Lenten Message: Sin

LENTEN MESSAGE: SIN
DR. JIM DIXON
MARCH 10, 2002
GENESIS 3:1-24

Today we are in the middle of what is called the Lenten season. The Lenten season begins with Ash Wednesday and it extends all the way to Easter Sunday. It is a time of preparation for the worship experience of Easter itself. The word Lenten comes from the word lenct, which means spring. And of course, the Lenin season leads into spring, but it has little to do with spring. What it has to do with is sin. The Lenten season is all about sin. On Ash Wednesday in many Christian traditions the priest or the minister places ashes on the forehead of the believer as a reminder of sin—that we are dust and to the dust we will return and that we are to repent in sackcloth and ashes.

And through the 40 days of Lent, some Christians participate in prayer and fasting because of their sin. And during those same 40 days, many Christians participate in a kind of modified fast where they deny themselves something they really love as a token of their consecration to Christ and their sincere sorrow for sin. And of course, it all leads to Good Friday when we come to the cross and we celebrate the death of Christ and substitutionary atonement for sin. It’s all about sin.

Many non-Christians (and even a few Christians) want to know, well, why is God so concerned with sin? And so this morning I would like us to take a 3-D look at sin. Actually, I want us to take a 4-D look at sin. I want talk about the four D’s of sin.

The first D is disobedience. Sin is all about disobedience. We see this even in Genesis chapter three, our passage of scripture for today. Sin is disobedience. It has to do with not doing what God has told you to do or with doing what God has told you not to do. Sin is always disobedience to God. And in the book of one John chapter three, verse four, the Bible says everyone who commits sin is guilty of disobedience, for sin is disobedience. Now, the Greek word there for disobedience is “anomia.” And that word literally means lawlessness. You see, sin is disobedience with regard to the laws of God. And how about you? Do you disobey the laws of God? Are you ever lawless, anomia?

Well, in the Old Testament there are three different types of law. Many Jews and Christians do not understand this. In the Old Testament, there are three different types of law. There’s the judicial law, the ceremonial law, and the moral law. Now, the judicial law is no longer binding. The judicial law consisted of laws that were given to govern the nation of Israel, and those laws passed away with the passing of Old Testament Israel. The ceremonial laws are no longer binding because many of the ceremonial laws have been fulfilled in Christ. And what hasn’t been fulfilled in Christ has been repealed. In the New Testament, for instance, the ceremonial law consists of the laws regulating the Jewish purification rights. Those laws were fulfilled in Christ. The ceremonial law consists of the laws regulating the Jewish sacrificial system. Those laws were fulfilled in Christ as He became the Lamb of God who was sacrificed for the sin of the world.

The ceremonial laws consisted of the laws that regulated the priesthood, and those laws are all fulfilled in Christ—the New Testament tells us that because Christ is once and for all our great high priest. The ceremonial laws consist of the Levitical dietary laws, and those laws have been repealed in the New Testament. So what remains from the Old Testament is the moral law. In the New Testament it is very clear that the moral law is still binding on us. And the moral law is centered on the decalogue and on the 10 Commandments. The 10 Commandments are still binding on us as Christians, not as a means of salvation, but as a standard of righteousness. The moral law is still binding. And much of what is written in the Old Testament is written to explain to us what the 10 Commandments really require.

When we come to the New Testament, as we have seen in the last few months in the Sermon on the Mount, Christ wants us to understand the full implications of the decalogue, the moral law. And He tells us in the Sermon on the Mount that the moral law really begins in our heart. It begins in your heart and in my heart, and by that standard we are all disobedient. We are all without law. Jesus said, “You’ve heard it said of old, you shall not commit adultery. I say to you, whoever looks upon a woman with lust in his heart has already committed adultery in his heart. You’ve heard a set of old you shall not kill; whoever kills will be liable for judgment. I say to you, whoever looks upon his brother or sister with anger will be liable for judgment.” So by the standards of Christ, the moral law condemns all of us.

We are all disobedient in our thoughts and in our motives, if not in our actions. We are all disobedient. The Bible says all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. There’s none righteous, no, not one. So we have this first D concerning sin: disobedience. Sin is disobedient, and we are all disobedient. We all sin.

Well, the second D of sin is deception. Now, my wife Barb grew up in a wonderful Christian family with wonderful parents, but they were very fundamentalistic in their Christian faith and they had some pretty strict ideas. And at Christmas time in Barb’s family, nobody ever talked about Santa Claus. You weren’t supposed to talk about Santa Claus. In fact, Barb’s dad always called Santa Claus “the great deceiver,” and that didn’t make Christmas a whole lot of fun. Of course, the Bible tells us that it is the devil who is the great deceiver, not Santa Claus.

