A couple of weeks ago, a friend and I got into a bit of debate regarding homosexuality. Many of us are familiar with the debate raging across the country. Unless you live under a rock, it's hard not to. For the most part, I have tried to avoid the debate and have intentionally avoided writing on it until now and it will be the subject of the next post.
A central reason I have avoided the debates is because, like most things, this (homosexuality) is really about that (sin). The real issue is the title question: what is sin?
I touched on the concept a while back in post where I laid down my model of how salvation works. If you haven't read it, or haven't read it in a while (most likely true), it might be good to refresh yourself on it. Though that model has changed somewhat, many of the central concepts are the same, including the one about Sin. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.
If you haven't already figured it out, the foundation of my theology comes from the Creation story in the first three chapters of Genesis. There are two reasons for this: one, because it answers the most important questions we ask (is there a God? Why am I here? Who am I? etc.) in those three chapters and two, because it describes the world as it should have been. After all, we are aiming for perfection and Genesis 1-3 describes perfection.
Most of us know the story: Yahveh creates the world culminating with the creation of Adam and Eve (humanity, in other words). He places them in a beautiful garden as their home and tells them to rule the world (literally). Where the story intersects the issue of sin is that after creating the Garden of Eden, Yahveh does something rather interesting: he places at the center of it two special trees.
One was the Tree of Life. Eating from its fruit would grant a person perpetual life and youth. The other was the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Eating from its fruit would, as Yahveh warned, bring about death and misery. That tree was Pandora's Box.
Obviously these trees are about something far more than fruit. They represent the most fundamental choice that we as humans are given: follow Yahveh or follow ourselves. To eat from the Tree of Life was to submit to the continued lordship and sovereignty of Yahveh. To eat from the other was to rebel against that lordship. It was to set ourselves up as "gods."
This is Sin. Sin is rebellion against the sovereignty of Yahveh. That is what got Satan in trouble to begin with. According to Isaiah 14, he wanted to "be like the Most High." Satan wanted to be his own personal god, accountable to no one but himself. That is how he got Adam and Eve to fall. He told them that if they ate the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, they would "be like God."
The question of lordship is a central theme to the entire Great Controversy. The question of who will you follow is repeated over and over and over. At the end of Deuteronomy, Yahveh gives Israel an option: follow me and these blessings will ensue or reject me and these curses will follow. This wasn't a "love me or else" threat; it was a "will you accept or fight my sovereignty?" question.
At the end of Joshua, the same question is repeated to Israel. "Choose you this day who you will serve." The challenge was "will you accept Yahveh's sovereignty or will you fight it?" Solomon was given the same challenge to begin his reign as king over Israel.
And lest you think that this is an Old Testament phenomenon, Christ's battle in Gethsemane was a question of lordship. Hence his prayer "not my will, but yours be done." He was submitting to the sovereignty of the Father.
Salvation itself boils down to the question of lordship. Both Jesus and John the Baptist called people to repentance. Peter, in his Pentecost address (Acts 2) told the crowd to "repent and be baptized." To repent is to change direction, to do an about face. Specifically, they were calling people to change their lives. Another way of looking at it is to say that they were calling people to change sides. Paul most clearly sums it up in Romans 10. "That if you confess with your mouth 'Jesus is Lord' and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved."
The whole concept of salvation is more fully fleshed out in the previous blog post but to sum it up: not being saved is living in rebellion against Yahveh. This will get us killed. Conversely, to be saved means to be living under the sovereign lordship of Christ. It is like getting a change of citizenship.
But this means living under Yahveh's rules and this is where we as Americans get in trouble. After having lived in a democracy for so long, we consciously or subconsciously assume that the universe is a democracy. After all, we hear evangelicals preach all the time about righteous America and bringing God and democracy to the downtrodden places in the world.
The problem is, the universe isn't a democracy; it is, for lack of a better word, a dictatorship (the technical term is actually theocracy, but dictatorship conveys the idea more clearly). Unlike a democracy, in Yahveh's kingdom, we have absolutely zero say in the rules. Yahveh decides the rules and that is the end of the matter.
Let me give you an example: in the Torah, Yahveh told Moses the rules about how the nation of Israel was going to run. To repeat, he just told Moses the rules. There wasn't any discussion or vote. It was "this is how it is going to be." End of story.
Same thing in the Garden of Eden. Yahveh didn't sit down with Adam and Eve and have a long discussion about what trees they could and could not eat from. I mean they might have, but it wasn't a "let's decide" conversation. It was a "this is how it is" conversation.
For that matter, look at nature. I mean, was there a vote about gravity? Was there a long, protracted debate about whether our bodies process oxygen versus, say, boron? No, of course not. These things are the way they are because Yahveh decided to.
The point of all this is is that Yahveh and Yahveh alone decides right and wrong. Whatever Yahveh says is right, that's right. Whatever he says is wrong, is wrong. Period. End of story.
Recently I read a blog post that claimed that sin is a very personal thing. If the blogger had meant that sin is a very personal thing to Yahveh, then he would have been dead on. Sin is whatever Yahveh decides is wrong. That standard is universal to the rest of us.
Unfortunately the blogger meant that sin is very personal to us. But this brings us back to the original point: sin is setting yourself up as your own god. That is what got Satan in trouble; that is what got Adam and Eve in trouble; that is what got Israel in trouble repeatedly; and it is what gets us in trouble today. Sin is trying to live life on your own terms instead of on Yahveh's.
In the end, it is by Yahveh's standard that we are judged. This is something else that we as Americans do not like to talk about, but whether we like it or not, we are held accountable. The Bible talks again and again about "the judgment" when all humanity must give an accounting for their lives before Yahveh (Daniel 7 and Revelation 20 are a couple of examples). In the end, there are two camps: those who accepted Yahveh's lordship and those who rebelled against. The former are given eternal life and the latter are given eternal death.
For many of us, this may sound harsh. But that is more because we are used to a democracy where we get to decide than because it is harsh. After all, Yahveh's rules lead to the best life possible. Sin ultimately leads to chaos and death. Following Yahveh is advisable all the way around.
This is a jumping off point into so many other things, like Salvation, Great Controversy, Origin of Evil, Judgment, and on. But for now, we're just going to define Sin. Sin is rebellion against Yahveh's sovereignty. Right and wrong aren't for us to decide; rather they are already dictated for us by Yahveh. We can either choose to submit ourselves to him or persist in rebellion. It's our choice.
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