Sin is never good but God is always good.

1. Sin is never good. It's a violation of Gods design and always creates pain, suffering and hardship.

However God is always good and redeems all our messes, bringing about our good in and through all things.

2. God is always good and redeems all our messes, bringing about our good in and through all things.

However Sin is never good. It's a violation of Gods design and always creates pain suffering and hardship.

I mention two key principles in both statement 1 and 2 above. Note I simply reversed the order. Am I saying the same thing? Why did I say it this way?

I did this because it's easy to emphasis sin's destructive nature to such an extent that we loose sight of God's working in and through all things. We can take the view that we have messed up (or our lives are messed up) beyond God's ability to redeem it, wallowing in guilt, shame and self pity.

Or we can emphasize God's working to such an extent that we forget or downplay sins destructive nature. Some may try to argue if God is going to use our mistakes for our good anyway, let's make more mistakes. After all, you can't out sin the grace of God (the last sentence is true by the way).

Whenever we deal with truths in tension it's easy to fall to one side loosing sight of the other. Emphasizing each while not ignoring either is important because both are equally true.

Regarding the tension between sin's destructive nature and God's working in and through all things, it is vital that we understand on the one hand, that sin is not less of a problem and not less destructive simply because God redeems it for our good. Joseph wound up being rejected by his brothers and sold into slavery due to his arrogant boasting of his vision. Jacob walked with a limp for the rest of his life due to his wrestling with God. Sin (self centered, manipulative behavior) still has it's consequences.

While on the other hand, no matter how bad we mess up, God is always bringing about his perfect purposes through all the choices of those who love him. The good, bad and the ugly ones. 

God is a God of grace, using and working through all things to bring about our highest good and his greatest glory. The the eventual outcome of the life of Joseph again comes to mind. 

In fact the consequences themselves become the very means of God's using it for our good, so he might wean us from sin's destructiveness.

If you are more of a moralist you will likely fall on the side of emphasizing sin's destructive nature. As you come to understand the extent of God's grace you may tend to fall on the side of emphasizing God's working in and through all things for our good. Again, both are true, but not to the extend of excluding the other.  

Exceptions to the rule.

The exception to the above is sometimes God in his wisdom and mercy will at times spare us the full repercussions of our poor choices. While at other times in His wisdom he will allow the full weight of our poor choices to fall on us and bare their bitter fruit. It seems he tends to do the former when we are younger in the faith and the later as we mature, but there are always exceptions in both cases. Generally speaking it seems as we grow in our walk with the Lord, it often requires more, not less trust in God. Therefore our struggles seem to increase instead of diminish. Certainly an awareness of our weaknesses (our internal challenge) is keener, if not our actual circumstantial challenges.

Why God's children disagree.

I think this is also why there is often debate among Christian's on how God works. Because some experience God working more one way then the other, they tend to argue more from their experience without considering that God may not be working in someone else life exactly the same way. God works with all of us according to where we are in our own personal walk with him and the level of trust we have in Him at that particular time.

I think part of the disagreement between groups is due to our self centered nature. We tend to assume we are the center of the world and God works in the lives of others exactly the same way he does in ours. Because of this we tend to gravitate to others that have had similar experiences, discounting those who have had a different experience. It then becomes an us vs them mindset.

Why we disagree with ourselves

Also some are inclined to think that the joy that often accompanies a young Christians experience is the norm, so as they mature, they spend their life trying to recover that seemly careless bliss of their early walk with God and are puzzled when they find life seems to get more challenging not less. 

God in his wisdom works with each of us exactly as he deems best, according to where we each are. When Peter inquired about the status of another disciple, "Jesus said to him, 'If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? You follow me!' " John 21:22  And so there we too should leave it.

For a further discussion on guilt and shame click here. 

The internal dynamics of our dilemma and God's amazing solution/offer!

Our problem isn't knowing what we should do, it's doing what we know we should. 

As a result, we have two opposing dynamics going on inside each of us which creates deep-seated conflict with subtle but far-reaching implications and impact. 

Those dynamics are:

1. We have an intuitive understanding and awareness of what is right. The old saying and golden rule "do to others as you would have them do to you" or "love others as you want them to love you," comes to mind. Who doesn't agree with this? Virtually every religion and ethical system recognizes this as a important universal principle in one form or another. 

We also know intuitively this is right and true. It becomes most apparent when we are on the ¹receiving end of not being treated this way -- when we are not treated with dignity, value, respect...in a word, love -- we feel wronged/offended. 

YET

2. None of us has the internal strength (spiritually,  emotionally) to actually ²live this way -- to treat others as we wish to be treated. Sure, on occasion we might, but consistently and perfectly... no way. When it comes to taking care of ourselves or another we naturally (vs supernaturally) take care of ourselves 1st. Why? Because we must have love by design. Without love we are "takers" instead of "givers."

