CC--Christianese 18b: Sin (part 2 of ?)

--As we saw previously, sin is really the counterpart of the Gospel, it’s a broad way of labeling everything that’s currently wrong with God’s Creation. As such, everything the Gospel intends to fix is in some way or another connected to sin, whether its origin, its condition, or its effects. In other words, sin is an extremely large topic. That’s why some metaphors may help illustrate sin.

Metaphor 1: A Stain
--A stain is what you get when some foreign substance is spilled onto something of value and can’t be easily removed. Even when you remove a lot of it, something still remains that mars or tarnishes the beauty of the thing. Although many stains are difficult to clean, perhaps the most difficult ordinary stain is blood spilled on a white fabric. And since the Bible talks a lot about whiteness as purity and the wearing of white as a condition of perfection, sin can be visualized as the spilling of blood on our pure, white natures as human beings made in God’s image. As the Bible explains, nothing we do can ever remove that stain from ourselves, which is why we needed a Savior, whose perfect and pure self-sacrifice actually functions like anti-blood to cleanse the stain of our sin.

Metaphor 2: A Disease
--When some foreign germ enters your body and propagates itself, you become infected with some sort of disease. As the infection spreads, it will go through various phases, depending on the particular microbe. But several features are common to most diseases. They usually spend some time incubating prior to showing major symptoms, which eventually manifest and are often connected with the chance of contaminating other people through contact. Some diseases are vulnerable enough to the body’s own natural defenses or else not serious enough to merit medical care, but others are deadly and can kill slowly or rapidly if not treated properly. Similarly, if sin is a disease, there are some ways of treating the symptoms, but only one way to eradicate all the germs and cure the disease permanently: the Gospel.