So the God who is perfect relationships speaks. In Triune speaking, God creates a place that is full of perfect relationships and two people who are in perfect relationship and he invites them to share in the unbroken joy of the Lord.
But they don't.
And so sin is broken relationship.
I used to think that this was a cop-out definition. The Protestant Reformation focused on law-breaking as the essence of our problem and modernity's emphasis on the mind ran with this and developed all kinds of courtroom analogies and illustrations to talk about our problem of sin. So I wanted a definition that would be a little more angry, a little more judgmental.
But if God is a Perfect Relationship, then sin is the bizarre concept that somehow relationships might be un-done. Relating to near and far away neighbors, to the created world, and to ourselves was meant to be friction-free. Instead, relationship is perpectually friction-laden.
And it starts internally. Notice in the Genesis telling of the fall, Adam and Eve's first action is to put together some fig leaves because they're ashamed of their nakedness.
Shame is different from guilt.
Shame: to feel bad about who you are.
Guilt: to feel bad about what you have done.
Shame is essentially an issue of broken relationship with the self. The problem of sin is most severe in terms of what it has done in our relationship with God. But the place where it first plays itself out is in our relationship with ourselves.
But here's a glorious mystery that is too wonderful for us to fully graps: from the moment that God spoke creation into existence, the Son was slain. The Scriptures say that the Lamb of God was slain from the foundations of the world. The Son died for the creation from the moment that "it was." And so shame and guilt, broken relationship with ourselves and with the external realities all around us, were all gathered up from "the foundation of the world" in the death of the Son for us.
2 comments:
The Son died for the creation from the moment that "it was."
This seems a little too strong. The difficult I have with it is that there's a small implication that The Fall was planned.
Certainly, the Fall was ancitipated by the Triune God of Grace, but in the sense that it was possible, not that it was necessitated.
I'll hasten to add that I am prepared to go to the mat over the idea that from the moment creation "was," the Son was committed to being incarnate, as humanity was always going to find it's union with God in Christ by the Spirit.
But, if the Fall hadn't happened, if A&E had chosen rightly, would the Son still have had to die? I'm not ready to go there.
Though, again, even if A&E had chosen rightly, I do believe that the Son would have become incarnate.
Thanks for the awesome posts!
Good thoughts, Macon--I think there we're obviously running up against the issues of God's relationship to time. If we go with God being outside of time but able to foresee all possible decisions, then in one sense he foresaw (but didn't necessarily pre-ordain) the Fall and given the occurence of that particular scenario he was indeed slain from the foundation of the world--that is, he was not only ready to die but given that he is outside of time he was sacrificed immediately for us and for our salvation upon the biting of the fruit.
I agree with you about the incarnation of Jesus even if creation hadn't fallen, but I think we both got that from Deddo(?)
Guesses, of course, only guesses...if they aren't true then something much more wonderful is.
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