--So far in talking about sin, I’ve emphasized the use of various metaphors as a way of grasping both the nature of what sin is and its effects and also as a method for seeing that sin is much, much bigger and more diverse than most people initially think.
--See, most people, even Christians, think that sin is simply doing something bad or perhaps that “a sin” is what we mean by some action that violates one of God’s rules.
--And it’s not that this is wrong, it’s just that it’s so very limited. Sort of like saying that if you want to know what a building is, well houses are buildings and there you go. Or if you want to understand animals, well, a dog is a common animal.
--And again, the reason this matters is because in failing to grasp the scope of sin and everything that Christian term covers, we also fail to grasp the scope of God’s Grace and His plan for solving sin with the Gospel.
--This means that part of seeing how big sin is entails beginning to see how big the Gospel is. If you think that sin is stealing, then the Gospel only needs to be big enough to make you not steal. And many things can do that, quite frankly. Guilt, fear, social coercion, or just education. And so what happens when you have a small view of sin is that many solutions seem adequate for solving the problem.
--Thus, even if you grasp that the Gospel is the sin-solution, you might admit almost anything as the Gospel simply because many things solve the tiny view of sin you have.
--But when you start to the magnitude of the problem of sin, all the pretenders and faux-solutions look pathetically small, especially things like willpower and education. And so an adequate grasp of how massive sin is not only helps raise your awareness of how massive the Gospel is, but it also helps eliminate false gospels and it refines and purifies your sense of what the Gospel really is and what it really does.
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