On Sin and Our Duty to Fight It

8 And if your hand or your foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life crippled or lame than with two hands or two feet to be thrown into the eternal fire. 9 And if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into the hell of fire. (Matt 18:8–9)

There are two extreme positions on sin that both misunderstand the gospel. First, that sin is no big deal because Jesus’ atoning death paid for it all for those who believe. Second, that sin is so terrible that we need constantly be in fear of the fires of hell.

Being a Christian is to always be in a two-front war. When God commissioned Joshua after Moses death, he said, “Only be strong and very courageous, being careful to do according to all the law that Moses my servant commanded you. Do not turn from it to the right hand or to the left, that you may have good success wherever you go.” (Josh 1:7)

There is a reason why Jesus describes the way of salvation as a narrow gate. In Matthew 7:13–14, Jesus said, “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.”

We are always pulled between at least two directions—sometimes they are temptations—neither of which honors God. Our task is to thread the needle, which we can only do with Jesus’ help.

So, if you are in the camp of people that believe sin is no big deal because you’ve signed a special deal with God by praying a prayer or whatever, this passage is for you. In Matt 18:8–9, Jesus teaches here that sin is so significant that physical deformation and suffering in this life is better than the natural outcome of sin.

But, if you are in the group of people who believe your sin is so huge that nothing could ever take care of it, then we’ll get to the joyous good news of the gospel in just a minute, so hang on tight.

When Jesus speaks of cutting off a hand or gouging out an eye, he is being hyperbolic––he is exaggerating. He isn’t actually telling anyone to self-mutilate, but I think he is quite earnestly explaining how bad sin is. Jesus also isn’t telling his audience, in this case his disciples, that if they cut off an appendage, then they can stop the sin for which they deserve hell.

This begins to make sense when we consider how dangerous our sin is.

The Nature of Sin

In this passage, Jesus is really telling us that sin is bad. It’s really bad.

Herman Bavinck describes sin as,

“appallingly many-sided, with untold moral dimensions, at its heart it is a religious revolt against God and thus appropriately summarized as lawlessness. . . . Sin is never an arbitrary matter, merely a whimsical displeasure of a jealous God. Sin is knowingly breaking God’s command and flows from a heart that rebels against God.”[1]

Sin is both an actively corrupting force within in us and a negator of God’s goodness outside of us. Sin always takes God’s good creation and turns it away from God’s good purposes.

According to J. C. Ryle,

“Sin, in short, is that vast moral disease which affects the whole human race, of every rank, and class, and name, and nation, and people, and tongue; a disease from which there never was but one born of woman that was free.”[2]

Sin is all around us, within us, and inescapable in this life.

As we think about sin, sometimes we tend to think of it in terms of being an opposite power to good. As if there is a balanced evil and good powers, like Satan and God are duking it out, and we’re just waiting to see who will win. Sin and holiness are not like the light and dark side of the Force.

Instead, many teachers throughout Church history have explained sin as the absence of good. The Westminster Shorter Catechism states, “Sin is any want of conformity unto, or transgression of, the law of God.”

In his Enchirideon, Augustine writes, “For what else is that which is called evil but a removal of good? . . . For good to be decreased is evil.”[3] Therefore, when we choose to sin, we are choosing something less than the best thing available. To put it another way, we are redirecting something good from its proper course into a lesser one.

For example, sex was designed as a means of procreating and as a sign of the marriage covenant between a stable couple of the opposite sex. Sin has distorted that design in a million ways by directing it outward to images on a screen, to people not involved in the covenant, or in ways that could never fulfill the procreative type. Sex is a good thing that has been turned away from God’s good purposes in a way that distorts God’s good creation and takes away the blessings it provides.

The natural consequences of sin will always be destructive. Sin is always a tearing down of the gift that God has given us and trying to rebuild the world in our image and according to our own desires.