I am reminded of a story of two children who came out of their second grade Sunday school class where they just heard about the devil for the very first time. And one little boy said to the other boy, well, what do you think? What do you think of this devil stuff? And the other boy said, well, you know how it was with Santa Claus. It’ll probably just turn out to be your dad. But of course, biblically, we know that’s not so. The devil is not your dad and the devil is not Santa Claus. Neither is the devil a mythological creation of uneducated and ignorant people. The devil is not a fabrication. He is not the mere personification of evil, as many liberal theologians would lead us to believe. The devil actually exists. The Bible makes that clear. Jesus makes that clear. The devil exists. We would be naive to deny that evil exists in this world, and we would be naive to deny that evil exists on a supernatural level. The devil exists and he is the deceiver.

Jesus tells us he is a liar, and he is the father of lies. And we see in Eden, in Genesis chapter three, how he seeks to deceive Adam and Eve and how he would have them to believe that sin, disobedience to God, will actually lead to enlightenment. That’s what he tells them. Sin will actually lead to enlightenment: your eyes will be opened and you’ll be like God. But it’s a lie because he is the deceiver. It is a lie.

Now, I know that many of you have heard of Tantalus in Greek mythology. Tantalus was the son of Zeus. In Roman mythology, Tantalus was the son of Jupiter. He was the king of Lydia. He was condemned by the gods because he murdered his own son. And being condemned, he was sentenced to live forever in Hades, in the underworld, where he was made to stand and the river Styx. And in that river, the water came up to his chin. Above his head there was a cliff, and upon that cliff a fruit tree. And the branches of that fruit tree descended so that the fruit was just above his head—the water below his head, the fruit above his head. And he would hunger and thirst.

But whenever Tantalus tried to drink, whenever he would dip his head, the water would descend. It would recede so that it was always just beyond his reach. Whenever he’d become hungry and he would reach for the fruit, the wind would blow and the fruit would blow away just beyond his reach. So it was forever and ever and ever that he never found fulfillment. He never found satisfaction. And of course, we get the English word tantalize from the Greek mythological character of Tantalus.

I hope you understand. Satan loves to tantalize. He loves to tantalize. He never offers fulfillment. Or, he does offer it, but he never delivers it. He never gives you satisfaction. He entices you to sin, but sin never fulfills. He wants you to think that it will lead you to satisfaction. And whatever sin tempts you, Satan wants you to think that you’ll find happiness through it. He wants the world to think that it will find happiness through materialism or through hedonism or through self-ascension and egoism. And he has sold the world a lie and the world’s bought it. But the world never finds satisfaction. The world never finds fulfillment because it’s all deception. Sin is deception. The second D of sin is deception.

Now the third D is really kind of a double D: death and destruction. Sin leads to death and destruction. Now, on February the ninth, in the year 1855, a strange thing happened in Devon, England. It was on that day in the year 1855 that it snowed in Devon. And in the county of Devon, sometimes called Devonshire, it rarely snows. I mean, if you know the map of England, you know that the county of Devonshire is on the southwest peninsula of England. It is lower than London, England, and far westward. It virtually never snows there. But it did on February 9th, 1855. And the Exeter river near the town of Exeter froze over that night, and the next morning when the children looked out of their houses, the snow covered the ground and the children went out to play and the adults went to work. But they all noticed something unusual. They noticed unusual footprints in the snow, cloven hoofed footprints in the snow. Now of course, goats have cloven hoofs, but these footprints were far larger than goat prints. And they weren’t the footprints of a quadruped.

They weren’t the footprints of a four-legged animal. They were the footprints of a two-legged animal, and that’s the problem. There are no cloven hoofed, two-legged animals. There is no such animal. And yet, here they were: footprints in the snow. As the people in Devon began to examine these footprints, they saw incredibly that the footprints went for a hundred miles in a straight line. Whenever the footprints came to a house or a building, instead of going around the house, they just went right up the side of the wall and then over the roof for a hundred miles. It was an incredible mystery. The word spread. Scientists came from the city of London trying to figure this out. Nobody could figure it out. Of course, the religious community—the clergy, the ecclesiastical authorities—examined it. And they concluded that Satan, the devil, had walked in Devon.

And of course, according to mythological imagery, the devil is a cloven-hoofed bipod being, but that’s just mythology. Nevertheless, that was the conclusion of the clergy. And today nobody knows. To this day, nobody knows what happened in Devon that night of February 9th, 1855. But it doesn’t really matter. I mean, it doesn’t matter because probably it was just a trickster. Probably it was just somebody pulling off some kind of trick. But you see, even if it was the devil, even if the devil did walk in Devon as the headlines of the New York Times said in 1855, it really doesn’t matter. Because that’s not what the devil’s all about. See, the devil’s not about footprints in the snow. He’s not about walking up the sides of buildings. What the devil’s all about is death and destruction. That’s what he seeks in your life. That’s what he seeks in my life.

