God Speaks Through Sin
God speaks through sin. Inevitably, we avoid conseuquences. I do it quite often. We do something and realize the backlash is going to hurt, so we cringe and think of ways to escape the pain. I have my hearing this morning for the DUI which I’d mentioned a couple months back. What I was most scared of yesterday wasn’t so much the legal ramifications, but the way I would be viewed by the people at my church. This came to a head yesterday when I was trying to meet up with a pastor to talk about some questions I had about doctrine and had to explain that I wasn’t sure when I could meet on a morning and then why I couldn’t meet. His answer was probably more impactful than the hour and a half that followed.
Sin is a misperception of God. Those weren’t his exact words, but you get the gist. When we choose to act accordingly to our wills rather than God’s, it’s merely because there is something we don’t understand about God. I steal because we don’t believe Him to provide for our every need. I lie because I’m not secure in my belief that God is sovereign and good in His sovereignty. I break God’s heart because I don’t know it.
If you don’t know God, how can you know yourself or others? My misperception has been to look at self and then focus on God. If I don’t know my Creator, my Originator, then how can I know the original purpose for me? How can I know for what I was made? How can I understand purpose, it’s nature, let alone my own? Much less can I understand others. If we seek first to understand the Heart of life, then maybe will we begin to understand our own. Why God? Because in the beginning and the end, it was never about me.
Share the truth. What good is truth kept hidden under a basket? What good is wisdom locked away in a safe? Truth, wisdom only benefits us when they are shared. Otherwise, they are merely wasted. To keep them locked away is to say once again, it is about me and we’ve established it already was. And, no, to share truth costs us nothing and we do not run out of that truth. Truth is not a competitive advantage. It is an unmerited gift, so share it as such.
We avoid consequence and often. I think it’s because on some level we know we are accountable to a higher power. We know we’re accountable to God, if you will. However, this fear of the unknown gets compounded by the fact that we are avoiding the consequence of an action we perceive to be bad, which was spawned by an already flawed image of the divine. Therefore, not only do we expect cosmic judgment, but we expect it in some way to be less benevolent than is true. And so we run. But we don’t have to run. In fact, it’s in those moments that God’s calling us loudest back to Himself. It’s in those moments He puts Himself most clearly on display for us to finally begin to understand. He wants to reveal the universe to us, but He knows (often I don’t) that first we must understand the Heart of it all. We must understand God rightly. Then, we need to share that revelation with others. And that’s how God speaks through sin.