Preface: A Sanctification Story
1.1 Filled with the Holy Spirit (part 1)2.2 What's love got to do with it? (part 2)
2.3 What is perfect love? (part 3)
5. Now we get to an important practical question. To what extent can a believer live above sin? To what extent is it possible for a Christian not to sin?
The word on the street is that we cannot help but sin even after we come to Christ. Many Christians identify strongly with Romans 7:19 -- "I do not do the good I want to do, but I do the evil I don't want to do." Someone might quote 1 John 1:8 -- "If we say that we do not have sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us." Seems pretty straightforward, right?
Except both of these verses are completely taken out of context. We've ripped them from the text and made them say things they weren't saying. In context, both Paul and John turn out to have exactly the opposite theology we are making it sound like they had.
6. Let's start with 1 John 1:8. If John was really saying that Christians cannot help but sin, would he also say 1 John 3:9? [5] No one who has been born of God practices sin because his seed remains in him and he is not able to sin because he has been born from God. Wow! That seems to say something quite different from what many take 1 John 1:8 to say.
If we would only read a little further in 1 John 1 to 1:10, we would get a better sense of what 1:8 is really saying. "If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us." This is the perfect tense, as also in 3:9. The perfect tense has the sense of something that happened in the past and has continued to the present. So, I have been married twenty-five years speaks both of an event that happened in the past but that has since continued.
1 John 1:10 is saying the same thing that Romans 3:23 does -- all have sinned at some point in the past. If you say you have never sinned ever, you are making God a liar. Now note the wording of 1:8. "If we say we do not have sin." The verse does not say, "If we say we do not practice sin." In other words, 1 John 1:8 is simply saying the same thing that 1:10 says. Everyone needs Christ because everyone has sin from the past -- sin that is forgiven and cleansed when we come to faith.
The perfect tense in 3:9 then gives the situation of the person after they have been born of God. If we all have sin before we come to Christ, we all have God's seed in us afterward. That seed is the seed of love we have already seen. And the seed of love makes sin incompatible with our new life.
It is difficult for us to interpret 1 John because it's historical situation isn't entirely clear from the text itself. It only gives us hints. A good hypothesis is that John's church had recently undergone a split (2:19) in which a group of early Gnostics had left. They were "Docetists" who thought that Jesus had only seemed to be humn. But to them, he had not truly come in the flesh (4:2).
In keeping with the fact that they did not believe Jesus came in the flesh, they denied the atoning work of Jesus on the cross. In effect, they denied their need for atonement, as if they did not have any sin that needed to be cleansed.
This group also seems to have had some material means but to have withheld it from those in need in the community (3:17-18). So when 1 John talks about love, it is not referring to an emotion but to the concrete help that one person can give to another. This is the nature of God, and John indicates it should also be the nature of the church.
If this hypothesis is correct, then the words of 1 John that can seem so abstract take on a much more concrete character. And the abstract theology that we are prone to take from the words ripped out of context becomes much clearer. John is not on "team sin."
7. 1 John has a number of interesting comments in relation to sin. For example, 1 John 2:1 gives us the bottom line: "My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you might not sin. But if someone should sin, we have an Advocate with the Father -- Jesus Christ the righteous."
From this verse it should be obvious that John is not teaching a sinless perfection. Perhaps we should go back to 3:9 and translate it, "No one who has been born of God continues to sin... He or she is not able to keep sinning." It is not an absolute statement. It is a statement of what should be normative for the Christian life. The Christian life should not be typified by sin, although it can happen, and we have a good Lawyer.
Even more intriguing are the comments John makes about sin as he closes this letter (or sermon). [6] In 1 John 5:16-17, John distinguishes between sins that are "to death" and sins that are "not to death." He says to pray for the restoration of someone who does not sin a "sin to death" But he doesn't suggest praying for someone who commits a sin to death. What could he be talking about?
A first observation is that there clearly are different levels of sin -- at least two. Another one of the common myths in the church today is that "All sin is sin." This is not the biblical view. Jesus, for example, talks about an unpardonable sin (Matt. 12:31; Mark 3:29; Luke 12:10). He clearly considered this sin to be more serious than other sins. In John 19:11, Jesus says that those who handed him over to Pilate were guilty of a greater sin than Pilate was.
Paul certainly does not treat all sins the same. While he chastises the Corinthians for many sinful behaviors, he only tells them to expel the man sleeping with his father's wife (1 Cor. 5:1-5). Some sins -- if continued -- imply that you will not inherit the kingdom of God (1 Cor. 6:10), but others seem more easily forgiven (1 Cor. 11:18).