Again, Bavinck is helpful here: “Sin also develops an order dynamic; there is a law of sin that proceeds from suggestion to enjoyment to consent to execution and involves both our sensuality and our self-seeking.”[4]

The effects of sin are to weaken and darken the soul. John Owen notes,

“[Sin] is a cloud, a thick cloud, that spreads itself over the face of the soul, and intercepts all the beams of God’s love and favor. It takes away all sense of the privilege of our adoptions; and if the soul begins to gather up thoughts of consolation, sin quickly scatters them.”[5]

Adam’s original sin in defying God’s special command not to eat from a particular tree led to he and Eve being forced out of Eden and set this whole world into a tailspin of sin. God sent a flood to cleanse creation, which “was corrupt in God’s sight” (Gen 6:11), so he did something like a soft reboot of his creation. Pharaoh’s sin in resisting God’s command to let the Israelites go led to economic and physical misery and eventually the death of the first-born sons. Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy are all filled with illustrations of how sinful every human is, with the sacrificial system given as a reminder that sin is a major problem to be dealt with. The first five books of the Bible are extremely bloody.

As the author of Hebrews reminds us, “Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.” (Heb 9:22)

Given that the death of God’s only son, the firstborn of all creation (cf. Col 1:15), was necessary to take the penalty of sin, we would do well to take sin seriously. If you are struggling with reading through the Old Testament, just know that it is supposed to be a reminder of sin that points you toward your need for a savior.

Dealing with Sin

For those of you who are Christian, it is vitally important that we actively fight against sin in our lives. The primary audience of Jesus’ words is the people who have followed him, who recognize he is Messiah, and who will recognize what that really means after his death, burial and resurrection.

Because sin is so serious, we need to deal with it seriously. Perhaps the most famous John Owen quote, offered by many who have never cracked one of his books, is “Be killing sin, or it will be killing you.”[6]

Owen’s entire book, The Mortification of Sin, is a masterpiece, though reading Owen is an acquired taste. But the expanded quote gives us a deeper sense of what Owen is getting at here:

“Do you mortify; do you make it your daily work; be always at it whilst you live; cease not a day from this work; be killing sin or it will be killing you.”

Although Owen is writing an exposition of Romans 8, he is channeling Jesus’ words from Matthew here. Sin is a really big deal and we really need to fight against it. If we aren’t killing sin, sin will kill us. It will suck our spiritual vitality away. It diminishes our work for God and our joy in God.

As we wrestle with sin, we need to keep two absolute spiritual truths in tension:

1.       All of our sin is paid for in full by the blood of Christ on the cross; (1 Peter 2:24)

2.       Our continued sin grieves God. (cf. Rom 6:1)

Our inheritance is sure, but our calling to resist sin is just as certain.

So, for example, if you discover that something you do that you love leads you to sin, you should be prepared to give it up. It may be a perfectly good thing in itself and others may have no problem with it. But if it causes you to sin, cut it out of your life.[7]

Our process of sanctification is the process of killing sin in our lives. We strive, through the power of the Holy Spirit, to look like the people God has called us to be. Positionally we have Christ’s righteousness the moment we are saved, but our lives typically don’t reflect that immediately. Becoming what we truly are requires us to put sin to death.

When a day goes by and you don’t think about your sin––thinking about it so that you can kill it––then you are probably losing ground.

We are subject to temptation, when we think of holiness and our fight against sin, to think that if we have beaten a few of our more obvious faults, that we are really humming along toward heaven. But the Christian life demands that we pursue perfect conformity to God’s law. Though God is certainly pleased with our first steps toward holiness, just as a father is pleased with his child’s first steps, God is not satisfied with believers who can only take a few steps before falling down. He expects us, through the empowerment of the Holy Spirit, to continue to strive to live perfectly in Christ’s image, even in the knowledge that we can never achieve that end.[8]

[1] Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Sin and Salvation in Christ, vol III, 126. Much of this definition of the nature of sin flows from Bavinck’s discussion.

[2] J. C. Ryle, Holiness, 2.

[3] Augustine, Enchirideon, 40–41.

[4] Bavinck, Sin and Salvation in Christ, 127.

[5] John Owen, Overcoming Sin and Temptation, 65.

[6] Owen, Overcoming, 50.

