Sin Is Death?
Sin isn’t just a series of errors or poor judgments with momentary consequences. Sin is taking you somewhere. It’s leading you down a path of decay, a path that ends in spiritual death.
Hyperbolic, isn’t it? “Sin is death” sounds like something you’d hear echoing from a bullhorn in a city that embraces noise as part of its culture. Philadelphia and New York come to mind (no offense, by the way; it’s just that I hail from a quiet fishing town in Canada). In the context of so much physical turmoil and death in our world, calling sin “death” seems almost offensive, as if we’re insulting people struggling with leukemia or COVID, the real death threats. How can we claim something so serious about a problem that seems more conceptual than physical?
It all depends on how you define life and death. What is life? If life is measured only in blood flow and heart beats, then “Sin is death” sounds ludicrous, like a misinformed battle cry of pre-modern street preachers. Sin might be a hindrance, a nuisance, or even a threat to moral flourishing in society at large, but death? Hardly.
But what if life has more to do with bonds than with blood? What is life is more deeply about a relationship than it is about our respiratory system? What is life is about an active (even if neglected or forgotten) bond of communion between us and the God whose breath gave us our breath? That would change our perspective on the whole “Sin is death” thing, wouldn’t it? And doesn’t Jesus refer to himself as the life (John 14:6)? Living would thus be a relationship with him, not a set of physical and mental animations.
And what is death? If it’s not just about the stillness of the body, the absence of animation, or the fading pulse beneath your skin, then what is it? Maybe if life is all about relationship, then death is really about the ending of that relationship, or at least the most dramatic change imaginable.
Sin as Death
Now, what struck me as I read Romans is just how direct Paul is in linking sin with death. He clearly views sin as more than a behavior problem that can be remedied by a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mentality. Sin is far more serious. Sin is lethal.
What then shall we say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.” 8 But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness. For apart from the law, sin lies dead. 9 I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died. 10 The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me. 11 For sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me.
Rom. 7:7-11
For Paul, sin kills. It brings death. This doesn’t mean that sin is an actual substance, some soul disease that spreads like wildfire. Sin is ethical, and it has no independent existence. It’s parasitic; it can’t exist on its own, so it follows around the good things of God’s creation and distorts them, deforming us in the process. As Bavinck put it in The Wonderful Works of God, sin is “a manifestation which is moral in character, operating in the ethical sphere.” Sin is moral and ethical. Yet, the fact that it’s moral and ethical doesn’t mean it’s not lethal. Paul’s language makes it clear that sin brings death. It destroys us.
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We Should Have Heeded Schaeffer’s Prophetic Warnings
What Schaeffer wrote there nearly 40 years ago was prophetic in nature. But as is so often the case, such prophetic words are ignored and rejected. As we look around the West today we see the sad fulfilment of what he had warned against.
On May 15, 1984, the great evangelical thinker, Presbyterian pastor, and noted apologist Francis Schaeffer passed away. Just a few months earlier his last book was released: The Great Evangelical Disaster (Crossway). Anyone who is familiar with his life and work knows that this volume very much followed in the same vein as his previous 21 books.
It continued the basic themes he had always preached on and written about, which include: an infinite personal God exists; he has revealed himself to us; Scripture is his inspired and infallible word; we can come to this holy God based on the finished work of Christ; Christians are called to model the truth and beauty of God in our relations with others, and the church must refuse to compromise and accommodate with the surrounding culture.
His final book certainly hammers home these key truths. In the dedication page he says the following:
To a new, young generation—and to those in the older generation—who will stand and be countedas radicals for truth and for Christ.
That is emphasised throughout this crucial volume. Plenty of quotes could be offered here. Let me feature just a few. On pages 31-32 he speaks about how utterly important all this is, and what a massive war we are in:
Make no mistake. We as Bible-believing evangelical Christians are locked in a battle. This is not a friendly gentleman’s discussion. It is a life and death conflict between the spiritual hosts of wickedness and those who claim the name of Christ. It is a conflict on the level of ideas between two fundamentally opposed views of truth and reality. It is a conflict on the level of actions between a complete moral perversion and chaos and God’s absolutes. But do we really believe that we are in a life and death battle? Do we really believe that the part we play in the battle has consequences for whether or not men and women will spend eternity in hell? Or whether or not in this life people will live with meaning or meaninglessness? Or whether or not those who do live will live in a climate of moral perversion and degradation? Sadly, we must say that very few in the evangelical world have acted as if these things are true. Rather than trumpet our accomplishments and revel in our growing numbers, it would be closer to the truth to admit that our response has been a disaster.
And on pages 48-49 he warns about which way we will go: with humanistic relativism or God’s absolutes:
Soft days for evangelical Christians are past, and only a strong view of Scripture is sufficient to withstand the pressure of an all-pervasive culture built upon relativism and relativistic thinking. We must remember that it was a strong view of the absolutes which the infinite-personal God gave to the early church in the Old Testament, in the revelation of Christ through the Incarnation, and in the then growing New Testament — absolutes which enabled the early church to withstand the pressure of the Roman Empire. Without a strong commitment to God’s absolutes, the early church could never have remained faithful in the face of the constant Roman harassment and persecution. And our situation today is remarkably similar as our own legal, moral, and social structure is based on an increasingly anti-Christian, secularist consensus.
