A Look At Current Events

I have a lot of issues with Christian education. Much truth is lost to misguided opinion. Take for example the idea that all sin has already been forgiven.  That will be taught in theory, but sharing how to actually live that out brings with it a lot of fear. If your sins are already forgiven, won’t you just go out and sin to your heart’s content?  Perhaps. But all that misses the point.

The Bible teaches that when Jesus died on the cross, he took everyone’s sin upon him and paid the penalty once for all (“The wages of sin is death” eternal death, separation from God). All meaning all sin for all people–past, present and future, therefore giving everyone the opportunity for eternal life (“the gift of God”).  If all of my sins were in the future when Jesus died (and they were), then all of my sins, and the punishment for them, were taken care of at that time.

We can take this gift or leave it.  So when we look around at one another and see behaviors we label “sin”, that sin has already been forgiven. It does not have to be worked off. God never asks us to get rid of our own sin. We can’t. We might (and should, as Christians) learn to sin less, but this side of heaven, the Bible teaches that we will still have to deal with sin in our lives. Since God never asks us to do the impossible, like take away our own sins, why on earth would we ask it of others?

The other truth about sin, God sees no hierarchy. The Bible always lists murder with anger, or sexual sins with envy, weighting them the same.  Sin is sin, missing the mark, the standard God has set. So our persistent ranking of sins isn’t biblical. The sin God hates is our persistence in refusing to acknowledge him and accept his very costly gift.

That leads me to Kim Davis and her quest to end the newly approved Gay marriage laws.  Is homosexuality listed as a sin in the Bible, yes. But right beside judging others and not living up to our responsibilities. In her quest to speak out against sin, why Gays? Because somewhere she has wrongfully been taught that homosexuality is a “big” sin, a heinous crime against God, an abomination. Maybe that’s how it’s viewed in the Old Testament, but that was before Jesus came to “fulfill the law” through his death and resurrection.  Homosexuality has been forgiven right along with every other conceivable sin. And, for the record, the New Testament has a lot more to say about judging others and being unforgiving than it does about homosexuality.

Certainly if you feel you cannot follow a civil law you need to take your stand.  Civil disobedience is a time honored American freedom.  But you take your stand knowing the consequences.  Greater people than Kim David have served time in jail for not obeying what they believed to be an unjust law. So quit your job or suffer the consequences.  But making such an issue of it, like signing those marriage licenses somehow paints her with an evil stain, that’s just ignorance of the Bible. 

Jesus spent most of his time walking, talking and eating with people the religious leaders of the day saw as “sinners”.  One such leader, a man names Simon, invited Jesus to dinner to check him out. While there a woman entered the room and knelt at Jesus’ feet.  She poured oil over his feet and began to weep. She dried his feet with her hair.  Simon thought, “if he only knew who this woman was, he wouldn’t let her touch him.” The Bible says that Jesus, knowing Simon’s thoughts, told a story about a man who had been forgiven a huge debt by his master, and a man who’d been forgiven a much smaller debt by the same master.  “Who loves the master more?” Jesus asked Simon.  “The one who’s been forgiven the most.” Ah.

The reality is, we’ve all been forgiven the most, but too many of us wrongfully believe that we’ve been better, cleaner, less sinful than someone else we see sitting across the room. We may have committed some sins, but they’ll never be as bad as homosexuality. Hmmm – hello Simon. To fully grasp Christianity is to fully grasp how much we’ve been forgiven, how very awful any sin is to God, how we all miss the mark of his holy standard.  Sin is sin; it’s all the same to God.  It was all forgiven on the cross.  Now we make the decision to accept or reject the gift.

It’s time for people who have accepted Jesus’ forgiveness to get off their sinful high horse and realize the only difference between them and that homosexual they are judging may be that they have accepted Jesus’ gift and the gay person has not.  Of course, it could also be the other way around, the gay person may already know God’s grace in their life, and the judgmental person may be judgmental because, though religious, they have yet to realize it isn’t about clean living; it’s about accepting that very costly free gift of God.