The devil seeks the destruction of your soul. He seeks your destruction, body and soul. And we see this in Genesis three, as sin leads to destruction and death. It leads first of all to relational destruction. Sin leads to relational destruction. On the vertical, it leads to a broken relationship with God. And so, the man and his wife seek to hide themselves amongst the trees of the garden, hiding themselves in the presence of the Lord God. The relationship is broken because of sin.

And on the horizontal, the relationship between the man and the woman was broken as they each began to blame each other because of sin. Sin breaks relationships. It leads to relational destruction. You may have seen that in your marriage or at work or in some other context. Sin leads to relational destruction.

It also leads to emotional destruction because sin brings guilt. And if you don’t deal with that guilt, guilt leads to despair. You see, sin leads to emotional destruction. It also leads to physical destruction, which means sin can actually begin to destroy us physically. The Bible says in the fifth chapter of James that many people are afflicted with illnesses and disease, diseases that are caused by sin. When Jesus healed people, as you go through the gospels, many times after healing somebody Jesus would say to that person, “Your sin has been forgiven you because,” Jesus saw a link between sin and illness.

Now, the Bible is clear that not all illness is caused by sin. So when you see somebody who’s sick, you don’t want to judge them as having participated in some gross sin. But there can be a link there. And even science and medicine proves that there is a link between sin and disease. And we as a culture and a nation are riddled with sexually transmitted diseases today because of sin—gonorrhea, syphilis, AIDS. And it’s really all because of inappropriate sexual conduct. I mean, the Bible is very clear that sex is this incredibly wonderful gift. Sex is a gift that’s meant to be opened only within the context of marriage. It becomes sin when it’s opened outside of the context of marriage. It also becomes dangerous and it can lead to physical destruction.

When we are not monogamous, sex is very dangerous. And of course, even doctors and scientists tell us this. Sin leads to destruction on the physical level. Of course, sin leads to destruction on the spiritual level, as Adam and Eve were banned from the garden. Sin can lead to destruction on the economic level, as corporate greed can lead to corporate downfalls and stockholders are devastated. Sin destroys. Sin leads to destruction and death.

You know, I’m reminded of a story I read not too long ago. It’s a true story. It was in the newspaper about a guy in Chicago who was a car thief. He was really trying to quit. I mean, he’d been apprehended before and even incarcerated. He knew he had to quit, but he loved cars and he loved the thrill of stealing things. He loved the thrill of theft.

Well, one day he was walking down the street in Chicago and he sees a beautiful brand new Toyota Forerunner. And this was his favorite car, and it was brand new in exactly the color he loved. And he thought, oh, I can’t steal a car again. But he just, you know, was really drawn to this car. And so he began to look inside and he was stunned to see the keys were in the ignition. True story. The keys were in the ignition. Some guy had just left the keys in his ignition in some hurry or something and gone into a building. Well, this thief thought, you know, this is just too good to be true. He gets into the car, turns the key, starts the ignition, and begins to start out. But what he didn’t know was that Toyota Forerunner was owned by an animal trainer, and according to the newspapers, in the back seat, sound asleep, was a full grown leopard.

This guy goes about a block and hits a bump, and the leopard wakes up and suddenly just jumps up with this ferocious roar. And this thief loses it. I mean, he loses control of the car and just crashes into a wall. He was apprehended, convicted, and incarcerated. He says he’s cured. He says he’ll never do it again.

Now, when you think about it, sin is a lot like a new car to a thief. I mean, it’s alluring, it’s attractive. Sin is like that. But you see, there’s always a leopard in the backseat. That’s how Satan has set the whole deal up. There’s always a leopard in the backseat.

The Bible says that the devil prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour. Death and destruction, that’s what he’s all about. And he really wants your soul. He wants your unrepentant sin to lead to soul death. He wants you to participate in the greatest sin of all, which is unbelief. He wants your soul. He wants you to experience physical death—separation of your soul from the body—and then spiritual death—separation of your soul from God.

But you see, fortunately, there’s a fourth D in this message on sin. The fourth D is deliverance. God offers to deliver you from sin and God offers to deliver me from sin—to deliver us from disobedience, deception, destruction, and death. In Psalm 51, David, after his sin with Bathsheba, cries out, “Deliver me, oh God, from blood-guiltiness, my God of my salvation. Then my mouth will cry aloud, sing aloud of your deliverance.”