[7] Intermediate application: If watching football causes you to sin by neglecting God’s Word and his people: cut it out of your life. If your job puts you in situations that lead you to defraud people or take advantage of them, be prepared to quit. Cut it off. If listening to particular radio shows or constantly streaming news causes you to despise other image-bearers and wish them harm, then turn it off. There is no limit to the types of applications, because we live in a society that seems to have unlimited temptations to sin. Whatever the issue is, be prepared to cut it off.

[8] This illustration is borrowed from C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 202–203.

Human Goodness and the Perfectibility of Society

Humans were created good in the very beginning. They were good in every way. After God created the whole universe, including Adam and Eve, he looked at it all and observed it was all “very good.” (Gen 1:31) But the first humans made a choice to defy God’s command and they ate of the forbidden fruit. As a result, everything in creation was touched by a curse to remind humanity that the way the world is is not the way the world was meant to be. (Gen 3:16–19)

It didn’t take very long for sin to show itself in human society in powerful ways. One generation after Adam’s sin, one son murdered another in a fit of jealousy over God’s affections. (Gen 4:8) A few generations later Lamech uses his freedom and power to unjustly kill a man as disproportionate revenge for wounding him (Gen 4:23-24). Not too many generations, Scripture records, “The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” (Gen 6:5)

Despite the wickedness of humanity and the corruption of creation, God preserved eight of his people on a boat constructed because of Noah’s faithful obedience to God’s command. After the flood, God released those eight people and the animals back onto the earth and made a covenant with both the humans and the rest of creation not to destroy it again. (Gen 9:8–17) But despite God’s grace, the old story repeated itself over and over again. Humans fell into patterns of sin that included oppression, violence, and greed. These are patterns that seem to repeat themselves down to the present day.

And yet, despite their continual disobedience, humans remain good in God’s sight. So good, in fact, that he came himself in the form of a human with the name of Jesus.

Jesus came to restore the goodness of humans and to bring salvation from sin, but the process of redemption is ongoing. Though all creation witnessed moral perfection in the person of Jesus Christ, all of creation continues to live under the effects of Adam’s sin. Even those who have been redeemed by Christ’s blood on the cross still regularly fall short of the moral goodness that God demands.

One of the central purposes of government is restrain evil. As the apostle Peter notes, we are to understand that “governors [were] sent by [God] to punish those who do evil and to praise those who do good.” (I Pet 2:14)

The government is necessary as a means to prevent the powerful from oppressing the weak. Among the things necessary for a healthy society are the rule of law and enforcement of property rights. These are proper roles for the government.

The worst documented humanitarian abuses in the world have occurred when government has moved from the role of attempting to restrain evil to creating a perfect society. According to C. S. Lewis, this impulse is common among many forms of modern government, as he noted in his essay, “Is Progress Possible?,”

“The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good–anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. . . . We are less [government leaders’] subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, ‘Mind your own business.’ Our whole lives are their business.”

The pursuit of social improvement requires that government become engaged in social interaction. In order to move from obedience to the law to moral improvement, there must be an allegiance to the power of the government.

In modern forms of government that are seeking to perfect (or at least enhance) the moral fabric of society, that allegiance is often sought in the name of superior information, which often goes under the name of science. If government is to improve society and improvement is measured by science, then good must be scientifically measurable and the theories of advancement offered by science must be obeyed absolutely.

As C. S. Lewis writes, “I dread government in the name of science. That is how tyrannies come in. In every age the men who want us under their thumb, if they have any sense, will put forward the particular pretension which the hopes and fears of that age render most potent.”

If science is seen as the means to determine policy, then a party need merely control the direction and flavor of scientific research and publishing to change the direction of society and reinforce control. This is what is happening now in China. It is what happened through the German propaganda during WWII.

Human sin is exactly the reason why therapeutic structures of society are bound to be unhelpful, because it gives the state or community to continue to shape and reshape human behavior according to whatever the contemporary consensus is and by whatever means are socially approved. It seems like tenderness, but, as Walker Percy once wrote, “tenderness leads to the gas chamber.” Sin corrupts everything and ensures that even movements begin with good intentions don’t usually end there.