As a result of these two opposing dynamics within us all, and our failure to love others as we wish to be loved, we constantly go about things with this deep-seated, nagging sense of failure, guilt and shame (no matter how unconscious and deeply buried this may be). We constantly fail to live up to what we intuitively know is right and how we were designed, yet never carry out. 

We aren't living up to our own ¹internally embedded standard much less the ones others try to impose on us. 

As a result, we are always going about life with this internal conflict and tension of knowing who we should be and what we should do, yet never doing it consistently (though we mask our shame well and are rarely fully conscious of it). 

At a result of this conflict, deep down inside all of us is a nagging sense of worthlessness (though we are far from being worthless. For more on this click here). 

This often manifests itself in depression. We can never consistently feel good about ourselves - if we base our worth solely on our efforts - because we fail to ³be what we know, at a deep unconscious - or conscious - level, we should be. 

A sense of worthlessness is at the heart of all emotional pain. It is why we are in a perpetual state of pain. We were designed for glory, the opposite of worthlessness.

Seeking relief. 

No wonder we are always trying to do things to prove we aren't so bad (i.e. so self-centered) and seek to obtain anything that makes us feel better about ourselves, if only for a moment i.e. temporarily.

No wonder we are always seeking to be affirmed and recognized by others as important, special, worthwhile, etc. 

No wonder we are offended when people treat us as unimportant/ worthless and don't give us the affirmation we want and feel we deserve. 

We may not be fully aware of the conflict, but we are very aware of our constant need to feel better about ourselves. At a minimum, this is the conscious or "external" evidence of this deeply buried conflict.  

This conflict/tension is a constant part of our lives. We are always seeking affirmation in one form or another. We are always seeking to feel better about ourselves. We are always seeking peace, contentment, joy in one form, or another. Every sales offer assumes and appeals to this at some level. 

We are always seeking internal calm by trying to order our external world (circumstances) in such a way that we can experience this elusive sense of internal peace. Always!!!

What do we do? What can we do?! 

Well, we can distract ourselves (seek to control our environment), through a variety of means. Recreation, drugs, sex, meditation, entertainment, achievement, "beating the next guy," power, fame, money (which affords us many of the other things on the list) etc.

OR

We can try to psyche ourselves into thinking this sense of failure doesn't really exist but is due only to an overly active imagination/ conscience or is part of "cultural programming"; that morality is just a myth, and these feelings of guilt and shame are only in our heads. It's all subjective and not real i.e. right and wrong is not an objective reality.

So how's that working for us (you) so far? Have you found anything that gives this perfect (complete and constant) sense of total wholeness, peace, happiness, without having to constantly jump through hoops of one kind or another? Do you live consistently in a constant, ongoing state of peace and happiness etc. (Yet isn't this what we all want and seek?)

If not, why not? Is this even possible?! Yes, it is. There is an answer. And in truth, it's ultimately the only answer that works. 

And what is that? Glad you asked! 

We can accept God's solution.

First, we need to understand why this tension exists to begin with. We  are made to be loved and to love others. It's part of being like God...in his image. He gives and receives love between the Father, Son, and Spirit. A relationship of love is the core of God's very being. God IS love i.e. He is relationship. It's not just what he does, it is who he is.

We are like him and made for a relationship of love in order to partake of and experience God, who is the source of love, because he is a being of constant, never-ending, overflowing, bottomless love. 

Because of this, we will never feel truly whole unless and until we live in this love. It is who we are, how we are designed and why we exist. Knowing God and experiencing all that he is, is why we were created. The bible states this explicitly and if we stop to really consider this, on a deep level we know intuitively this matches our experience.

  

But this is not all there is to us. We have rejected (and still do) this true source of love. God himself. We choose to operate on our own, with little to no acknowledgment of our need for God (who is infinite, nonstop love) and now try to fill ourselves with substitutes... and think we can.  

But we can't! We are like a fish out of water flopping about, experiencing enough rainfall to keep us from drying up and dying, but nothing like we need to function at the level we were designed to operate.  We are designed to live and swim about in an endless sea of love i.e. with God. Not constantly gasping for breath.

How can a finite being (us) use finite created things to ever fill a need for something Infinite i.e. God himself? That's like putting a pint of fuel in a jet and expecting it to fly (we may be able to briefly fire up the engines at best).

But there is good news! 

God did this for us! Did what?! What does that mean? Christ, while on earth, loved perfectly and completely (because this is who he is and how he has always been throughout eternity past) to the point of dying. He actually gave himself up to be sacrificed.

He first loved His Father. And because he loved his Father he loved us. 

