Last Month’s article addressed the difference between the concepts of behavior and the attitudes which beget the behaviors. Legalism focuses on behavior because we can observe and measure behavior but not the attitudes behind it. God, however, sees our hearts and measures our faith at a level unknowable to humans. Now, let’s apply this background to a consideration of sin and righteousness.
First, here’s a one-question quiz to help you assess your own thinking on this subject. The question concerns your understanding of the judgment.
Do you think that some people will just barely make it (or not) into the Kingdom? In other words, do you think there will be any “tough calls” at the Judgment seat of Christ?
Considering the judgment
God judges the heart and knows immediately if we belong to Him (John 10:14). He sees sheep and goats, wise and foolish, servants and imposters. It’s either “Enter into the joy of your master” or “I never knew you.” Nobody gets a lukewarm, “Sorry, but you just missed. You’re not as bad as the truly evil, but you’re not quite up to my entrance requirements.”
Now, of course, we don’t judge anyone, but we do have an impression of how the judgment might occur. We might think that for some, acceptance or rejection at the judgment would be a “close call.” Not in the sense that Jesus would have to think it over for a while, but in the sense that a person’s life would have fairly equal amounts of good and evil.
Just how is it that we err towards legalism if we think that some people have marginal qualifications for the Kingdom? Gradient thinking only comes by using legalistic measures. It comes when we have a paradigm of judgment that looks like a balance sheet, with debits and credits. If the credits and debits seem about the same, we can imagine an “iffy” situation regarding judgment. One might have many good works, but a few big bad ones to offset them. Or, one might have many evils and try desperately to balance them out by doing good works rather than believing that God can erase them through forgiveness.
Evaluating behavior
Let’s look at a couple of hypothetical examples. A brother has spotty attendance at meeting and seldom does anything extra for the ecclesia. You know that he has a full schedule of non-ecclesial involvements, sports activities for the children, hobbies and vacation travels. Yet, he’s always warm and friendly and sounds so sincere when he says something in class. You wonder if he really values the Kingdom first in his life. If he makes it, you think, it won’t be by much.
Now consider a sister who has always been one of the most active people in the ecclesia. She’s always involved, her home is the center of young people’s activities, she contributes to every ecclesial project, and every summer she volunteers to cook at camp and teach children’s classes at Bible school. You think she’s a certainty for the kingdom until you find out that earlier in her life she had a child out of wedlock whom she gave up for adoption. Now you’re not so sure about her.
In these examples, we listed the behavior of an imaginary brother and sister. However, we did not say anything about their faith, because we cannot. Only God can judge faith. We only see behaviors, which we call “works.” If we see many good works and few bad works, we might think someone will be in the Kingdom. If we see a strange mixture, we wonder.
But the “credit” and “debit” system has no place in the New Covenant. (It never really did in the Old Covenant, either). God never had a system where He weighed our “good works” against our “sins.” In God’s justice, He looks at our faith (Hab. 2:4; Eph. 2:8,9). If we have faith that He forgives our sins, then we have no debits (Psa. 103:12; see also Psa. 32, 51, 65). If we don’t believe that He really does forgive, then we are left to believe that somehow God retains our sins and weighs them against our “good works.”
If we have faith, we have forgiveness. If we have forgiveness, we have no debt of sin. If we have no debt of sin, we have a clear conscience toward God and a place in His Kingdom at our Lord’s return..
We are either wholly in or wholly out, because that’s the way the New Covenant of grace operates. There aren’t any “close calls,” because close calls could only come from an imaginary paradigm of balancing good and bad works.
Counting sin
Does reliance on grace not amount to “let us sin that grace may abound?” We hope no one will see it that way. However, the possibility of that conclusion led Paul to exclaim, “By no means!” (Rom. 6:2). We have many Scriptures to help us direct our lives away from sin and toward holiness. We made the point that God forgives on the basis of our faith in Him to do so. We also, by that same faith, generate our lives of holiness. Flawed creatures that we are, we need both operations of faith.
Even if we direct our lives toward holiness, we will still sin. But how does one count sin, anyway? What constitutes a “sin”? We can find a few Scriptural definitions of sin, but then we need to take those definitions into the realm of life. “All that is not of faith, is sin,” wrote Paul (Rom. 14:23). “Sin is lawlessness,” wrote John (I John 3: 4). How do these statements guide us to a working definition, something we can relate to daily life? How can we derive a definition of sin that is pragmatic and theological?