The Christian Mind of C. S. Lewis: Essays in Honor of Michael Travers

Wipf and Stock

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Not the Way It's Supposed to Be - A Review

Sin. It’s one of those topics that we are all skilled in the practice of, but often try not to think about a whole lot. Too often, our concept of sin is narrowed by a set of concerns for personal redemption and our consideration of its devastating power is abbreviated by the belief that our sin has been paid for at the cross by Christ.

This thin conception of sin has devastating effects on Christian engagement in society and the degree of empathy many Christians have for those who commit obvious, flagrant sins. Cheap grace can only abound when the severity and pervasiveness of sin throughout our individual lives and the fabric of society are underappreciated.

The tragedy of much contemporary and theologically orthodox Christianity, particular among evangelical Protestants, is that a faulty definition of sin has led to thin ethics. Sin is sometimes popularly perceived of as something that is paid for by the cross and then entirely behind the Christian. To a degree this is true, Christ’s substitutionary death on the cross provided a path for the elect to be redeemed. Forgiveness for sin is now available for those that repent and put their faith in Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection as the hope for eternal life. All of this is true, but it neglects some of the ongoing effects of sin in even the lives of Christians and especially in the world around us.

Cornelius Plantinga’s book, Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin, is an important book for understanding the nature and effects of sin. The book was originally published in 1995, and won multiple awards. It is both excellently written and exceedingly positive. This is the sort of book that should remain in print because of its enduring value as an accessible and theologically precise systematization of the doctrine of sin.

The key concept for Plantinga is Shalom. The Hebrew term shalom refers to holistic flourishing of the world across multiple dimensions. From a human perspective, shalom entails right relationship with God, non-human creation, and humanity. This flourishing existed only for a short time in the beginning of creation, which we see described in Genesis 1 and 2. We have the promise that it will exist later in the New Heavens and New Earth, as depicted in prophetic passages like those at the end of Revelation and in several sections of Isaiah. We live in a world right now that has had its shalom disrupted.

With the idea of holistic flourishing in view, the concept of shalom becomes both clearer and more complex. Sin is no longer a transaction between God and humanity alone, but a transaction that has implications for a whole web of relationship. Ultimately, sin’s penalty is due to the offence of God’s character (Ps 51:4), but its substance may be primarily disruption of the human-creation or human-human relationship.

When we begin to understand that sin is a disruption of shalom, the cycles of Judges begin to make sense. The people of Israel were oppressed, the repent, God sets them free, they fall into sin. That sin has both personal implications (separation from God) and social implications (disruption of systems and relationships). Thus, we can see that God might be justified in desiring to begin society all over again if “the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence. . . . For all flesh had corrupted their way on the earth.” (Gen 7:11–13) Sin isn’t just a personal violation of God’s law, it also entails distortions of all of human relationships.

Plantinga’s book begins from unquestionably orthodox foundations in the Reformed tradition. Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be explores dimensions of sin as it is seen in both personal and social dimensions. He approaches the topic by describing sin categorically. It is a form of corruption, which requires a concern for spiritual hygiene. Its corruption permeates life and society. Sin is a parasite on the good in this world. It is an attack on God’s Kingdom and his common grace. Sin finds its way into human interactions and life in unbelievably difficult ways through addiction, a little-considered dimension of sin. (Usually addiction is dealt with as a simple failure in will-power.) Sin can also be a form of flight from the responsibility to deal with faults in shalom and neglecting our call to restore it.

Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be is a Christian classic. It’s taken me years to get around to reading it, but it’s a book that is consistently found in the footnotes of other significant texts. The book was named the Christianity Today book of the year for 1996, because of its theological acumen and its clarity. Plantinga’s book is one that is accessible to any reasonably theologically engaged Church members.

If this book were published today, it would likely be viewed with suspicion because it explores the social implications of sin. This begins to sound a bit too much like social justice for some people. If the fear of considering the impact of sin on holistic flourishing of creation by some Christians will have hugely negative influences on the ability of future generations of Christians to appropriately relate to society. We are already seeing this happen as younger generations, recognizing the implications of Christianity for social ethics, are drawn to non-orthodox versions of Christianity because (despite denying central tenets of the faith) they often have a better (or at least more engaged) attitude toward the social implications of Christianity.

Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin

By Cornelius Plantinga Jr.

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