Separated from God

I believe that God is Love. In my experience, God, because he is Love, desires a love relationship above all and extends the offer of a love relationship with him to us all. So I spent a lot of time re-thinking sin in the light of God’s character of Love and in the light of what the Bible says about sin.

I have to confess that I now see things rather differently. It is not that I don’t believe what the Bible says anymore. I do! But when I read the Bible now, I no longer equate sin as the sum of the things I have done wrong. The way I understand it now, sin goes a lot deeper than our behaviour. Essentially sin describes the state of our heart, the condition of our hearts when it is not touched by God’s Love.

Sin is a big deal. There is never any question about that. Sin does indeed cut us off from God. But not because God puts conditions on our acceptability. Sin does not cut us off from God because God cannot tolerate behaviour that goes against his nature or because our behaviour somehow disgusts Him, making him turn away from us, or because our sin somehow contaminates Him and thus forces him to cut himself off from us. Sin cuts us off from God because when we are turned away from Him and from his Love, there simply is no connection.

Just as the side of the earth turned away from the sun is in darkness and unable to receive the sun’s light, so a human heart turned away from the God of Love is in sin and unable to receive the light of His Love.

When the Bible talks about sin separating us from God, I believe it doesn’t mean that our behaviour per se is unacceptable to God and therefore creates a barrier between him and us. If sin is a barrier between us and God, it stems from our rejection of him, from our turning our backs on him, figuratively speaking. Two people cannot have a meaningful relationship if one of them has their back turned toward the other. You can’t relate closely to someone, you can’t receive from someone, nor can you give to someone if you have your back turned to them. There is no meaningful connection when someone has their back turned towards you. In a similar way we cannot have a meaningful relationship with God if we are turned away from him. And so our turning away from him becomes a barrier, separating us from him. Our turning away from God, our rejection of him, is what the Bible calls sin. There are lots of reasons why we deliberately turn away from God. Perhaps the most profound reason is that we don’t really trust him, so we don’t believe he is who he says he is and so we don’t want to submit to his ways. We much prefer to do things our way and in a way that will benefit us. We want to be in the centre of our own existence. We want “me” to be in the centre of our lives. We want things to revolve around our happiness and our satisfaction. Perhaps there is a sense in which we want to be like a god – in charge and with power over others. So at the heart of sin, at the heart of our turning our backs on God, is rebellion against God’s kingship and God’s rule.