CC--Christianese 18c: Sin (part 3 of ?)

--Sin is the catchall word for everything that’s wrong with the world God made, and yesterday we saw that two useful metaphors for sin include a stain and a disease. Here are two more :

--Metaphor 3: A debt.
--The Bible uses debt as a metaphor for the condition of sin, partially because it helps clarify the nature of the condition, but also because it so usefully illustrates the transformation that takes place in salvation. Most of the time, a debt is something you incur because you have borrowed with a promise to repay. This actually isn’t a very good metaphor for sin because many of these debts can be repaid (whereas our sin can’t be paid off so easily) and also because we borrow with the agreement of the lender. So a different sort of debt might work a bit better here, the debt owed as a result of damaging someone, or what lawyers would call a tort. If I am walking through your house, in which you have some artwork, and I either fall and damage it or else actively set out to destroy it, I have wronged you and I am obligated to pay you back to make you whole again. Until I do so, I have a debt. But what if the artwork was priceless, irreplaceable, and precious to you? There is literally no way to pay off that debt. Perhaps I can temporarily appease you with lesser artwork, but this will not do permanently. So, I walk around with this crushing obligation to repay what I cannot repay or else be thrown into jail or slavery. But then one day, you contact me and offer to forgive the debt. I am relieved beyond measure, and that relief is the experience of salvation, the removal of this debt.

--Metaphor 4: A defacement
--To continue a similar line of thinking, the experience of the one who destroys the art is to be indebted, but the experience of the owner of the art is the loss of beauty and satisfaction which beholding the art rightly brings. And although many people think of sin as us destroying the art on God’s wall, we sometimes miss the fact that what makes this all the more terrible is that we ourselves are the art, unique, precious, and irreplaceable yet damaged beyond repair. We are a work of art that decided to deface and destroy itself. And this condition of being ruined only leads to us continually ruining ourselves more and more because, as should be obvious, self-ruining artwork is in no position to restore itself. Only someone with comparable skill to the original artist can return the wreck to its intended glory.

--Sin is thus a kind of self-ruination of the artwork we are, which ugliness is carried in us and the debt we owe the Owner for having so ruined ourselves.