Rethinking Sin

The author of Hebrews writes that, "We do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has been tempted in all points like as we are, yet without sin" (Hebrews 4:15). In 2 Corinthians, Paul says that "God made him who had no sin to be [a] sin [offering] for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God" (2 Corinthians 5:21).

The belief that Jesus was without sin is a necessary belief of the Christian faith. If Christ sinned while on earth, He couldn't be the blameless sacrificial lamb that humankind needed to atone for our sins. If He committed even one sin in his life then my faith is without reason. I am not guaranteed salvation for accepting him as my savior.

Yet for as long as I can remember, there are a few stories in Jesus' life that I have struggled to fit within this belief--by all accounts they appear to be sinful actions that Christ committed.

In fact, even a casual study of the gospels does not show a savior that is a perfect picture of what we think as the typical way a Christian should act. Christ seemed to rebel against society. He angered many by his words and actions. He was not the poster child for a church-going conservative. As one commentator noted, "he was no James Dobson."

There are two incidents in particular that I've had a hard time with. The first is recounted in Luke 2, when Jesus is twelve years old and stays behind in Jerusalem after Passover while His parents continue on to Nazareth to go back home. His parents realized a day after traveling that He was not with them. They went back to Jerusalem and searched three days for Jesus before they found Him in the temple. When asked where He had been, Jesus replied, "Didn't you know I'd be in my Father's house?" (Luke 2:49).

I know one thing: if I had pulled that on my parents, it would have been a sin. I would have disobeyed the "honor thy father and mother" commandment, and would have felt guilty about it for days. So does that mean the young Jesus committed a sin?

Or how about when Jesus was in the temple (Matthew 21)? After his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, Jesus went to the temple and "drove out all who were buying and selling there." That's not so bad, you say? Well listen to what our Savior did next: "He overturned the tables of the money changes and benches of those selling doves" (Matthew 21:12).

Destroying property, vandalism, disturbing the peace--that surely is sinful, isn't it?

I did some of my own research on this, and found answers that were wholly unsatisfactory. They were adequate, but only worked to come up with a lame excuse why Jesus was able to do this. One argued, for example, that Jesus was absent-minded, and didn't realize His parents were heading to Nazareth and that is why He stayed around in Jerusalem. An absent-minded messiah? I hope not.

No matter how you look at it, these actions of Christ do not fit within the mainstream church's view of what is sinful and not. You can come up with cute little ways with how we can justify them, but in the end those are merely unsatisfying excuses meant as a way for the "absent-minded" believer to sit back and go, "OK, that sort of makes sense. I guess so." I can't, however, swallow them. Does that mean then that my faith is all for naught? That I should just give it up?

I can't do that. I have been a first hand witness to the power of Christ in my own life. I know how He has transformed the lives of me and those around me. In fact, it would take more faith for me not to believe in Christ. And so I must seek another answer. And I think I have found one that is really revolutionary for my own faith, and has caused me to rethink what sin really is.

For years sermons have been taught on the verse that says that "God is love" (I John 4:16). Almost invariably when a speaker speaks on this, he stops the audience and causes them to really think about the verse. Modern-day society has a very perverted idea of what "love" is, influenced by a mainstream media that has it all wrong. When we think of our definition of love, and then think that God is supposed to represent that, we come away with a very deficient view of God.

What we are often told by the minister, however, is that we can't define God by our view of love. Instead, we must put together everything that we know about God, and define love as that. God defines love, not vice versa. Love is characterized by God. Once we see it that way, we come away with a better understanding of what love is supposed to be.

In the same way, when I think about sin, I can't think about sin as the way that the world (or even the church) defines it. If I believe that Christ is the messiah, and I believe that the messiah was without sin, that I have to define sin as being anything that is apart from Christ--anything that Christ wouldn't do. And anything that Christ did, I have to view as not sinful.

Thinking about sin that way necessarily transforms how we think about it. The modern-day definition of sin is a series of "do's" and "don'ts" of "wills" and "won'ts." Basically, if I go throughout the day and serve as a "model citizen," avoid cussing, disturbing peace, getting drunk, looking lustfully at women, stealing, cheating, etc. then I have "avoided" sin for that day.

I don't think that God, however, views sin as such. I'm not convinced that He has a master set of rules and regulations, and puts a check mark next to every single "violation" that we have committed. I don't think it's as black and white as that.

Christ says to us that "whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother" (Matthew 12:50). In fact that is why Christ came to earth: "For I have not come down from Heaven to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me" (John 6:38). Not sinning, therefore, and being like Christ, is to do the will of God. Sinning is to do anything apart from that.

This, of course, leaves room for much in terms of "grey areas" of sin. It is as not cut and dry as sin is usually thought of and, in fact, as we humans like. We like lists. We like to know the 5 or 10 things we should or shouldn't do. And in fact, I don't think it's wrong to help out a new Christian by telling him the things that he should or shouldn't do. An immature Christian might not realize that certain things take him away from God or are against God's will and might have bad habits from his previous life that need to be stopped.

But as one becomes more mature in the walk, I believe there is more freedom allowed in the Christian life. Isn't that one of the reason Christ came? To free us from the law?

Paul himself makes reference to this in Romans.