We all want to be delivered from death and destruction. God offers that. God offers that through Christ. Jesus came into the world to deliver us from sin and from death, and there’s a passage of scripture that is so precious with this regard. That is 1 John chapter one, beginning with verse five, where we read these words: “This is the message we’ve heard from the beginning. God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all. If we say we have fellowship with Him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not live according to the truth. But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, the blood of Jesus, His son, cleanses us from all sin. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. But if we confess our sin, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sin and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

“If we say we have no sin, we make Him a liar and His word is not in us. My little children, I’m writing this to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father: Jesus Christ, the righteous. He is the expiation for our sins, and not for our sins only but also for the sin of the whole world.” The deliverer is Jesus Christ. It all begins with confession. When you’re willing to come into the light, when you’re willing to walk out of the darkness and into the light and confess your sinfulness, that’s where deliverance begins.

I know that many of you, perhaps most of you, have read Gulliver’s Travels. It was written in the 18th century by Jonathan Swift. Gulliver’s Travels is of course a masterpiece of literature, and children just love to read Gulliver’s travel. Sometimes adults are kind of disturbed by it because they understand the deeper meanings—the allegories, the symbolism. In Gulliver’s Travels, we’re told that Gulliver took four journeys, and the first journey was to the land of the Lilliputians. And the Lilliputians were little people, one 12th the size of normal people. That was Gulliver’s first journey. And on his second journey, Gulliver went to the land of the Brobdingnags, and they were giants 12 times the size of normal people.

On his third journey, he went to various lands and encountered various peoples. But every literary scholar agrees that the most important journey in understanding Jonathan Swift was the fourth journey. And on the fourth journey, Gulliver traveled to a land where he saw two different types of beings. There were the Houyhnhnms, and the Houyhnhnms were kind, and gentle, and wise, and good. They looked a lot like horses. Then there was another race of beings, and they were called the Yahoos. In fact, this is where in the English language we get the word Yahoo. We get it from Jonathan Swift and Gulliver’s Travels.

The second group of beings were called the Yahoos. And they were not kind, and they were not gentle, they were not wise, and they were not good. They were sometimes mean, and they were sometimes stupid. They were often sinful. And the Yahoos looked a whole lot like human beings. So Gulliver didn’t want to hang out with the Yahoos. He wanted to hang out with the Houyhnhnms. He wanted to hang out with the horse-like beings. But the Houyhnhnms didn’t want Gulliver to join them because he looked a lot like a Yahoo. And you’ll recall that at the end of Gulliver’s travels, when he leaves that land and returns to the city of London, he no longer wants to hang out with people because they look like Yahoos and he wants to hang out with the horses because they look like Houyhnhnms.

Some people have actually concluded that Jonathan Swift, on the basis of Gulliver’s travels, was a misanthrope, that he hated people. But they don’t understand him at all. He didn’t hate people. In fact, Jonathan Swift loved people. And for more than 30 years, he was the senior pastor of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, Ireland. For more than 30 years he was the senior pastor. And he loved people. But you see, he understood the Bible. He understood that all people are yahoos. He understood that. He understood that we’re all sinners in need of grace, that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. There’s something of the Yahoo in all of us. Do you understood that? That’s the beginning of deliverance. When you understand that at least in some measure you are a Yahoo, that’s the beginning of deliverance. When you understand that you’re a sinner in desperate need of grace and you confess your sin, that’s the beginning of deliverance.

But confession is not enough. We must also, the Bible says, repent. Confession must be followed by repentance. And repentance implies a sincere desire to change. And if you know you’re a sinner, do you have a sincere desire to change your thought life? Your motive is your behavior. Do you have a sincere desire to change? That’s repentance. But even that’s not enough. Even confession and repentance, the Bible says, is not enough because we must have faith. We must come to the cross in faith. We must fall down at the foot of the cross and accept Christ—His bloodshed, His atoning sacrifice, His payment for our sin. We must come in faith believing that His sacrifice is sufficient. And you see, when you see the gospel summarized in scriptures, it’s always, “Repent and believe.” Confession is part of repentance. “Repent and believe.” So, it’s confess, repent, believe; that’s the call of the gospel, and it’s the means of deliverance.

Then when you do that, when you come to the cross, you receive Christ and Savior and Lord, He delivers you from your disobedience, from your deception, and from destruction and death itself. That’s deliverance. You begin a whole new journey in sanctification and discipleship that leads to heaven itself. That’s the offer of the gospel. And it is so wonderful. And as we close this morning, it’s possible that there are people here who’ve never found deliverance from sin, from disobedience, deception, destruction, and death. This is the morning to take care of that. So, let’s close this Lenten in service with a word of prayer.