CC--Christianese 18j: Sin (part 10 of 11)

--Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been explaining what sin is by using both metaphors and definitions. The point of this was twofold. I wanted you to see how diverse and complex sin is, and I also wanted you to see just how massive it is.
--The entire human condition is plagued by it.
--See, people tend to think of sin as a relatively small problem, like a little bit of rust on the car or a bit of mold on the siding. And so all you have to do to solve it is to sand and paint or scrub and rinse and it’ll be gone. Oh sure, it may come back again, but you just need to repeat the cleansing, and all will be well. This is natural, after all.
--But because most people think of sin this way, they also think the solution to sin is equally small, perhaps something as simple as changing your behavior: you know, giving away more money or keeping your mouth shut when you want to berate someone or refusing to give in to some temptation of the flesh.
--But sin’s greatest deception is precisely its ability to blind us to it’s own scope. This was part of the blindness John Newton wrote about. Being blind to your own condition is part of the ruination.
--A better way to think of sin is as a house that’s infested with termites, toxic mold, leaky roof, rotting pipes, and any other ailment houses suffer from. But the owners think that a fresh coat of paint will solve everything. How absurd! This is what Jesus meant when he called the Pharisees “whited sepulchers.” He wasn’t criticizing their uniquely depraved condition. Everyone’s house is rotten. He was saying how foolish they were for thinking a coat of external paint could solve such a deep and deadly diseased condition.
--Sin is thus in part the fact that we all have lives like living in such a house. But it’s also in part the extreme self-delusion that everything can be fixed we can solve all these problems with a merely external refurbishing.
--Whatever the solution to sin is going to be, it needs to solve everything sin is. Eliminating the termites doesn’t fix the mold, for instance.