Detail of Expulsion from the Garden of Eden by Masaccio Cappella Brancacci (1401-1428); from Wikimedia Commons, .
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Certain words make people feel uncomfortable. For example: “tax,” “coffin,” “debt,” and “hemorrhoids.”
“Sin” is another uncomfortable word. It reeks of condemnation, judgementalism. We don’t like to hear it; we feel a bit embarrassed saying it. What is sin, this thing that makes us so uneasy? In the garden of Eden, God gave man one command:
And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” (Gen. 2:16-17)
Adam and Eve were surrounded by food-laden plants and trees, so this wasn’t a very difficult command to keep, but…
Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’” But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths. (Gen. 3:1-7)
We learn five things about sin from Genesis 3:
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First, sin is breaking God’s law. It is crossing a line that God has forbidden us to cross. It is disobedience.
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Second, sin is making ourselves the law-maker. “Knowing good and evil” means: “You, not God, will decide what is right and what is wrong.” Sin is doing what is right in our own eyes. Sin is not just breaking the rules; it is making them.
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Third, sin is putting ourselves in God’s place. When we decide that we know better than God, that God’s laws don’t need to be kept, that we can replace God’s laws with our own, then we seat ourselves on the throne that belongs only to God.
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Fourth, sin dehumanizes us. If we were made to love, obey, and worship God—and each of these three actions is the expression of the other two—then to sin is to descend from our true nature. Sin bestializes us, but worse, for even the beasts act according to their true nature.
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Fifth, sin ruins our lives and the lives of those around us. How can we break God’s law, make our own laws, depose God, and deny our humanity without terrible consequences?
“Sin” makes us uncomfortable, but until we understand it, we can have no idea of how broken we really are, and why we so desperately need a Savior.
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