The crunch

If God is Love, if his desire really is to allow man to become part of himself and part of his circle of Love, if he continues to woo man and pursue him with his Love despite man’s rejection of God, why does the Bible talk so much about sin?

The Bible tells us how sin angers God, how it cuts man off from God and how God punishes sin. If God is Love, why is sin such a big deal? Why does God seem so intolerant of sin? What is it about sin that separates us from him? Can’t he just let it go? Why is the consequence of sin death?  If sin has to have a consequence, could God not have invented a different one? It all seems rather harsh for a God of Love.

I grew up believing (and I dare say it is a fairly prevalent view) that sin is the sum of all the bad things we do. The wrong things we do are bad because they don’t match up to God’s yardstick of perfection. As God is the Creator, it is his yardstick that counts and everything is measured against his perfect and blameless standards. I grew up believing that God is a perfect and pure God and that God therefore cannot be in relationship with anyone who is less than perfect or pure. I grew up believing that God can only be in relationship with those who are blameless, or are considered blameless by him. So I grew up believing that sin was like a contaminant which essentially prevented me from coming into the holy (which I understood to mean something like ‘sterile’) presence of God, who was unable to stand any contamination. I grew up believing that sin, those imperfect and therefore wrong things that we do, brings with it punishment, like breaking the law brings punishment. I grew up believing that God’s punishment for doing things that don’t match up to the perfection He requires is death. As no-one is perfect, I grew up believing that therefore God’s punishment on us all for not doing things his way is death. After all, doesn’t the Bible clearly state that we have all sinned and fall short of the glory of God? Doesn’t the Bible also indicate that the wages of sin is death, in other words that the consequence of our failure to live up to God’s perfection is death, being cut off from him forever?

Somehow this all seems very harsh for a God of Love. It portrays a God who is more concerned about perfection and particular behaviour than a God who desires relationship above all? Doesn’t the Bible itself tell us that love is patient and kind, that it is not self-seeking, not jealous, not proud and that it doesn’t keep a record of wrongs? Insisting on perfection or else death seems rather self-seeking. Is God not really Love after all? Or could it be that we have misunderstood sin?

God’s choice

God also has a choice.

He could withdraw into the comfort and wonder and love of the triune relationship and simply leave man to get on with it and to muddle through himself. In terms of attributes, he could have done it. And who would blame him if that is what he chooses to do?

Or he could destroy everything he had made, wrapped it all up. He could have treated the whole thing as a great experiment, definitely worth it, but a failed experiment and he could have stopped it right there and then and put an end to it all. In terms of his attributes, his power to do so, he could have done it. And who could stop him if this is what he chooses to do?

But God chooses to continue to love and to redeem what was lost and broken. God continues to extend unconditional Love. His purpose continues to be that man might mature into his Love and become one with him.

Out of Love, God banishes Adam and Eve from Eden. In order to stop evil from having unlimited opportunity, to stop man becoming immortal whilst living in this matrix, not out of anger, God removed the temptation for Adam and Eve to eat from the Tree of Life by banishing them from the garden.

Because God is true to his character, because he only ever acts out of Love, God does not force himself onto man, but chooses to wait for man to respond to Him. The sadness of it all is that living under the ‘new’ matrix has made it so much harder for man to recognise God’s Love, let alone to respond to it. But that doesn’t mean it is not there. It is! The Bible tells us that nothing can separate us from God’s Love – not death, not life, not angels, not demons, not any other powers (nor Satan himself), not the present, not the future (not even the past!). Nothing in all creation can make God stop being Love and wanting us to be part of that Love!

Out of Love, He sets into motion a long-term plan through which the matrix would be changed once more, through which all that was broken could be restored. He would continue to woo his bride!

Living under the new matrix

In His kingdom, God’s kingship and authority are rooted in Love. As such he never forces or coerces, he never dominates, oppresses or insists on his own way, he never uses threat, blackmail or fear to make people do what he says. Instead, he invites his subjects to receive his Love and to respond to it. By choosing to do things God’s way, by obeying and submitting God’s way, by choosing to live also rooted in Love, God’s people willingly put themselves under his kingship. Living in mutual love firmly establishes God’s kingship over his people, as well as allowing his people to live in complete freedom and security.

Satan’s rule is characterised by the opposite. He is a dictator who insists on his own way and uses deception, blackmail and fear to ensure it is done. Living under a dictatorship is oppressive. Whilst individuals may refuse to comply, the fact still remains that they are living under a dictatorial regime. Satan has crowned himself “Prince of this World” and the tragedy is that man legally elected him. As long as he succeeds in persuading man to keep choosing to turn away from God, as long as he succeeds in persuading man to keep agreeing with him, as long as he can persuade man to live according to his ways rather than God’s way of Love, he, Satan, will remain in power. As it was man who allowed him to take up his rule and it is man who keeps him there, it is only man who can oust him from his place and strip him of his authority. (This is really key).

When man first turned away from God, everything changed. The matrix of how things were changed: no longer is man able to enjoy the tangible presence of God. No longer does man have real power and dominion over the whole of creation. Man has to labour and toil to provide for himself, tending to choose to trust in his work and in what he sees than trusting in God’s provision. No longer is it God’s purpose for man that gives his life meaning. Trying to find significance and purpose, identity and self-worth in a world view now clouded by Satan’s lies are issues that have haunted humanity throughout history. 

Underpinning it all is death. The Bibles is very clear: the natural consequence of turning away from God, the source of Life, is indeed death. Death and life cannot co-exist. The more man empowers Satan by turning away from God and the more man chooses out of his own volition to live turned away from God, the more death encroaches.

