7. Sin
We believe that all have sinned and have come short of the glory of God. To sin is to stray from God’s standard, to miss the mark of God’s holiness. It is fundamentally a rebellion against God Himself. The penalty for such rebellion is death.
The Good News is that Christ died for sinners. We must either accept Christ’s payment or personally experience the eternal conscious torment of death in hell and the Lake of Fire. When a Christian sins he has an advocate in Jesus Christ, and he is commanded to confess and forsake his sin (Isaiah 53:6; 64:6; Romans 3:23; 5:8; 6:23; 1 John 1:1-9; 2:1-2).
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Sin is one of the primary through-lines of the Bible. Starting in Genesis three when Adam and Eve rebelled against the righteous rule of God in their lives, all the way to Revelation 20 and the final defeat of Satan, sin plays a central role in how the Bible's story unfolds.
We often think of sins simply as discrete, individual actions unconnected from anything else. However, while each of those sins are a real and devastating reality, they are not our biggest problem. Our primary problem lies not in our individual sins, but in our underlying sin. You and I are born as those who have a natural bent away from God. Our desires are not merely neutral, waiting to decide between right and wrong. We are bent away from good, we are bent away from God, the inclination of our hearts is to exalt ourselves. We have exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshipped and served created things rather than our Creator.
Because of this, the apostle Paul refers to us as being by nature children of wrath (Ephesians 2:3). That is, our natural condition, the state in which we enter this world, is under the wrath of God. Each and every one of us is estranged from God by our indwelling sin, and that estrangement is compounded time and again by the conscience and willful choices we make to commit sin. We are rebels who stiffen our necks when confronted by the truth.
And this wreaks havoc on everything. We face eternal separation from God's kindness. We are wronged and hurt by those around us. We hurt and wrong them. Our relationship to the non-human parts of creation is an ugly distortion of what it should be because we are failing to live up to the role we were given in Eden of being God's image-bearers. And we have no hope of changing this.
But God. But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:8). God made him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Corinthians 5:21). The Good News of the gospel is that Jesus, God's Son, took on humanity and after living a perfect life, died in our place and bore all of God's anger toward sin for any who would trust in him. You can't fix your sin. I can't fix mine. But you and I and anyone in this world can cry out to Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, and he will forgive our sins if we repent of them and trust in him alone. Everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name (Acts 10:43).