Why would he do that, and how did he? 

Two ways/reasons he showed his love for us. 

1. So that we, who can't live as we were created to, don't have to in order to have God's love. Now God offers us Christ's faithful life of love in exchange for our not living the life of love that we are created for. He did this as proof of his love for us. If we accept this, the Father credits Christ's life of love to us as if we lived this kind of life. (good bye guilt and shame over our failures to love as God deserves and others as we are designed to)

2. And not only does God offer to credit us with this perfect life but God put the consequences of our not living this kind of life; the life we were designed to live, onto Christ. (good bye judgment, condemnation and rejection)

For a further discussion of God's solution and its necessity click here.

Now, guess what? When we recognize we can never resolve the deep-seated conflict within or ever satisfy our deepest longing and then believe and accept his offer, it's done! There is no more guilt, no more shame, no more condemnation or rejection by God! It's gone!!! Hard to believe, but it's true. And that is now our only issue; do we believe this? The more we do, the freer we are. This is God's free offer to us if we accept it. Do you accept it?

We still blow it!

But don't we still blow it? Yes, we still do. We still don't love as we are designed to but God no longer looks at this as necessary for extending his complete, uninterrupted love to us. If we accept his offer He now sees and accepts Christ's perfect record as ours, credited to our "account" if you will.  

This would be like us having a seriously overdrawn bank account and then someone else with an account that has an unlimited balance assigns their account over to us.  It was earned by them, but out of their love for us and desire that we experience their wealth, they assigned it over and put our name on the account. Not only is everything in this other account now ours, but the funds from this new account were used to zero out our overdraw account and close it.  That old account is now gone along with all its debt. Everything in the assigned account is now ours. 

And not only so, but before God made this offer, we were still his enemies. How? We opposed God by trying to be our own god and fill our need for love with things other than God (and still do) which doesn't work i.e. it is not possible because it violates our design. We are designed for the infinite, not the finite-limited creation.  

It is also a lie because it says we can be who God designed us to be without Him. If we are designed for infinite love and God is that infinite love, this is not only impossible but it dishonors him for who he truly is... the only Source of true and infinite love and life.

Seeking to be for ourselves what only God can be for us caused a rift in our relationship with God. This blocked our experience of his love for us (not his actual love) so we no longer felt or experienced it. (If however, we receive his offer in Christ that barrier is removed and God's love is now freely available to us. To accept His offer is saying we can't be all we are designed to be apart from our Creator). 

Once we began to see this; once this really seeps into the core of our being, we fall in love with Him and Christ for doing this for us. The more we see how antagonistic we have been and are to God and all He has done to completely remedy this, the more we fall in love with Him. What an incredible gift this is! How can we ever thank God enough? 

Glad you asked. 

Now that we have been freed of the obligation to give God his due honor (since Christ satisfied this for us), we are free to live this life of love he's designed us for (which also "just happens" to bring us the greatest sense of meaning and purpose since this is why we were made to begin with). 

We now are loved in such a way that when we "get it" it draws out of us a desire to love back and a trust in following His direction (how can we not trust someone who would do all this for us). Now we have a reason to love as we were originally designed to. The love from someone else (i.e. God) we were designed to experience from the beginning has been restored back to us and is now fully ours, never to be taken away. We no longer live the life of love we were designed to live because we have to in order to be loved again. We now have that love we were originally designed to experience. It was secured by someone else's efforts, not ours. Therefore, it is completely ours and can never be cut off or blocked again. Now we love others out of love and gratitude for what God and Christ did for us and desire to share this with others. 

We also now want to show Him off (honor/glorify Him) to others because, for the first time, we now understand how amazing He is and now see He deserves our love and honor and that others also need this love/Him. We want to live for his honor and their good. And the way we do is to love him and others in the same way he loved us.

BUT, I can't relate to what you describe above. I am just not feeling it.

Now the truth is most don't experience this inner conflict I described in the beginning, on a conscious level and to the extent I have described it. However, what we all experience is a longing for love. This we are, more or less, far more conscious of then the inner conflict mentioned above. (In fact, most of us don't even experience how great this desire for love is until we "fall in love" for the first time and experience a longing we didn't know existed before then).

And if we have some success in finding love or if we have grown up in a nurturing environment due to stable and loving parents, we won't know much (or at least be aware of the depth) of this conflict. 

But we all know what it's like to lose love in some form or another. Separation from a dear friend, spouse, loving parent, or sibling due to a variety of reasons, such as relocation, death, estrangement, etc should hit home for most of us. And when we lose it, then we become aware of a longing for what was lost. The simple reality is none of us can live without love and a sense of value very long. 