We can start with a simple analysis. Sin has two components, the thought and the deed (Gen. 3:6; Josh 7:21; Mt. 15:19,20). We sometimes see people’s deeds of sin. We never see the thought. The deed is the child of the thought. We think evil, and then do evil (Micah 2:1-2). When we get really good at sinning, we can bypass the thinking stage. Then we have a habituated sinful response, sin-on-the-shelf waiting for the occasion.
So how, then, does God count sin’? Do we sin as soon as we think something sinful and relish the thought, or does it only count when we actually carry it out? If we don’t carry it out, do we need to seek forgiveness for the sinful thought? Jesus taught us that harboring sin in the heart was sin, even without the corresponding deed (Mt. 5:21-28). God doesn’t have to see the work of sin. Unlike faith, which must have the corresponding work to prove itself (James 2:17), sin stands guilty in the mind of its owner even before it begets its evil offspring of sinful deed.
We could say that every time we think something sinful, we need forgiveness. Every lust, every jealousy, every moment of envy or anger or resentment or hate or prejudice requires our awareness, our prayer for forgiveness, and our commitment afresh to a better way. However, even considering every evil thought, even adding in the partially offensive thoughts, or the mildly reproachful, we still wouldn’t come close to cataloging our repertoire of sinful thinking. Why not? Because we have only taken into consideration thus far the sins of commission. By far our larger deficit carries the label sins of omission.
Sins of omission
A sin of omission happens when we don’t do something bad, but could have done better in a situation. Now, what would be the thinking behind the sins of omission? If sin has two parts, the thought and the ensuing deed, then we must look for a corresponding pair in a sin of omission. But we may have trouble locating the engendering thought, because it’s the lack of thought that leads to sins of omission. Remember, Jesus elevated the New Covenant paradigm of sin and righteousness above the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees. We don’t consider doing a “bad work” as the full measure of sin any more than we consider a “good work” as righteousness. We’re looking at another level of measurement altogether, that of the mind. So when we consider sins of omission, we face a challenge to our understanding, namely, how can we sin when nothing at all happened? Can we be guilty of sin when we have done nothing wrong or even had a wrong thought? Absolutely yes, and the realization of this circumstance is a watershed issue in our maturity in Christ.
I recall years ago a young brother in a Bible discussion saying, “But what if you haven’t sinned that day?” Clearly, his understanding of sin at that time included only sins of commission, and probably big bad ones at that. He would grow into a day when he would chortle at that statement. He would learn that the definition of sin includes far more than doing something wrong. He would learn how much good he could have done, had he had the awareness to do so.
Failing to do what we could
Let’s take a simple example. You put money in the collection on Sunday. “Good for me,” you might think. If you think you have any merit because of this, you’ve essentially gone back under the law. That’s a sin of attempted justification by works, and an act of pride. But what if you didn’t think “good for me,” or anything like that. What if you thought, “God gives to me, and I give back.” That’s better, but who knows what attitude is really lurking behind that? God knows. Let’s say He finds you pure even at that level, and wholly congruent in your act of love.
But why didn’t you put two or three times that amount into the collection? Did you not think of that? Did it not occur to you that you could do so? If you could have, but didn’t, then that’s an omission. The omission is what we haven’t yet grown up to in Christ. Now we’re getting at the main theology of sin,,in the New Covenant. It’s not so much what we’ve done amiss, but what we haven’t yet done or even thought of doing, but could be doing.
Omissions come when we don’t preach, when we don’t make the opportunity to preach, when we don’t prepare ourselves to preach, when we don’t give freely, lend freely, help freely, love freely, serve freely. The sin of omission, though, occupies an even larger domain than specific behaviors. It also includes failing to take steps to increase our faith. The greatest sin of omission lies not in the specific lack of any certain act or deed, it lies in our failure to become whom we ought to be in Christ. (This concept, familiarly known as “Spiritual Growth,” will occupy an upcoming article, Lord willing.)
For now, we note the basic redefinition of the idea of sin as we move from law to grace. Law defined right and wrong behavior. Sin meant violating the code. This could mean failing to do a necessary ritual, but more commonly it meant doing a prohibited action. Under grace, we move from the behavioral and tangible world to the realm of values, thoughts, and beliefs. Sins of commission now have labels such as “lust,” “envy,” “pride,” “judging,” and “party spirit.”
