through the Atonement of Jesus on the Cross. What I share here is for my own life as much as for yours and I really pray that the Lord will open your heart to see the immense seriousness of this issue that is so often ‘brushed under the carpet’ or ‘glossed over’, so to speak.
The Lord has taken me to Oswald Chambers and I in turn share with you below what the Lord has revealed to him and what he has been shown about sin and the disposition of sin. We may sometimes think that in our modern days that things we see around us are ‘new’ Oswald talks about his modern days below and he is writing in 1909-1911! The Bible says there is nothing new under the sun…
Ecclesiastes 1:9-10
9 That which has been is what will be,
That which is done is what will be done,
And there is nothing new under the sun.
10 Is there anything of which it may be said,
“ See, this is new”?
It has already been in ancient times before us.
In the Love of Jesus How to think about sin
Then, when desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, brings forth death.
The slightest deflection from the real truth about sin, and all the rest of our reasoning goes wrong. Once placed fundamentally right regarding the doctrine of sin, and the reasoning follows in good order. If you read modern statements regarding the sin, you will be amazed to find out how often we are much more in sympathy with them than with the Bible statements. We have to face the problem that our hearts may be right with God, while our heads have a startling affinity with a great deal that is antagonistic to Bible teaching. What we need and what we get if we go on, is an intellectual re-birth as well as a heart re-birth.
The problem with modern statements regarding sin, is that they make sin far too slight. Sin according to the modern view simply means selfishness, and preachers and and teachers are as against selfishness as the New Testament is. Immediately we come to the Bible, we find that sin is much deeper than that. According to the Bible, sin in its final analysis is not a defect, but a defiance, a defiance that means death to the life of God in us. Sin is seen not only in selfishness, but in what men call unselfishness. It is possible to have such sympathy with our fellow-men as to be guilty of red-handed rebellion against God. Enthusiasm for humanity is quite a different thing from the enthusiasm for the saints which the Bible reveals., viz., enthusiasm for readjusted humanity.
Sin intellectually revealed, is never anything else than defective development, because the intellect will not allow for gaps that destroy its main principle of outlook. The Bible supplies the facts for the gaps which intellect will not accept. According to the Bible, sin is doing without God. Sin is not wrong doing, it is wrong being, deliberate and emphatic Independence of God. That may sound remote and far away from us, but in individual experience it is best put in the terms of “my claim to my right to myself”. Every one of us whether we have received the Holy Spirit or not, will denounce selfishness, but who amongst us will deny the ‘right to myself’?. As long as my right to myself remains, I respect it in you, you respect it in me, and the devil respects it in the whole crowd, and amalgamates humanity under one tremendous rule, which aims at blotting the one true God off His throne. The Bible shows that human nature as it is is one vast ‘strike’ against God. Paul states that “through one man sin entered into the world, (Romans 5:12); but we must remember that that man was not like you or me, he was the federal head of the human race. Sin entered into the world by that man’s disobedience to to God’s rule (see Genesis 3) From that moment the strike against God began and has gone on all down since then, and never was there such a big, massive organised ‘strike’ as there is today against God and God’s rule.
All the great movements of the modern mind are on the line of a combination that swamps the individual value. Men detest the doctrine of individual responsibility, and react against a doctrine of Salvation through Jesus Christ because it fixes on the value of the individual. The Bible reveals that the losing of the sense of personal responsibility is the result of sin. (Genesis 4:8-9 – 8 Now Cain talked with Abel his brother; and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother and killed him. 9 Then the LORD said to Cain, “Where is Abel your brother?” He said, “I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?” ) The characteristic of sin is to destroy the capacity to know we sin, and the Bible talks about unregenerate man as “dead”, not dead physically but dead towards God. (Ephesians 2:1 – And you He made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sins).
The recovery of the Bible affirmation about sin is what is needed. The bible distinctly states that sin is not the natural result of being a finite being, but a definite stepping aside from what that infinite being knew to be right. How one wishes that people who read books about the Bible would read the Bible itself! Read Ezekiel 18 – “the soul that sinneth it shall die”; and again Romans 3:23 “For the wages of sin is death”. The Bible does not deal with sin as a disease, it does not deal with the outcome of sin, it deals with the disposition of sin itself. The disposition of sin is what our Lord continually faced, and it is this disposition that the Atonement removes. Immediately our evangelism loses sight of this fundamental doctrine of the disposition of sin, and deals only with the external sins, it leaves itself open to ridicule. We have cheapened the doctrine of sin and made the Atonement a sort of moral ‘lavatory’ in which men come and wash themselves from sin, and then go and sin again and come back for another washing.
This is the doctrine of the Atonement: “Him who knew no sin” (not sins) – Him who had not the disposition of sin, who refused steadfastly, and to the death on Calvary, to listen to the temptations of the prince of this world, who would not link Himself on with the ruling disposition with humanity, but came to hew single-handed through the hard-face of sin back to God – He made to be sin on our behalf; that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.
The disposition of sin that rules our human nature is not suppressed by the Atonement, not sat on, not cabined and confined, it is removed! Human nature remains unaltered, but the hands and eyes and all our members that were used as servants of disposition of sin, can now be used as servants of the new disposition (Romans 6:13 And do not present your members as instruments of unrighteousness to sin, but present yourselves to God as being alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God.) Then comes the glorious necessity of militant holiness. Beware of teaching that allows you to sink back on your oars and drift; the Bible is full of pulsating, strenuous energy. From the moment a man is readjusted to God, then begins the running, being careful that “the sin which so easily ensnares us” (Hebrews 12:1), does not clog our feet.
I believe that God so radically, so gloriously and so comprehensively copes with sin in the Atonement that HE is more than Master of it, and that the practical experience of this can take place in the life of anyone who will enter into identification with what Christ did on the Cross. What good is it saying, “I believe in Jesus Christ as the Saviour of the world” if you cannot answer the blunt question “What has He saved you from?” The test is not in theories and theologies, but in practical blood and flesh experience. Jesus Christ is our Saviour because He saves us from sin, radically altering the ruling disposition. Anyone who has been in contact with the Lord when He alters the ruling disposition, knows it and so do others. But there is a painful, tremendous repentance first. The whole teaching of the Bible on the human side is based on repentance. The only repentant man is the holy man, and the only holy man is the one who has been made so by the marvel of the Atonement.
And here comes the wonder – let the blunders of lives be what they may, let hereditary tendencies be what they like, let wrongs and evils crowd as they will, through the Atonement there is perfect readjustment to God, perfect forgiveness and a gift of a totally new disposition which will manifest itself in the physical life just as the old disposition did (Romans 6:19 I speak in human terms because of the weakness of your flesh. For just as you presented your members as slaves of uncleanness, and of lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves of righteousness for holiness.)
Jesus Christ comes as the last Adam to take away the abnormal thing (which we call natural) , the disposition of my right to myself, and He gives us a new disposition, viz., His own heredity of unsullied holiness, Holy Spirit.
Thank you so much for sharing this!
Peace and love in Christ, sweet sister!