Sin and death, faith and resurrection
Why is sin a recurring subject during a Bible study? If gospel is all good news, why this preoccupation with the concept of sin?
The truth is, being ignorant of one’s sinful condition is part of what separates a person from salvation. The fallacy of every human philosophy more or less relates to ignorance or misunderstanding of sin as human nature. On a personal level, every excuse for unbelieving or rejecting God relates to the person’s ignorance or misunderstanding of his sin.
On the other hand, being conscious of one’s sin is not the same as knowing and understanding one’s sinful nature.
Further, feeling guilty in itself does not bring salvation to a person. Adam and Eve felt guilty the very day when they disobeyed God, but it took God many thousands of years of personal dealing, first with selected individuals and then with an elected people (the Jews), to manifest the true sinful condition of the fallen race.
It’s not because people have been gradually and progressively becoming more sinful than before, that God had to wait thousands of years for the sinful condition of man to grow into its maturity. In the eyes of God, people are as sinful today as ever, even from the first day when Adam and Eve chose to disobey God.
The wages of sin is death. Death is then the final manifestation and conclusion of sin. Death is really the true face and real condition of sin. Therefore only when you see the fixed equal sign between sin and death (SIN = DEATH) can you say that you truly understand what sin is.
Death of course is the ultimate embodiment of the total hopelessness. One who sees death objectively (not merely subjectively) sees total hopelessness. In other words, seeing no hope in oneself and thus standing hopelessly before a just and holy God is the only right and truthful conclusion of sin. Only then do you know that, being a dead man, your only hope is resurrection, which is of course the ultimate symbol of impossibility for a natural man.
But you have now been brought face to face to the gospel of Jesus Christ, which is summarized by one word: Resurrection.
God promised and eventually demonstrated this resurrection in the Lord Jesus Christ. The promise seems impossible, just as the promise to Abraham seemed impossible to him. But that is very thing your faith must rest upon, and it is the essential merit of your faith which God can count as righteousness to you.
The decision is yours. Before you choose, you must be aware of the fact that you are brought face-to-face to the gospel by the necessity of your life’s condition, not by a curiosity in your mind.
According to the gospel, the sinner’s sinful life dies with Jesus when Jesus died on Cross bearing the sinner’s sin (because He died for the sinner). The sinner has thus paid the dues of his sin without suffering the actual outcome of his sin. But the sinner receives the resurrected new life from Jesus when He was resurrected from the death due to this connection made in faith.
God has promised you something which seems impossible, and if you believe that God did not lie, your faith will be counted as righteousness to you. Stop doubting by reasoning that what was promised is impossible. Impossibility is the very quality of the promise that can save you, because the impossibility is overcome by the resurrection power of the Lord Jesus Christ.
God made such a hard-to-believe promise because he must, as nothing short of the resurrection power can save you from sin and death. If it could take less to accomplish that, God would not have made such a hard promise. You complain that it is hard to believe, but have you ever thought that it was much harder for God to make such a promise, because the hardship all falls on God himself. The hard nature of the promise required God to give away his beloved Son for our sake. Do you think God would let His Son suffer the death as a cost of sin if it were not necessary?
Dear friend, take this to heart: Nothing short of that will do. What you think may be easier to believe is not worth believing; But what is worth believing, is necessarily hard to believe due to the nature of our problem.
Why do you base your doubt on the very basis for the only thing that can save you? Abraham believed. Many others did too. Will you?
“[Abraham was] fully convinced that what He had promised He was also able to perform. And therefore “IT WAS ACCOUNTED TO HIM FOR RIGHTEOUSNESS.” Rom 4:21-22:
