THE LIES OF SIN – PART FOUR

Take care, brethren, that there not be in any one of you an evil, unbelieving heart that falls away from the living God. ¹³ But encourage one another day after day, as long as it is still called “Today,” so that none of you will be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. ¹⁴ For we have become partakers of Christ, if we hold fast the beginning of our assurance firm until the end,

Hebrews 3:12-14 (NASB)

SIN DECEIVES US ABOUT OUR RELATIONSHIP AND OUR VIEW OF OTHERS – ESPECIALLY GOD.

But your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God,
And your sins have hidden His face from you so that He does not hear.

Isaiah 59:2 (NASB)

One evening after I had made dinner for our nightly guests – many homeless people off the streets of Oklahoma City -- in the home we called God’s Crash Pad I had an encounter which I have never forgotten.

I was always one to defend what I believe the Bible said. As I was walking out the door of the house I was in back of another man. He turned around and looked at me and said, “God helps those who help themselves.” I said to him with equal firmness, “No, he helps those who cannot help themselves.” At this the man started screaming at me, shaking his fists in my face and saying he was going to kill me. Several of the others grabbed him and forcibly held him back. As he finally calmed down enough to let him go he took off swearing that he would find me and kill me.

I wondered what I had said until his friend told me just before the encounter the man had opened the fridge in our kitchen and stolen food. I then realized what had actually happened. He thought I had seen him. His statement, “God helps them who helps themselves” was his way of dealing with thinking he had been caught. When I innocently replied as I did he thought I was condemning him. This angered him greatly which accounted for his violent outburst. Had he simply said to me, “So you caught me taking the food” I would have most likely said, “if you need it it’s yours.” That was what we usually did in such cases. However sin had deceived him about our relationship and about me. He saw me as a condemning person even though I was not.

My wife saw this clearly in the scriptures one day. The part she read was about Joseph’s brother’s selling him into slavery. It struck her that when they came to report the lie that Joseph had been killed, Jacob had not only lost Joseph, he lost his ten other sons as well. The act they did and the lie they told to cover their act meant their relationship with their father changed forever. The separation that happened was a true death. They could never again be in sweet fellowship with their father until their act had been confessed and the lie renounced.

Jacob’s heart towards his sons had not changed. It was not him who drove them out of his life. He knew nothing of what had happened. His son’s hearts were separated from him because they knew what they had done. This relational separation is a universal, unchangeable outcome of all sin. It always happens between us as humans when we sin. Most of all it happens between us and God. It is not something that only happens in the person we sin against or who finds out our sin. It happens in us. And when it happens it changes our view of our relationship with the other.

Let’s read that scripture again.

But your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God,
And your sins have hidden His face from you so that He does not hear.

Isaiah 59:2 (NASB)

It is not God’s heart to separate Himself from us.

The separation happens first in us, then between us and God. Separation, alienation and isolation are unchangeable outcomes of sin. But sin deceives us that it is the other person who brings about the destruction of the relationship – not the sin.

⁶ When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took from its fruit and ate; and she gave also to her husband with her, and he ate. ⁷ Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loin coverings. ⁸ They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. ⁹ Then the Lord God called to the man, and said to him, “Where are you?” ¹⁰ He said, “I heard the sound of You in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid myself.”

Genesis 3:6-10 (NASB)

We see this clearly in the first sin humans committed. It was not God who was condemning, pushing them away or even isolating Himself from the couple. In fact He was searching for them as he does for everyone who has been deceived by sin. It was their thoughts about God that drove them from Him not His thoughts about them.

I am convinced that had they sought Him to confess what they had done, sought his forgiveness and to submitted to his discipline they would have found forgiveness. It is God’s very nature to forgive. It is His heart to be reconciled to we who are alienated from Him in our response to our own sin. Even if I cannot prove it for the first couple, I certainly can for those of us who live after Jesus’ final and absolute triumph over sin.  

 If we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us. ⁹ If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

1 John 1:8-10 (NASB)

But in sin’s extreme ability to deceive us it seeks to first get us to embrace its lie of being good and then lock us into its addictive grip by lying to us about God and other’s response to us in that sin. The means by which it does so is guilt, shame and perceived condemnation.

It tells us that it is not sin that causes the problems it does. It says it is something else. It is the other person….. it is God…… it is the law…... it is always something else than what we did. In this deception we continue to practice what is killing us.

Returning to the picture of my friend’s saw, we put our hands into the blade then say it was our father who taught us not to do it that is the problem. If he had never told us not to do it we now would not feel condemned for having done it.

We might say it was the saw manufacturer. If they had never created the saw we would not have harmed ourselves by putting our hand into it. This in spite of the warnings all over it about the danger involved in using it and the proper safety measures we need to employ.

Or in an almost insane way we say that it’s really okay to put our hands into the saw blade. We then can go on a crusade against the hateful proclamation of others who try to restrict saw blade plunging. We could proclaim they are condemning or making themselves to be better than others because they do not practice saw blade plunging.

We might tell others about how deeply we were wounded by their trying to stop us from putting our hands in the saw blade. We might go into therapy to get rid of the guilt, shame or regret we feel from others. We might tell those who try to show us the damage that we are doing to ourselves, “Who are you to tell me what I can do or not do with my body?”

But even if we are able to reduce everyone to silence we still have a bloodied mess of a hand and every time we go back to putting it again in the saw it gets worse.

Next Part - The Lies of Sin Part Five

http://leonardterry.blogspot.ca/2013/03/the-lies-of-sin-part-five.html