Sin is defined as disobedience to the law of God. Just as modern medicine has taught us that children of parents are more likely to get a disease if their parents had it, sin spreads from parents to children. Unlike our medical example, however, the chance of inheriting the disease of sin is 100%–an absolute certainty. Every single person is born a sinner. Furthermore, the irrevocable law of God states that the penalty for sin is death and eternal punishment in the afterlife. Every single person who is born is subject to this fate.
But God created human beings for eternal fellowship with Him. Man was created to have eternal life with God but chose to sin in the Garden of Eden resulting in this separation. We no longer could be in fellowship with God because his holiness requires those around Him to be holy as well. He could also not revoke his laws, as such an act would contradict his righteousness. J. Gresham Machen said the reason for this is that
“God would be untrue to Himself, in other words, if sin were not punished; and that God should be untrue to Himself is the most impossible thing that can possibly be conceived.”
Man thus needed a substitute to pay the price of sin since the justice of God demanded that a penalty be paid. The love of God provided our substitute in the form of His eternal Son, Jesus Christ. The work Christ did in his life and death to earn our salvation is known as the doctrine of the atonement.
To earn righteousness for us, Christ had to be perfectly obedient to God His entire life. If he had not done this, we would have no record of obedience we could use to earn God’s favor. This is sometimes called his active obedience. Christ also had to suffer for us, referred to as his passive obedience. This suffering lasted his entire life including opposition from Jewish leaders, growing to maturity, and the temptations in the wilderness and culminated in the pain of the cross. On the cross, He experienced physical pain and death, the pain of bearing the sin of the world, abandonment, and the wrath of God.
We must remember that the penalty of sin was inflicted upon Christ by God the Father. It was His justice that required the payment and the Son volunteered in our place. With this the Father received full, not partial, payment for our sins. The blood of Christ poured out and we then had hope rather than the dismay of knowing we could never live up to the standards of God. Christ was our penal substitute; he took the penalty that we deserved and we were thus made clean by His blood.
We deserved to die as the penalty for our sin but Christ died as our sacrifice. We deserved to bear God’s wrath against sin but Christ died as propitiation for our sins. We were separated from God by our sins but Christ “reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation.” (2 Cor 5:18) We were in bondage to sin and to the kingdom of Satan but Christ provided us with redemption from that bondage. Christ bore our guilt but He did not become guilty.
Our violation of God’s laws required our death. God’s love for us through the death of Christ gave us new life. God’s love for us allowed Him to take on the penalty for sin Himself. He took the punishment so we could reap the rewards. Machen explains:
“God’s the cost and ours the marvellous (sic) gain! Who shall measure the depths of the love of God which was extended to us sinners when the Lord Jesus took our place and died in our stead upon the accursed tree?”
As human beings, we all have our own thoughts, desires, and feelings. These are things inside of our existence that are private to us, but some of these internal items can be betrayed by our facial expressions or any number of other physiological characteristics. If I were to look across the room at you and you were sad I might see a painful expression carved into your brow or I might even see tears streaming down the sides of your cheeks, but these outer expressions can be deceptive – we can find many people gifted in the art of manipulating their outward appearance simply by turning on the television. We can also spot the people in the same medium that are not as talented. We are able to judge the accuracy of an actor’s portrayal of a certain emotion by our own experiences that can either be the emotions we have personally felt or the emotions we have watched in others. However we have developed this skill it is unquestionable that it exists. If it did not, then our televisions would be empty caverns filled with the echoes of emotionless monotony. On the bright side, though, we would probably have a lot more time on our hands.
Just as I can look at you in an attempt to figure out if the feelings you are expressing are genuine, I can also look at my environment and attempt to know things about it too. Trying to understand our environment – the room we are both in as I watch you experience your emotions – is actually easier than trying to interpret your inner thoughts, desires, or feelings because our environment is external to all of us; it’s not something hidden within us.
Our environment is the common area where we share our existence. If you had just experienced a death in your immediate family and I were to ask you how you were doing and you said that you were doing fine, I might question it since that is not how most people would react in a similar situation, but I would not have any way of knowing with absolute certainly the veracity of your statement. If you were to tell me that the chair I am sitting in as I write this was brown, however, I would immediately know that something was afoul. It could be your senses failing you due to either a physiological condition or perhaps even improper lighting. It could be that you were taught colors incorrectly when you were a child. It may even be that you are being dishonest with me because I know that the chair is black. How can I be so sure of my own faculties in determining the color, you might ask? First I am as certain about the color of the chair as I’ve been about anything because I have extreme confidence with my ability to identify the color black. When I have identified the color in the past, not one person has ever disagreed with me. Second, I am the one who purchased the chair and removed it from its box which said something along the lines of “Contents: one black chair.”
Our external world is something we learn as we experience it, but many others are going through the same process of experiencing the world simultaneous with our exploration. People are doing things everywhere all the time and people have been doing things everywhere for a long time. Since we cannot ever experience every single event in our external world we must learn to trust others. If we did not we would die. Think about all of the warning labels we see every day. If we had to figure all these warnings on our own I probably would not have lived long enough to write this and you probably would not have been around to read it. An example that is better still might be that of doctors. Imagine how long we all would have lived had it not been for modern medicine.
We have learned ways to trust the experiences of others in order to help guide ourselves through our own existences and to live longer, more meaningful lives. We do not simply trust others blindly, but critically, and all of us apply differing levels of criticality to differing aspects of our shared existence. Since there is so much in the world to experience we also all tend to focus on certain parts of it. Some people focus so sharply in a specific subject that they become experts. They are the doctors, the scientists, and the historians. Doctors have a specific purpose – to save lives and cure disease – and have come up with specific, effective, and appropriate ways of accomplishing this task. Scientists are responsible for determining how our world works. Historians keep track of the progress of both of these other fields and the rest of human existence. There is a “history of doctors,” a “history of science,” and a “history of [fill-in-the-blank].”
Historians are charged with figuring out where we have been and recording where we are by interpreting and keeping logs of our shared existence. All events occur in a moment in time and then are over. As we get older our memories may fail us and we surely die. Historical events would die with the last person who experienced the event if the discipline of history did not exist.
Even though I was not there to experience it, I know that Abraham Lincoln was the sixteenth President of the United States. I know a lot of things outside of my personal existence through reading history. History is important to us in that we can positively stand upon the shoulders of those who have gone before us to continue their life’s work as not to have to relearn something that was already learned by someone else and to negatively keep from making the same mistakes again that others have made before us.
But how do we know who’s history is the right history? How can we trust what we have read or know if a historical account is accurate? After all, cannot one construct a misrepresentative historical account just as one can fabricate the external signs of internal feelings that do not exist? Yes they can, but fortunately for us the discipline of history has determined methods for diagnosing whether or not a specific account is deceptive.
In an earlier post, I displayed a video promo of the new Creation Museum. Casey, from Casey’s Critical Thinking, has a very good discussion going on over at his blog regarding this topic.
Advice on how to do just that was presented at GodBlogCon, a convention for Christian bloggers at Biola University in 2006. The speaker is Pat Sikora from the blog Sometimes I Feel Like a Piece of Bologna.
The mp3 file of the lecture can be found here.
Many people refer to Enuma Elish as a creation story when the creation account is only a subplot to the major story – the elevation of the god Marduk as ruler over all other gods. The motive of this story is political, not moral as the account of the creation and fall of man as expressed in the OT. The God of Genesis is not the chief God of many trying to establish power, but the only God who already has power. Other surface similarities exist (creation by a supernatural entity, the order of creation, etc.), but these are only surface similarities. The major theological elements do not share any level of similarity.