Theological Reflection on Sin

So I posted last night that I was working on a paper. I didn’t actually go through with it. I went to bed. Which meant tonight, after having a good time with friends, I had to get home and get a theological paper finished by midnight. I just got done with “Sin and the Impaired Relationship with Creation,” and I thought I’d drop some excerpts here:

…sin is primarily a separation, in terms of relationship, from a relational God. God created us for relationship and our offense against God is ultimately falling short of that relational fullness. We are, in short, at a distance from that relationship we were most created for.

Sin is a violation of [the] divine relationship, and Christ’s death on the cross reconciles us to that relationship by taking the separation upon Himself.

Our work as the church, the agents of the Good news, is to spread this mission to the world by embodying it. We must become the community that Christ died for us to experience.

…we must think about our brokenness and distance from our fellow humans. If we were created to be in a good, right relationship with the Creator, that means we’re all of equal value and importance in the global society. This, however, is hardly the case. Inequality reigns supreme among the human race, direct evidence of sin and the separation among humans. Salvation, therefore, reconciles us to the rest of humanity in a way that establishes equality and mutual respect in light of our standing before God and each other. Salvation means that we have all the rights to be thankful to God and no right to be glad for our own doing, which means we’re all worthless without the love and relationship of the Creator.

Church should be a place that is shaped by dependency; our ecclesiology is formed by our need for each other and the recognition of our collective reliance on each other to make it with this Kingdom mindset in the midst of the prevailing culture.

Compunction

I’ve heard people contrast the law of the Old Testament with the grace of the New Testament.

But I don’t know if we let the ramifications of the Old Testament impact us enough. People assume that the Old Testament offerings were to make up for the people’s transgressions of the law. But that’s not entirely true. The sin/guilt offerings were primarily about covering unknown or accidental sins. There wasn’t really a way of covering intentional or malicious sins.

In common language–if you did it on purpose, there’s no easy way out.

Where I think we miss the point in looking at all this is that we take it instantly back to a “who’s in? who’s out?” conversation.

But what if the point was this: The way the Covenant relationship is set up between God and Israel, God’s intuitive assumption is that the guilt from any possible sin (including, perhaps especially, ones that were unintentional) would be so powerful that the people couldn’t go on with their daily lives because of the internal suffering.

What if what we should take away from the picture of the guilt/sin offerings is that God imagines the sin so seriously that we couldn’t function without the Grace granted to us by the one whom we’ve violated by violating his Creation?

Most of us don’t live this way. But maybe we should.