There was a time, about a year and a half ago when at church, the preacher for the day said something that at the moment I did not really choose to meditate on but that was like one of those things you hear, accept and do not give much by way of a second thought. For the record, it was a series on sexual purity and I think that his was the last or second message of the series and I did benefit a lot from the series as a whole. What I want to focus on today is the simple statement that the preacher, a mentor and friend said as part of his 5 points that day which is; “One of the reasons we are so susceptible to sin and why we do not take sin seriously enough is we are not convinced of the consequences of it.” In another manner of speaking, we do not treat sin as seriously, definitively and decidedly as we ought to because we don’t think it is a big deal and we do not think that we have a lot to lose.
And as easy as that was in my mind to skim over lightly as truth not requiring much more thought, it could not be truer. We live in the age of Christ, an era where all the debt of mankind’s sin has been paid on the cross of Calvary and what happens at times is the grace of God can be misconstrued to be a licence to sin and just let the grace of God take over. However, nothing could be more wrong and it is of utmost brevity and importance that we take heed of former examples and realise that sin has no place in the life of a believer. In one portion of his letters, Paul says to continue to live in sin, willingly in licentiousness is to crucify the Lord Jesus afresh in our lives and it is such honest and brave wording we ought to take heed of. Now, about those consequences, before I digress a lot.
Have you ever thought about the fact that the presence of death, sickness, the chaos in the world, the pain of the mess that this life in, the “natural disasters” (which a lot of if not all I believe to be what the bible describes as ‘all creation was subjected to corruption by the sin of Adam’ and as well as the groanings of creation for the manifest sons of God) all came about because Adam and Eve ate from the wrong tree. God did not create man to taste of death, sickness, or even something even less severe as lack-the garden of Eden had food and wealth more than enough for Adam and Eve before even they were created and it was from a place of complete supply that they were to function. All of this, was thrown into an upside down chaos when they sinned, when they committed just the one sin. Everything was skewered.
David was a man after God’s own heart, a man of whom the Bible describes Jesus as an heir to the throne of David. But, the manner in which he got Bathsheba as a wife with adultery and murder opened the door for so much trouble in ‘a man after God’s own heart’. The first child with Bathsheba died, his children got into in fighting, incest, murdering one another and even trying to usurp David. David had a number of wives and concubines, and his heir, a man to whom God granted exceeding wisdom about life, about the flora and fauna ended up marrying foreign wives, who led him and the nation of Israel astray from the worship of God. Ananias and Sapphira died on the spot when they tried to defraud the disciples of some money and in Hebrews, we are told that “God will judge the immoral and the adulterous.”
Sin ruins relationships, futures, societies and families. The Bible says “righteousness exalts a nation but sin is a reproach to any people” in the book of Proverbs, which I believe is kind of like a manual on the “Ways of Royalty.” It is an avenue that the adversary desires to use to gain entry into our lives and if he gets the chance, he will do his job; which is to steal, kill and destroy. In so many cases, the consequences go even to the next generation who then have to bear the brunt of what they did not do [imagine or consider the young one who grows up Fatherless, with no guide or anyone to speak an identity over their lives, or the wife who suffers from the pain of broken intimacy by an unfaithful husband].
Make no small issue out of this because the reality is sin is deadly and it has no place in our lives and we need to be sober and wise in our avoidance of it [more of this in a later post] for to be anything less is to shoot ourselves in the foot.