8. So where did this popular myth come from when it is so obviously not a feature of Old or New Testament theology? [7] There are likely some historical forces at work here. But perhaps some naturally think this way because we know that "all have sinned" before coming to Christ, and many believe in eternal security after you come to Christ, where "eternal security" means that you will certainly be saved after you come to Christ no matter what you do.
If your actions after Christ don't affect your spiritual destiny, and your actions before you come to Christ all have the same consequence, then you could see how someone might naturally conclude that "all sin is sin." However, while it is true that all sins have the same basic consequence before you come to Christ. The view that once you are saved, you are "always saved" is not biblical.
We can simply bring out the "big guns" of Hebrews: "If we continue to sin intentionally after we have received a knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is remaining" (10:26). Similarly, "If they fall away, it is impossible for those who have once been enlightened and have tasted of the heavenly gift and have become partakers of the Holy Spirit and have tasted the word of God and the powers of the coming age, to be renewed to repentance. After all, they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and holding him up to disgrace" (6:4-6).
This concept seems similar to what we are reading in 1 John 5. There is a point where sin severs a person from God, Christ, and salvation. It is a "sin to death." Where is that line? God knows. From everything we have said so far, it is a matter of our hearts leaving God, not a matter of some action in itself. It is not a matter of someone "taking us out of God's hand" (John 10:28-29). It is a matter of us walking away from God with our hearts.
9. The holiness movement had an opposite extreme. I call it the "one sin you're out" perspective. If you said a curse word and got hit by a train before you could repent, you were hell bound. Some have jokingly called this "eternal insecurity." It is not biblical either.
The balanced perspective of the New Testament would seem to be something like the following. Before we come to Christ and receive the Holy Spirit, we cannot help but sin. The result is that all have sinned, and the wages of sin are death (Rom. 6:23).
After we come to Christ, empowered by the Holy Spirit, intentional sin should not be normative for the believer. God's seed is in us, we should love one another as the norm. Sin is not falling short of absolute perfection. Mistakes are not sins in the sense of doing wrong although we can unintentionally wrong others. "Infirmities" of our mind are not sins. Sin is intentionally doing what is contrary to our allegiance to Christ or intentionally not doing what we know faith would have us do.
If we sin, we ask Christ for forgiveness, and his blood atones for our sins. However, we can walk away from God. Our hearts can abandon God. As Paul says, we can become "disqualified" because we stop running the race (1 Cor. 9:27). It's not a matter of a single sin act, although one can imagine a choice against God so definitive that it would sever the relationship at once.
This would seem to be 1 John's "sin to death" and Hebrews "falling away."
I like to think of it in relational terms. A single act rarely breaks a relationship, although some acts are so severe they might conceivably do so. If you forget your anniversary, thou hast sinned, and atonement must be made. But it probably doesn't mean divorce. Every sin damages our relationship with God, but a single sin is unlikely to sever our relationship with him.
Can you come back after you have crossed back to death? The church long ago concluded that you could. [8] The Parable of the Prodigal Son would seem to say so (Luke 15). We can certainly make a logical argument for potential return. If it is the Holy Spirit that draws us to Christ, then anyone who genuinely desires to repent can because the Holy Spirit is saying so. God can work out the details. [9]
Those who have committed a sin to death will never truly repent.
10. We should look at James 2:10 before we move on to Romans 6-8. On the surface, someone might think it teaches that "all sin is sin." "Whoever keeps the whole Law but fails at one point has become guilty of all." Again, if we rip this verse from its context, we might think it is equating all sins.
The verse is actually saying that we can't make excuses for ourselves by saying. "I'm a pretty good person. I keep almost all the Law except for x." In the context of James 2, it probably refers to a wealthy person who keeps most of the Law but dishonors the poor (2:6).
The bottom line is that the verse is not saying that all sins are equal. It is saying that all righteousness is important. Love must be complete, not partial. If we fail to love one group, we aren't off the hook just because we do pretty well at loving another...
[5] I will refer to the author of 1 John as "John the elder" even though 1 John is technically anonymous. The style and theology is similar to 2 and 3 John, in which the author merely refers to himself as "the elder."
[6] 1 John does not have the typical features of a letter. It seems more to me like a homily.
[7] In the Old Testament, we have already seen the sharp distinction between unintentional sins and intentional sins. The sacrificial system was primarily targeted at the cleansing of unintentional sins (Num. 15:27-31).
[8] In the Novatian controversy of the 200s, it was determined that Christians who had renounced Christ under persecution could be restored.
[9] I often think of Schrödinger's cat at this point. You seem to have left the faith. You never come back. You committed a sin to death. You seem to have left the faith. You come back. You apparently didn't commit a sin to death. How do we know whether you have committed a sin to death? Only when we open the box at the end of your life and see whether the Spirit has let you repent.
1 comment:
Another good one. THanks.
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