All of this points to the nature of our make up and raises the question, where does this come from? How can we express a personal need for a loving relationship if we came about by accident from an impersonal universe? No matter how much we try to reason away this central part of our make up, there it is, staring us in the face when we least expect it. 

Do you wish to continue on this path of longing or do you wish to turn to the path you were created for? He extends the offer I have mentioned. Will you accept and receive it?

Further discussion on depression click here

Further discussion on our being finite click here

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Footnotes:

¹We cannot get away from this or set it aside. We bump up against this everyday in everything we do. We all intrinsically seek to be valued. In a word we are hard wired for love.

²We can't because we are "running on empty." We are void of the love we were designed to receive/experience/participate in and must have in order to love others sacrificially. It's just not in us to do so on our own. It has to come from somewhere outside of us; from another source; a Source we cut ourselves off from.

³doing as we are designed to do only comes out of being who we were designed to be...fully connected to the source of life and love, God himself. 

The Law...good or bad?

If I jump off a building 10 stories high and go "splat" this is the normal consequence of violating a law of nature. If someone tells me about the law of gravity and cautions me not to jump, this would be the loving thing to do; a good thing, not bad. 

Law is for our good. It is not bad. Even though God's love for us and acceptance of us is secured by Christ's obedience to God's law and not based on our keeping it, he will not suspend the consequences of violating the law to protect us. Anytime anything acts contrary to its designs, there are consequences. This is the nature of operating in a created order. God is a specific way and therefore operates in a specific way. Because we are in his image, so do we.

The what and why of the law is not arbitrary or simply philosophical but very practical, *real and down-to-earth. 

In fact, more importantly, God giving us laws is evidence that he cares for (loves) us.

Just like the creator of a sophisticated machine, such as a race car or jet, provides extensive instructions and procedures on how to care for, maintain and use that machine for maximum safety, efficiency and longevity, so also does God -- this is most apparent in the one law to obey our parents. In so doing we are promised that our life on earth will be longer.

Obviously, we are personal beings and not machines. We are far more sophisticated than a machine. But all the more reason (and evidence of care) for providing instructions on how we best function.

The point is all things are designed in a specific way (particularly us as his image-bearers) in order to function in a specific way and operate at maximum capacity.

What are God's laws after all? They are simply an explanation of how we operate best according to who he is and who we are i.e. according to our design, his purposes, and the design of his created order. God's law is not arbitrary but rooted in the nature of God and how he operates (who he is) and in who we are as his image-bearers. 

Nor does God give us laws as a means of our gaining his approval and earning his love. He gives them as evidence of his care/love for us so we might know how to relate to him and best function according to our design, for our joy and his glory.

The reason we have trouble with law (generally and not necessarily regarding a specific law) is because it tells us what to do when we believe we know better than someone else what to do.

There are two issues regarding our obeying the law.

1. Is the one giving the law trustworthy?

If they are

2. Do we trust in the one who is giving us directions/law? If we trust someone and believe they love us we will have no problem following their directions.

We should always and only seek to follow God's instructions because we trust him, love him and desire to honor him. Not to earn God's love or gain his acceptance and approval. In Christ, we already have it. 

The problem isn't the law itself but our propensity to try to earn and gain acceptance and approval by our own efforts. In fact, many who say they are Christians us the very **law itself to do just that. 

The challenge of the law is we must be on our guard to never lose sight that God never intended or intends the law to be the means of gaining his love, acceptance and approval.

Christ tells us in Mat 5:17  "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them."

Why?  This tells us two things. 

1.     The law is important, otherwise, he wouldn't have bothered to fulfill it.  

2.     Because we could not fulfill it ourselves he came and did it for us.

Is there a difference between God's law and man's law?

It depends? All laws based on God's law are legitimate. These are to be followed diligently, for our good. But there are many laws that men create to take advantage of and abuse others that are in direct violation of God's law (legalized abortion comes to mind. The order of Pharaoh to have all babies destroyed at birth, would be a biblical example). Not only are we not obligated to follow these laws, but to do so would be disobedience to God. Since God is the ultimate lawgiver, the consequences of violating his law is far more severe than violating man's.

For a further discussion on the basis or grounds for morality click here. 

For a helpful outside article on the value of rules click here. 

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*The fact that we can predict an outcome when we repeat a certain process tells us we live in a world of design. 

**Paul deals with this misapplication of the law often in his letters to the churches. In fact, the problem was significant enough that he wrote an entire letter to the Galatian church that deals exclusively with this issue. The law is mentioned 32 times in this one short letter alone. Second only to Romans (which is almost 3x longer) where he mentions it 78 times. "Per capita" the law is mentioned most in Galatians. 

Those who misapply the law are often know as legalists. In Paul's day they were called Judaizers.