On page 60 he discusses what happens when cultural infiltration saps the strength and vitality of the church. Everything that we have now experienced – including the evangelical acceptance of homosexuality and fake marriage, was all foreseen by Schaeffer: -
Will Trump Be Indicted? Why Christians Should Care
The four-decade effort by the secular left to undermine the integrity of our elections and constitutional order is nothing less than an attempt to remove the biblical foundations of our government and culture in order to create a centralized, tyrannical government untethered from God which will be a terror to good conduct rather than bad (Romans 13).
When you go out to war against your enemies, and see horses and chariots and an army larger than your own, you shall not be afraid of them, for the LORD your God is with you.—Deuteronomy 20:1
Christians’ ability to speak and live out the Word of God is under assault from the secular, progressive left. They seek to remove any trace of God or His people from the culture.
The ongoing assault against President Trump is part of this. In order to understand why this is the case–and why Christians should be concerned, let us take a look at what the left has done to Trump in light of attacks on other Republican presidents before him.
The week before the raid on Trump’s home, George Parry published an article in the American Spectator, “The Democrats’ Looming Trial and Conviction of Donald Trump.” In it, he wrote:
“We intend to hold everyone, anyone who was criminally responsible for the events surrounding January 6, for any attempt to interfere with the lawful transfer of power from one administration to another, accountable,” said Garland.
Who’s he kidding? Garland made it sound as if there is a chance that Trump might not be arrested and prosecuted. But, to anyone who has been paying attention, the intention of the Democrat-controlled federal government has always been and remains to be the legalized destruction of Donald Trump. It is, in fact, the whole purpose behind the illegally constituted Jan. 6 committee’s Soviet–style show trial, its contempt citations of Trump administration officials, and the follow-up supporting criminal cases by the FBI and Justice Department.
The Soviet–style show trial and previous efforts to remove Trump from office come from the same playbook Democrats have been using against Republicans for decades. It started at least as far back as Watergate, when Democrats took illegal activities by some Nixon aides–who acted without Nixon’s knowledge–and managed to parley that into overturning the results of a presidential election in which Nixon won 97% of the electoral vote. They twisted and distorted the evidence so badly that even Nixon thought that he had engaged in a coverup. But he had not. Nixon had his faults, but he broke no laws and committed no high crimes or misdemeanors. Yet Nixon was forced to leave, and progressives had the run of the federal government for the next six years.
The Democrats took this route twice with President Reagan. First, it was the October Surprise conspiracy theory, where Democrats concocted a story that vice presidential candidate George Bush travelled to Paris in October on a U.S. government SR-71 spy plane to convince the Iranians not to release their American hostages captured during the attack on the American Embassy until after the November 1980 presidential election. Congress finally rejected the theory–in 1992.
Next were the 1987 Iran-Contra hearings, based on largely unconstitutional attempts by Congress to control the president’s ability to conduct foreign policy. These hearings failed to overturn the 1984 Reagan landslide over Walter Mondale, but hamstrung his final two years in office and were perfectly timed to affect Vice President Bush’s prospects for being elected president.
After Bush overcame Iran-Contra and was elected, the October Surprise hoax was revived. It received substantial coverage in the mainstream press, to the point that a January 1992 poll showed 55 percent of Americans believed the allegations. Bush created many of his own problems, especially lying to the American people when he promised, “Read my lips. No new taxes” during his 1988 campaign, but the propagation of the hoax likely had an effect on his loss to Bill Clinton in the 1992 election.
Bush’s son George W. also was the target of Democrats seeking to overturn presidential election results. This time, it was U.S. Rep Dennis Kucinich, joined by 11 cosponsors, who filed articles of impeachment because of what they claimed were lies regarding weapons of mass destruction as a pretext for America’s invasion of Iraq. I do not think we should have invaded Iraq, but neither do I believe that Bush manufactured false evidence to push us into another war. Yet Democrats still tried to overturn his election through the impeachment process. As well as hamstring his administration through the bogus Valerie Plame Wilson investigation.
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Chosen to Proclaim | 1 Peter 2:9
We proclaim Christ because He called us out of darkness into marvelous light. Speaking of Christ should not be a chore because we are giving the good news to those who are still in darkness. If you have been brought by Christ out of darkness, you are then a new person with a new identity, but with that identity comes the need to proclaim Christ. May we never cease proclaim His excellencies throughout the duration of our exile.
But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.
1 Peter 2:9 ESVPeter’s first epistle is filled with hope to a persecuted people. Throughout the letter, the apostle makes references to the condition of the believers’ lives, comparing their lives in this world to the Israelites in the Babylonian exile. He calls them exiles and sojourners, saying that they are of the Dispersion, which is another term for Israel’s exile. It is very clear that these Christians no longer belong to the culture around them. They feel as though they are strangers and foreigners, even though they are living in the cities of their youth.
Peter explains why in this verse. Christians are supposed to feel strange within the culture around them because we are foreigners. As followers of Christ, we are a new people group, a nation within the nations. Our primary identity is no longer our homeland nor our ethnicity; it is our being in Christ.
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