Episode Transcript
PRAYER OF CONSECRATION
Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.
Jesus, I belong to you.
I lift up my heart to you.
I set my mind on you.
I fix my eyes on you.
I offer my body to you as a living sacrifice.
Jesus, we belong to you.
Praying in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.
Exodus 32:30–35
The next day Moses said to the people, “You have committed a great sin. But now I will go up to the Lord; perhaps I can make atonement for your sin.”
So Moses went back to the Lord and said, “Oh, what a great sin these people have committed! They have made themselves gods of gold. But now, please forgive their sin—but if not, then blot me out of the book you have written.”
The Lord replied to Moses, “Whoever has sinned against me I will blot out of my book. Now go, lead the people to the place I spoke of, and my angel will go before you. However, when the time comes for me to punish, I will punish them for their sin.”
And the Lord struck the people with a plague because of what they did with the calf Aaron had made.
CONSIDER THIS
The next day Moses said to the people, “You have committed a great sin. But now I will go up to the Lord; perhaps I can make atonement for your sin.”
Why must sin be atoned for? And what is sin anyway? We think we know until we are asked. It is fairly easy to provide a religious answer, but the wilderness invites us to dig a bit deeper into the essence of sin and atonement. Be warned. This entry is a thinker.
I have mostly thought of sin over the course of my life as a personal failure in some way, I failed to live up to a standard, behaved badly, or otherwise “did it again.” In other words, I have tended to define sin in a self-referenced fashion. I am coming to understand this as the essence of sin—even the way I am defining sin—to live in a self-centered way or to revolve life around myself (a.k.a. self-ish-ness).
To demonstrate how deep this goes, let’s consider how we might define the opposite of sin. Is it to be sin-less, or to behave according to expectation, or to be obedient to God? If we are defining sin as self-ish-ness, then the opposite would be self-less-ness or unselfishness. See the problem there? The very effort to define the opposite condition of sin still finds itself caught in the gravity of self. It leads to defining sin primarily in behavioral categories around individual success or failure, which leads to a pervasive framework of pride and shame (a.k.a. self-righteousness and self-loathing).
What we must have is a shifting of the center of gravity in our lives from self to something else. Naturally, we would consider the opposite of a self-centered life to be an others-oriented life. This is where we come up against our big problem. We are so trapped in the brokenness of our self-referenced way of life that even our best efforts to be oriented around others easily become a veiled effort to benefit ourselves.
In other words, even my most unselfish efforts rarely go beyond my own self-interest in some way, shape, or form (i.e., to increase my self-esteem or to gain the esteem of others). It is impossible to overestimate the pervasive permeation of the self-referenced structure of our lives. This is the law of sin. Sin is not bad behavior. That is what sin looks like, but that's not what it is under the surface. Sin is the pervasive permeation of a human being who is comprehensively referenced and strategically structured around him/herself.
Consider the eternal words of the apostle Paul, about the law of sin no less:
So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? (Rom. 7:21–24)
Paul testifies to the powerful, inescapable gravity of sin—the pervasive structure of a self-centered life. One cannot behave or even repent one’s way out of this reality. We must be delivered from it. I’ve got good news:
“Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Rom. 7:25)
And there it is: deliverance. The only way we can move from self-centeredness to others-centeredness is to be delivered by the greatest Other in the history of others, Jesus Christ our Lord. Becoming Other-centered is the secret to becoming others-centered, which is the outcome of being delivered from self-centeredness. It is to be free.
We must come to understand sin as fundamentally relational (not individual), which is why the first impulse of a sinner is to hide from "the Other" (a.k.a. God) and from others. We must come to understand that all sin is all at once against God, other people, and ourselves. In other words, while sin is always committed by an individual, its effect is always to desecrate three relationships—my relationship with God, my relationship with myself, and my relationship with other people. Finally, we must come to understand that we do not become free from sin by trying harder to not sin but by living according to the law of love (i.e., the Greatest Commandment)—a.k.a., the life-giving law of the Spirit.
There, I said it. The opposite of sin is not sinless. It is love. Sin is not primarily an individual moral failure. It is the failure to love God and neighbor.
“Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death” (Rom. 8:1–2).
And we are here only beginning to touch on the meaning of atonement. The way we understand sin will dictate the way we understand atonement. Atonement is an act of love. Because sin is the failure of love, only love can atone for sin. Herein is the meaning of the celebrated text: "But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Rom. 5:8).
THE PRAYER FOR DELIVERANCE
Lord Jesus, you are my Deliverer.
As I think about the golden calf, the great sin committed by the Israelites, it strikes me that all sin is great sin. I confess my ways of wanting to minimize my sin and then to dismiss them. Worse, I confess I am blind to the way my sin hurts you and others and even myself. I need the deeper understanding that precedes the deeper deliverance.
I receive your deliverance from my thin and thoughtless understanding of sin and what it is and how it works. I receive your deliverance into the wisdom of God and particularly the Word of God that I might understand sin rightly.
I receive your deliverance from my own self with all its sophisticated, self-referenced, and self-centered structures and ways. I receive your deliverance by your great act of love in the atonement of the cross. I receive the life-giving law of the Spirit coming from your death to sin and your resurrection to life. Teach and train me to behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.
It will be for your glory, for others' gain, and for our good.
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost.
As it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be. World without end, amen! Amen!
