CC--Christianese 18f: Sin (part 6 of ?)

--We’ve already seen that the Bible uses metaphors for sin (the ruined condition of mankind) such as a stain, a disease, a debt, a defacement, and a burden.

Metaphor 6: A separation
--Here we start to see again some of the way in which sin as a concept is sometimes divided up into the causes of sin, it’s condition or ontology, and it’s consequences. And in that approach, separation from God is sometimes mentioned as the result of sin. This isn’t wrong, but it can mislead us a bit.
--Think about it this way. Imagine a man cheats on his wife with another woman without being caught for two months. Then, at the end of two months, he is discovered and they separate.
--The question is, at what point did their separation occur?
--You could certainly argue that it was when they physically separated and that this was a result of his adultery.
--But I think a better way to look at it is that this external separation is really just the final alignment between their behavior and his own choice to separate from her by beginning the affair. When he joined with another woman, he left his wife in the most dramatic way possible.
--In the intervening months, they really are separated, she just doesn’t know it yet and he is not fully acting as if that is true, trying to have both the separation and his marriage at the same time.
--Likewise, even though sin leads to separation from God as ultimately represented by hell, sin is really the internal reality of us having already separated ourselves from God by our unfaithfulness to Him. And so, it’s not as though sin leads to separation from God.
--Sin in a much more fundamental sense IS separation from God. And when God condemns unrepentant sinners to hell, all He’s really doing is making completely and externally real what is already internally true.
--In this way, you could say that the separation of sin is actually hell already, just on hold or held back or partially realized. So hell isn’t the result of sin, just its fullest manifestation. Sin, then, is pre-hell.