Sins of omission, in terms of the New Covenant, don’t have a crisply defined category. Scripture says, “All that is not of faith is sin.” This means that we define sin in the context of faith, not law. Sin goes beyond breaking a commandment. If now includes failing to live according to faith; this emphasizes performance rather than avoidance. We have a view of sin that exceeds the scope of sin as defined by law.
Our view of sin must go beyond “doing something bad.” It must go; past that, and beyond “thinking some’ thing bad.” It must even go beyond “failing to do good.” Our definition finally comes to rest at something like “falling short in our quest to live in faith and love.” This is not to say that if we do bad, we don’t commit sin. Of course sin is still sin, adultery is still adultery, and lying is still lying. If we commit sin, we need to ask for forgiveness. We also need to appreciate the breach of faith that is the root of our sin. And what we need to see most is the growth of our faith, and realize that the greatest sin is the indifference and unawareness that stunts our spiritual growth. The question about life’s activities and challenges we want to ask is not “What’s wrong with it?” but “What’s right with it?” Better yet ask, “Is this consistent with the growth of my faith?”
Repentance
One more thought concerning the effects of using a legalist-based model of sin. If we do so, it abrogates our forgiveness, because we won’t have near the awareness of sin that we ought. Let’s follow the line of thought: If you don’t sin, you don’t need repentance, right? However, we believe we all sin, therefore we all need repentance. Sometimes we forget to move the theology of Romans 3:23
into the real-life prayer of repentance (Psa. 65:1-3). Shortcomings in repentance stem from thinking only sins of commission count as “sin.”
It starts with a legalistic definition of sin: doing something wrong. We then need to know what not to do, so we make a list of bad things not to do. This is fairly easy, as the Bible has several such lists (e.g, I Cor. 6:9-10; Col. 3:5-8). We take these and pare away the entries that cover the intangibles of character which we can’t see, like envy and greed. We keep the big baddies, like adultery and theft, drunkenness and cheating.
When we avoid these, we feel good about ourselves. We aren’t sinners like other people. We can even make another list of things of which we don’t approve. This list might include watching TV, going to certain movies, or drinking alcoholic beverages. If we don’t do those either, we don’t sin. Now we are speaking hypothetically, of course, but also demonstrating the real-life danger of a legalist definition of sin. It is putting new wine into old wineskins. If you go through a day of not doing anything wrong (in your limited view of “wrong”), then you have no perceived need of repentance. And if you don’t repent, you won’t receive forgiveness because you didn’t ask for forgiveness.
Rather than list activities to avoid, list characteristics to develop. Then, when you realize at the end of each day that you still have a long way to go, you’ll have no trouble finding the right mindset to seek and receive the forgiveness we all need to stand before our God.
Righteousness
We titled this article Sin and Righteousness, but thus far we’ve only talked about sin. Righteousness doesn’t take much space, as we don’t have any. However, God counts our faith as righteousness (Rom. 4:5); moreover, this passage is in the context of forgiveness. One aspect of our faith is the firm belief that God forgives our sins. Paul also quotes here from Psalm 32, which refers to King David’s nefarious assassination of Uriah. God does forgive the worst of sins, and Paul places this teaching in the midst of his discussion of Abraham’s faith (for a fuller discussion of this point, see Tidings, Sept. 98, pp. 333-336). For purposes of our present discussion, we would emphasize that aspect of faith that sees God as the forgiver of all our sins, omitted and committed, thought and deed.
Summary
A legalistic definition of sin focuses on behaviors, mainly avoidance behaviors. A working definition of sin consistent with the New Covenant focuses on the higher levels of attitude and identity. We move from the realm of avoidance to development, from behavior to values. We define our shortcomings not so much as what we did wrong, but what we didn’t do right because we didn’t become the person whom Jesus desires. Development of character, not avoidance of bad behavior, becomes the focus of our morality.
Righteousness, likewise, does not come from successfully avoiding any specific bad behavior or list of bad behaviors. Nothing we do can avail righteousness; it must come from the higher level of values, principally faith. The recognition that God looks at our faith alone allows us to receive His grace. Entrance into the Kingdom requires spiritual development, but grace, not our own doings, saves us.
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One