Making Sin Abhorrent (part seven)
By Jay Wegter
God hates all forms of idolatry because of what it does to His Name and what it does to us, His image bearers. The first four iterations of the Ten Commandments are designed to guard against idolatry. At the heart of idolatry is self-love and self-worship (2 Tim 3:1-5). Man was created for the love of God. Only redemption in Christ restores a man to love God instead of worshipping and serving the creature and the creation. Idolaters usurp the role of God by living as if their minds project reality onto the screen of life As a consequence, idolaters are fugitives under God’s moral government (Gal 3:22). They trample God’s law and challenge His absolute right to rule over them. They live with their backs to God, as enemies of God in their minds (Col 1:21). As Bible believing Christians we must understand that idolatry tells a multitude of lies about God. It is an attempt to bring integration to our beings around something finite— something created. God condemns the idolatry of immoral behavior because it is lawlessness and the love of sin (1 Jn 3:4; Col 3:5). And, God opposes ‘religious idolatry’ because it equates God with something in His creation. Idol worship degrades a man; enslaves a man; damages the image of God in man; and exchanges the glory of the Godhead for something within the creation itself. Idolatry promises freedom and fulfillment, but can only deliver disappointment and degradation and servitude. The idolater makes his own needs sovereign—then tries to fulfill those needs by sinning. He incurs more and more guilt by doing so. What sinners fail to understand is that the universe exists as a stage for God’s moral majesty: the moral laws which are part of creation are just as real as gravity or any other physical law. Therefore, our holy Sovereign energizes the laws of moral cause and effect—of crime and punishment. Sinners break themselves in their breaking of God’s laws. Unlike the recent ad for Las Vegas (‘what happens here, stays here’), there is no such thing as a moral holiday in God’s universe. Sin pays the guaranteed wages of death, separation, torment, and wrath. God does not have to think up punishments for sin. Creatures made in the image of a holy God have the moral mark of God upon them. That moral mark is called the conscience. The conscience will be fully activated by God’s wrath in eternal perdition. On judgment day the possibility of overriding the conscience will be forever gone. On that day, a man’s conscience, God’s law, and God’s verdict will be in perfect agreement. Only then (as God’s wrath ignites it) will a man’s conscience rise up to its full stature and take its eternal revenge against its ungrateful host. To understand what sin is in this moral universe is to begin to comprehend that sin carries with it a curse. This is why sin is spiritual insanity—symbolic suicide. To keep sowing thorns in this moral universe governed by an absolutely holy God means that a day of harvest is coming. And when that day comes, each person will harvest more and will harvest longer than they could have possibly conceived. To sow thorns is to ultimately lie down in thorns and be pierced by them forever. To refuse to repent is to constantly be fashioning chains that will hold a person in a claustrophobic grip of radical crushing solitary confinement. Romans 2:8-9 describes the torment awaiting the impenitent. “But to those who are selfishly ambitious and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, wrath and indignation. There will be tribulation and distress for every soul of man who does evil, of the Jew first and also of the Greek.” They will experience anguish, torturing confinement—crushing suffering. Jesus draws a horrific picture of sin’s eternal judgment: the activity of God’s justice and wrath will fill the conscience like a busy voracious unstoppable toothed creature (a gnawing worm) which will consume (without removing) the soul (Mk 9:48). J. I. Packer captures the chilling action of eternal divine wrath in the following words, “A bad conscience is the most universal experience—and the most wretched. No outward change relieves it; you carry it with you all your waking hours. The more conscientious you are, the more your knowledge of having failed others, and God too, will haunt you. Without forgiveness you will have no peace. A bad conscience delivering at full strength, tearing your to bits in the name of God, is hell indeed, both here and hereafter.”¹ The wrath of God unleashed in the conscience as a consuming force fragmenting the soul into pieces is a terrifying image. We evangelicals are often embarrassed to own a God whose holiness energizes these eternal judgments. We tend to make excuses for God because
1 J. I. Packer, I want to be a Christian, Wheaton, IL: Tyndale Publishing, 1977, pp. 90-91.
He does not apologize for the cruel destruction which awaits impenitent sinners. Our understanding of the pernicious, abhorrent nature of sin is deficient. This is the case because we do not grasp what it means to be created in God’s image. Sin is war upon the soul. Sin is parasitic—it seeks a willing host who will embrace its agenda and offer the faculties and members of the body and soul for its purposes. Sin has a goal—it acts like some shrewd alien living thing bent on obliterating its host—it is not content until it has practically wiped out the image of God in the second death—and even then it is not content. In everlasting perdition sin is cumulative—over the millennia, lost sinners in agony will lose every speck of meaningful connection and remembered well-being and, as the soul continues to come apart—the fragmentation will issue forth in a gnashing stream of madness. Let us determine to preach and evangelize with the actual nature of sin in view—to see it as our holy God sees it.