Therefore let us stop passing judgment on one another. Instead, make up your mind not to put any stumbling block or obstacle in your brother's way. As one who is in the Lord Jesus, I am fully convinced that no food is unclean in itself. But if anyone regards something as unclean, then for him it is unclean. If your brother is distressed because of what you eat, you are no longer acting in love. Do not by your eating destroy your brother for whom Christ died. Do not allow what you consider good to be spoken of as evil. For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking, but of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit, because anyone who serves Christ in this way is pleasing to God and approved by men. Let us therefore make every effort to do what leads to peace and to mutual edification. Do not destroy the work of God for the sake of food. All food is clean, but it is wrong for a man to eat anything that causes someone else to stumble. It is better not to eat meat or drink wine or to do anything else that will cause your brother to fall. ~ Romans 14:13-21

We are called, therefore, to act and behave in a way that does God's will and helps others find out about Christ. This will be different for each of us. For some, drinking will be sinful as it causes one to fall away from the Lord or others to think less of the Christian--and thus less of God. For others, drinking will be completely acceptable and it is not outside of God's will to enjoy a glass of wine.

When we are able to view sin as not a series of lists, then, but a way of living that is apart from God, we are able to look again at the actions of Christ in a new light. And we are able to clearly see how they are not sinful, but instead are the actions of someone fulfilling God's will.

So why did Jesus seemingly disobey his parents and stay behind in a temple? The easy answer is because God wanted him to. Perhaps He saw it as a way to allow Jesus to learn more about Him. Perhaps He wanted Mary and Joseph to understand who Jesus belonged to--that He was a child of God, and not earthly parents. Maybe he wanted Jesus to be able to witness to the Pharisees in the temple. Maybe Jesus was going to catch a cold on the way to Nazareth if He left when His parents did. (OK, that last one was far-fetched, but you get what I mean.) The point was Jesus was so in tune with the will of His Father that God asked Jesus to stay back--and He did.

Now His parents didn't understand that, and the Bible tells us so. They were not as in tune with God, and maybe just didn't "get it." And that leads us to the most telling part of the incident. After Jesus realized that his parents truly didn't not understand what Jesus was doing, Jesus "went down to Nazareth and was obedient to them" (Luke 2:51)! After He saw that His actions did not, perhaps, have the desired affect on his parents--that they saw it as being disobedient when perhaps Jesus had hoped they would have a different reaction--He went back and did what He was told. In order to better serve His God, Jesus realized at that time that He had to serve His parents. They were not as mature in their faith as He would have hoped. And so Jesus obliged.

Most modern day twelve-year olds couldn't get away with what Jesus did. For most of them, to stay back while their parents were leaving would be dishonoring "thy father and mother." Most modern-day twelve year olds also are not the messiah. But there is a real-life application for this. As we grow older and more mature, there may be times when disobeying our parents is in the will of God for us. Perhaps our parents want us to be a certain profession, and we feel strongly that God is calling us in another direction. What are we to do in that case? Are we to wait until they "pass on" to pursue God's will for our life? I would hope not! Instead, in these instances, we might have to disobey our parents to follow God's will. That doesn't mean we have to dishonor them and go about God's will disrespectfully. But it does mean that God's will has to take precedence over theirs. Jesus, being God, was just able to learn that at a younger time in His life than most of us.

In the temple incident later in His life, Jesus knew that the way to reach the people who were defiling it by their merchandising--and make a stand for what is right--He had to react as He did. Being God, He knew that "civil disobedience" wasn't going to work in this instance. What these people were doing was abhorrent in the eyes of His father. And the way to have the maximum impact and, indeed, to do God's will, was to root out evil when and where He saw it.

In fact, I see these actions as proof that Jesus was the Son of God. God loathes the defiling of what is Holy. And if Jesus hadn't overturned these tables, God would have sent a storm that would have. Remember, the same God who wiped out Sodom and Gomorrah is the same God that was present in Christ. And where no one faults God for doing what He did in Sodom, no one should fault Jesus for detesting what the merchants were doing to the temple.

What does that mean, then? Is there room in the Christian life for anger, for behavior such as this? Normally, not. But I believe Jesus shows us that in the right circumstance that there is. Sometimes God calls His people to stand up in a dramatic way for what is right. There is room for name-calling (as Jesus did when he called the Pharisees hypocrites) and destruction, provided that it is done with the right intent, in the right frame of mind, with God's blessing, against such detestable acts as what was going on in the temple and in the hearts of the Pharisees.

Thus, I have now come to believe that to do God's will sometimes requires behavior that other people might not "approve" of--or that they even might find as "sinful"--provided that the Holy Spirit is calling us to do it.

But that comes with a huge warning. The discernment of knowing whether such a call is truly from the Holy Spirit is reserved for only the most mature of Christians. And under normal circumstances, no Christian should believe that they are being called to "sin." And, in fact, I think anything that the Bible clearly spells out as sins are always forbidden.

The acts of the sinful nature are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God. ~ Galatians 5:19-21

I, and most people I know, could not do what Jesus did without committing a sin. The rest of the world has a standard by which Christians are supposed to behave, and I believe that it is our obligation as Christians to follow that standard. That is what we are called to do. After all, "It is better not to eat meat or drink wine or to do anything else that will cause your brother to fall." To not uphold what the world thinks as acceptable Christian behavior causes others to stumble and therefore is sinful.

But I also believe that as we mature in our Christian walk we will come upon times with which there is no clear verse in the Bible as to what to do. There might come a point where we have to choose between honoring our parents and honoring God. Or we might be faced with such deplorable disrespect of God that turning the other cheek will do less for His Kingdom than calling out those people for their detestable behavior. In those times, no decision should be made without much prayer and study. And if after all of that we still come to the conclusion that God is calling us to take a particular step in one direction or another, we must be willing to follow God's will no matter what the cost.

It is His will that we do that. To do anything less would be a sin.