The Irrelevance of Sin

Sin is a strange thing.

On the one hand, it is a terrible truth of the human existence.  We all sin.  Each and every day, each and every one of us does things that go against God.  Sometimes we know the sin that we're committing, and sometimes we don't.  Either way, each of us sins against the God who created us.  That sin created a divide in our lives - a divide so large that it separated God from the entire human race.  We were once on a level field, side by side.  When Adam and Eve walked the Garden of Eden, they were sinless.  They were naked and not ashamed.  Sin then entered the world, and everything changed.  That level field was split, as though a great earthquake had shaken everything that we know and everything that we are.  A canyon now separated the creator of the universe and his prized creations: a deep, treacherous canyon we could not cross or circumvent.  Suddenly we were alone with no hope, and what was the cause of this?  It was sin, that terrible force of evil, that brought the divide between us.

Sin is indeed a terrible force, one that we must be aware of and can never ignore.  What would God do in the face of the sin that inflicted his creations?  Would he leave us to be alone for all time?  Would he surrender victory to sin and forfeit his creations away?  No; in a way that only God can, he went ahead and made sin completely irrelevant.

There's an asterisk by that statement, of course.

Around two thousand years ago, a man walked this Earth and lived his life in a way that no other man ever did or ever will: he was sinless.  Not a single blemish can be found on his record.  There was no hidden darkness.  There were no covered scandals waiting to be found.  There is simply the truth that Jesus was a completely innocent man.  In today's world, we have good people.  We have people who we see as righteous and living moral lives, but every human is a sinner, even those we see as good.  Every human except Jesus, who was the only man to ever complete the feat of a sinless life.

He also happened to be the son of God.

So how did God make sin irrelevant?  He send a part of himself down to Earth in physical form to live among us, to teach us, and then to die for us.  It was us, the very people who he came to save, who nailed him to a cross and hung him to die in humiliating fashion.  That single event summed up what Jesus came to do: the murder of Jesus was, in fact, a sin.  It was a sin that was being committed at the exact same moments in which it was being forgiven.

Every sin creates a debt between us and God, and it is a debt that must be paid.  In Biblical times, the Jewish people would sacrifice animals to be forgiven for their sins.  The person sinned, and the animal was given up to pay the debt.  There were detailed instructions in the scriptures on how they were to make such sacrifices, and they had to make those sacrifices over, and over, and over again.  Because they kept sinning, and debts kept on being created.  And all debts must be paid.

On that day, around two thousand years ago, when the son of God hung on a cross, dying, the blood that was being spilled became the payment for so much more than one sin by one man.  The death of Jesus paid the debts created by all men, for all the sins they had ever committed, and all the sins they ever will commit.  Jesus was the ultimate sacrifice - one that covered all sins for all time.  The canyon was filled back in, and sin no longer separated us from God.  Sin no longer had the power over us that it once did.  Sin had become irrelevant.

* And now we come back to that asterisk.

"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life." - John 3: 16

That's it.  Jesus came and died for all of us, but we must accept his sacrifice in order to fully receive the forgiveness that he brings us.  We must acknowledge that God is God, and that Jesus is the son of God sent to die for our sins.  And then, in the eyes of forever and the eternal destination of our souls, sin becomes irrelevant.  We should be striving to live godly lives, of course.  We should be striving to live by God's moral standard and not our sinful nature.  However, our lives should become more about living for God and spreading the good news of Jesus to a lost world, than about living a perfect life.  Because we won't, and truthfully, for Christ followers, our lives shouldn't be about that anymore.  While sins we commit may still have consequences on this Earth, our sins have been forgiven and there is no more debt to be paid.  We should not live in guilt or shame of our past or present sins, for God has remembered them no more.  Just as Jesus then rose from the dead and defeated sin and death once and for all, we should wave sin goodbye as it is no longer the defining truth of our relationship with God.  We should live as lights to the world, seeking to make everybody else's sin as irrelevant as ours.