Tag: Sin

Are People Responsible for the Earth?

There is an irony at play today in regard to the way Christians see the world and the prevalent way modern westerners see the world.

kevingdrendel1 Comment
Photo by Randy Schoof
Photo by Randy Schoof

There is an irony at play today in regard to the way Christians see the world and the prevalent way modern westerners see the world. Modern westerners largely believe that human beings are affecting climate change and are arguing that we must change the way we do things because we are breaking the world.

Christians may or may not believe in climate change and may or may not believe that we can affect climate change, but Christians believe that human beings broke the world because of sin, because we rebelled against God, because we are flawed.

The irony is that modern westerners don’t believe in sin. They don’t believe in God or that we are opposed to God in our nature. They don’t believe that people are fundamentally flawed. They don’t believe that we are responsible for the brokenness of the world.

Aiming for Eternity

kevingdrendelLeave a comment

13731513_10210133390755193_1035877452838217062_n

God is from everlasting to everlasting. He sets eternity in the hearts of men (Ecc. 3.11), but our glimpse of eternity and our sense of God is often obscured by the every day realities of our lives.

That God set eternity into the hearts of men should tell us something. It should urge us to look beyond ourselves, to look to God for His purpose in our lives. Yet we are often given to walking with our heads down, driven with blinders on chasing after self-fulfillment or prone to obsessive self-reflection with eyes turned inward. We have a hard time seeing past our own noses, much less focusing on an eternal God  We have a hard time, wherever our gazes are set, letting go of self-direction.

The Bible calls that sin.

Take the morality out of sin, and sin is simply missing the mark. The mark is God, His character and His purpose. When our focus is on other things, when we are pursuing other things to the exclusion of God, we are missing the mark. We are missing the purpose of God in our lives.

God, of course, is the very reason for our existence. Continue reading “Aiming for Eternity” →

The Temptation to Complain

kevingdrendelLeave a comment
Photo by Beth Drendel
Photo by Beth Drendel

Why should any living man complain?[i] You are alive! Therefore, you have hope.

Your life, no doubt, has not gone the way you hoped it would. Looking back, there may be many regrets. You may deeply wish that you had known then what you know now, and if only you had some foresight, some sheer luck perhaps, things would be much different.

But things are what they are, and no amount of wishful thinking will change the course of events that have happened to this point.

Have you made mistakes? Be honest! We all make mistakes, and not just mistakes of choice – we all do things we should not have done. We have all done things that we knew we should not have done because they were not right.

We try to “redeem” those mistakes. Sometimes, we try to redeem them by re-characterizing our actions, thoughts and decisions, owning them as if they were right because they are who we are.

That is the temptation of modern life. “Be who you are” – whatever that may be. “Never apologize for who you are”.

But who are you?

Are you your own person?

Continue reading “The Temptation to Complain” →

Taking the Emotion out of Sin: A Study in the Substance of Death and Life

Let’s put aside the issue of morality, take the emotion out sin and see what we have left.

kevingdrendelLeave a comment

(c) Can Stock Photo

“[T]he wages[1] of sin[2] is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Romans 6:23.

We tend to view sin in moralistic terms, but I wonder sometimes if we might look at sin in non-moralistic terms. The adage, “we are what we eat”, is an apt description for sin. How we eat is a moral issue for some people, but most people (or many at least) don’t view eating that way.

We tend to view sin in moralistic terms, as in reaping what we sow. [3] What if we try to take the morality out of the discussion? What would we have left?

Although sin is a moral issue at heart, the emotion of morality in this modern, post-Christian age in the US may obscure how we view sin and the relationship between sin and death.

Men have tried to hijack morality and claim it as a product of their own making. If God exists, however, He is the author of morality. God, Himself, is the moral standard. I would say that, without God, there is no such thing as objective morality.

If God doesn’t exist, we create our own morality, and your morality might be different than my morality. The morality that is predominant in my community, may not be the morality to which your community subscribes. No one is ultimately right, and no one is ultimately wrong, except that those with the power and influence get to set the standard.

But that’s not what this piece is about. Let’s put aside the issue of morality and take the emotion out of the equation. Let’s take the emotion out of sin and see what is left.

Continue reading “Taking the Emotion out of Sin: A Study in the Substance of Death and Life” →

How Can God Judge Good People: Examining the Problem In More Detail

kevingdrendel1 Comment
https://www.flickr.com/photos/daynoir/2180510779/in/photolist-4jFFTr-4jKHMd-jWQJXK-odioQr-ocsW2d-odinbH-ocxZSt-g4hBCg-ocE5s6-9bjxyt-8NZVci-8RHoRH-8P41aG-oeUc8U-8NZVcZ-owufDH-ocAr9z-8kEjNt-odx8YU-chcGb-owxMQc-jWQpsn-oe1m1N-8LFfce-ouzTQs-jWR4Hi-osKV4U-jWSQS5-hrLbx1-6utpwj-apBGdk-owEuZp-em3Gxk-oeQ9Rf-9bjxxF-8Vkhtj-8VhsPF-ovviDV-8RHoSc-ou8Fd6-odpLFj-6hLRVK-QKB3p-nzWLGM-osEBRN-DBdANc-ouGvh8-oegftL-oyffAa-hvLNE6
Dayna Mason on Flickr

In a previous blog post, I explained how God is the standard of goodness, and we all fall short of that standard. We have a false view of goodness when we measure ourselves against other people. When we measure ourselves against God, we do not measure up.

And, this is the problem: if God is perfectly good, and there is no bad in Him, we would corrupt Heaven if we entered there. Even the comparatively little bit of bad in the best person would pollute the perfect goodness of God. Just as the physical characteristics of people are virtually indistinguishable 110 stories atop the John Hancock Building, our relative goodness is indistinguishable from the perspective of the perfect goodness of God.

It is not that God would refuse us because of our imperfection; our own corruption (sin) is the problem. As Ezra pined, “Here we are before you in our guilt, though because of it not one of us can stand in your presence.” (Ezra 9:15) Our own sin keeps us from God; our sin separates us from God. The problem is us, not God.

We can not enter Heaven in our present state, the “place” where God dwells, because whatever “bad” we have in us would prevent us from entering. Like an invisible force field, we could not enter in. Our sin would catch us short.

A discussion of goodness and badness, however, really misses the point altogether. As I have said, “goodness” is defined by God, and only God is God. We are not. That may seem elementary, and it is – in the sense that it is essential to understanding our problem. To understand more completely, we have to go back to the beginning. Continue reading “How Can God Judge Good People: Examining the Problem In More Detail” →