This is the matrix we live in. This is the way things are in our world. We are well familiar with it. And yet, remaining somewhere deep within humanity is the inkling that this is not how it should be. Each of us, if we look deep enough inside all the layers of our being, has a hope, however small, of a different kind of world - a world of peace and of justice, a world with no pain and no suffering, a world where Love reigns.

Why did God not intervene at the beginning of time and prevent the matrix changing? Why did he not step in and preserve our world, our existence, the way he had created it? Why did he not just barge in, oust the ‘dictator’, rescue man from death and make it all like it was before?

Precisely because he is Love! Because out of Love he has to allow the genuine consequences of genuine choices to unfold.

Man continues to have a choice, though the choices are more limited. Man could turn to God once more. Throughout history, many people do and enjoy a foretaste of life within God’s circle of Love. Their lives are characterised by a meaningful relationship with God.

Significantly, humanity on the whole continues to choose to turn away from God. Eating of the fruit had given man understanding of life apart from God and at the dawn of time man consciously chose to live apart from God. But throughout history, man continues to listen to Satan and his lies about God, and about ourselves. Man continues to act according to Satan's ways and thus man continues to empower Satan. Satan’s patterns become increasingly entrenched in man’s hearts, taking root, flourishing, and defining man’s actions. Jealousy, greed, selfishness become strongholds in the human heart and give birth to a lust for power, to domination over others and to a deep-rooted desire to be better than anyone else. 

Cosmic consequences

If God is fully and completely Love, why could God not just have forgiven Adam and Eve there and then (assuming they were “sorry”) and returned to their previous love relationship with God? Surely if God is really Love, he was ‘man enough’ to have simply forgiven them? After all, Love is not self-seeking, nor is it easily angered.

Because God is Love, he did forgive them! Forgiveness is not acting as though it didn’t happen or didn’t matter. Forgiveness is all about not holding someone else’s actions (and the consequences of those actions) against them. There was reconciliation of a sort with God: God clothed them, continued to provide for them and helped them learn to farm the land. He continued to communicate with them and with their children and desired to be part of their lives. God had not cut himself off from them in anger and frustration! It wasn’t that he was now sulking in a corner waiting for Adam and Eve to somehow make amends. God continues to love proactively.

It is just that eating of the fruit was more than a breach of trust. The underlying issue here is not the fact that Adam and Eve disobeyed God’s instructions, neither is it that God was angry towards them or required to be kept apart from them. Yes, of course Adam and Eve had disobeyed God’s clear instructions. They had deliberately turned away from Him when they took of the fruit. Of course that is at the heart of it all. Of course this broke God’s heart and it wasn’t that God felt impassionate about that.

It is just that there is a deeper issue - through man’s choice, the matrix of everything changed. Turning away from God and doing things Satan’s way, even for a short time, had been enough to allow Satan to step into God’s place in man’s life. There was now a ‘new regime’ and this new dictator was not going to step down any time soon.

When Adam and Eve listened to Satan, when they followed his advice rather than God’s, when they did things out of self-interest rather than out of love, it had opened the way for Satan to ‘step on the throne’ as it were. He not only took God’s place in man’s life. He also usurped man’s God-given role to rule over and subdue all of creation. In this way he had crowned himself “Prince of this World”. From this position of authority in the world, Satan would to continue to prevent man from encountering God’s Love. It was now easy for him to deceive man into believing that God was no longer interested in relationship and to persuade man into continuing to trust him, Satan, rather than turning back to God. From this position as “Prince of this world” it would be much easier to entice man to copy his ways of power and domination rather than God’s ways of Love. And of course he could subdue creation as he wished.

Genuine consequences and a new matrix

The crushing tragedy for human history is that the effects of the choice Adam and Eve made were not only a personal matter between them and God. It had cosmic repercussions and affected the entire matrix of how things were.

God outlines what will now happen to Adam and Eve, not because, having been wronged, he is meting out punishment, but because he is explaining what life will look like within the new matrix. For woman, giving birth and raising children will be difficult and painful. Her relationship with her husband will be hard work, strained even, as she seeks to be the support and helper for him God created her to be, but as he now will tend to take the upper hand. For man, work will become toil and burdensome. Work would no longer be a joy. There would be stress and strain, disappointment and frustration as man ekes out a living and tries to find some sort of meaning in it as his life ebbs away and he realises that really he is dust and will return to being dust.

I grew up believing that because of Adam and Eve’s disobedience in going against God’s instructions, He became angry with humans for their insolent disobedience. I grew up believing that God cut himself off from them, not because he doesn’t love them anymore, but because in his holiness and his perfection he is no longer able to live in relationship with man who has now become less than perfect. I always imagined God’s holiness to be a sort of pure existence, sterile almost, that can’t bear contamination or imperfection of any kind which is why he had no other choice but to cut himself off from man until ... well, until when? Until man could prove he was really sorry? Until the conditions were met that allows man to be, or at least be considered as, untainted again, until somehow a solution could be found by which man could get ‘cleaned up’ so he can once again enter God’s clean and  sterile presence?  

The way I look at it now, I see that I was looking at it the wrong way round! Of course God was deeply hurt by Adam and Eve’s choice. There is even a sense in which God was angry, the same way we would be angry if our own children turned their back on us and walked away from us. But God was not inventing a punishment for his beloved children because he was angry. He was not being spiteful, wanting them to see what they had done to him (and better be sorry!). It was not about retribution.

All of Scripture portrays a God who, although humanity turns their back on him, continues to pursue her with his Love. In Scripture we find a God who gets himself dirty and who remains involved with humanity, despite their indifference, despite their rejection of him. We find a God who continues to offer the choice to respond to his Love and return into relationship with him until the opportunity for doing so is no more and man makes his ‘final answer’.