Love and Sin

In our Relationship Tuesdays, we just started looking at God’s love, and today we’re going to continue looking at God’s love in relation to sin, and it’s going to be a relatively simple lesson.

1 John 4:18 says, “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love.”

There’s a reason why we don’t have to be afraid of punishment when we abide in God’s perfect love, and the premise for this is summed up in the following verses of 1 John 4:

We love, because He first loved us. If someone says, "I love God," and hates his brother, he is a liar; for the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from Him, that the one who loves God should love his brother also. 1 John 4:19-21

Paul says we know what sin is because of the law (Romans 7:7), Jesus says that the whole law is summed up in two commandments: love God with all your heart, soul, and strength and love your neighbor as yourself. (Mark 12:30-32)  If love fulfills the law, then anything other than love is sin. 

Perfect love = Not sinning against God or anyone else

If we don’t sin aka love, there’s no punishment.  Thus perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love.  If you’re afraid of punishment, it means you’re not living in a loving way in every area of your life. 

Now you can get all sappy and say, well the enemy attacks us and tells we’re not good enough and push the blame onto the serpent just as we’ve always done since the garden, but because I love you, I’m going to tell you the truth: 

That’s a lie. 

Pushing the blame of ungodly fear off onto Satan is an unloving act toward God.  You’re basically saying, “God I don’t think you’re big enough to protect me from the lies of the enemy.  I don’t think this armor you’ve given me is strong enough to deflect those fiery darts.  In fact I think you’re a liar because all those promises you made about the devil fleeing when we resist just aren’t true.”

And yet by giving in to the lies, you’re not resisting, so why would the devil flee?

Do you want to know if you’re loving God and others perfectly?  Read 1 Corinthians 13:4-8, and replace the word Love with your name.  “Stephen is patient, Stephen is kind, Stephen is not jealous, Stephen does not brag, he is not arrogant” . . . I’m already falling short of perfect love, and I’m not even a quarter of the way through it.  I’d wager no one, save Jesus, could read 1 Corinthians 13 this way and not be lying through their teeth.  It’s called a sinful nature.

But there’s good news.  We even call it The Good News, and we’ll talk about it in our next Relationship Tuesdays: The Gospel of Love.

To Tattoo or Not to Tattoo?

That is not the question, but it certainly is one question a lot of younger Christians are asking these days.  In fact it was a question that I had to ask in college when a lot of my friends were getting them.  I decided against it, and here’s why:

There’s only one verse in the Bible that mentions tattoos: “'You shall not make any cuts in your body for the dead nor make any tattoo marks on yourselves: I am the LORD.” (Leviticus 19:28)

Usually the response to this verse by those who want to get tattoos goes a couple of different ways:

1. This verse is applying to pagan rituals that God didn’t want the Israelites participating in.  Tattoos today are purely adornment and not ritualistic.

2. This verse refers to Old Testament law.  We’re under grace now, so we don’t have to follow the law.

The issue that I struggled with was that while tattooing may not always be ritualistic in our culture; it’s still very ritualistic in other cultures today when they worship their gods or the dead.  I also had a hard time when looking at some of the other rituals included in this Leviticus passage: eating blood, divination, soothsaying, purposefully cutting yourself, selling your daughter into prostitution, not keeping Sabbaths, not revering God’s sanctuary, and turning to mediums or spiritists.

Are these things we can do as long as we’re not ritualistic about it?  Likewise are these things we should go do just because we’re under grace now?

Paul writes, “I would not have come to know sin except through the Law.” (Romans 7:7)  He also writes, “What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase?” (Romans 6:1) We are not under the law, but we should not purposefully seek to break it and sin either. 

If all the law would be fulfilled by, as Jesus says, “Loving the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and strength and loving your neighbor as yourself.” (Matthew 22:37-40)  Then getting a tattoo, having been restricted in the law, must somehow be an unloving act toward God or others.

When I came to that conclusion, I decided against it.  After all, did God not fearfully and wonderfully form me in my mother’s womb? (Psalms 139:13-14)  Is my body not the temple of the Holy Spirit? (1 Corinthians 6:19)  Would I graffiti the temple of God and defend my actions as artistic expression?  That’s not revering God’s sanctuary, which you’ll notice is in this list from Leviticus too.

Here’s the thing: grace is being forgiven for not loving God with everything you have (sin), so that you can love Him the way He loves you (righteousness).  The Old Testament law is founded on loving God with all that you have to offer.  I could not bring myself to sin so that grace may abound and get a tattoo.  I just couldn’t do it. 

What is Sin?

Have you ever asked this question?  If you have, you’ve probably gotten a lot of cryptic responses like “sin is ‘missing the mark’”, “sin is disobeying God”, “sin is all the bad things we do”, etc.  

While these answers are not wrong, I never felt like they adequately explained it.  So, I set out to find a solid answer for the question of what sin is. What’s the mark we’re missing?  What’s God want us to do that we’re not? How do we know what bad things are?

I somewhat foolishly started in Romans, where Paul complicates the matter even more with phrases like “What shall we say then? Is the Law sin? May it never be! On the contrary, I would not have come to know sin except through the Law; for I would not have known about coveting if the Law had not said, "YOU SHALL NOT COVET."  (Romans 7:7) 

So, is sin breaking the Old Testament Law?  Jewish leaders spend years going over the Law and still can’t completely agree on everything in it and how it applies today.  And then there’s the whole “I do what I do not want to do, hoo do, di di do” tongue twister Paul lays out at the end of that chapter.  Yikes!

Bedraggled by the torrent of rhetoric that is Romans, I walked away even more bogged down by the question of sin.

Finally acknowledging that I couldn’t grasp it on my own, I prayed for help.  As I prayed, I looked up and saw the picture hanging above our front door.  It’s just a piece of paper we printed on our home computer with a couple of verses on it:

Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD is one! You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. (Deuteronomy 6:4-5)

You shall not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the sons of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself; I am the LORD. (Leviticus 19:18)

On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the prophets (Matthew 22:40)

And it clicked.  If the law points out what sin is, and all the law and the prophets hang on these two commandments, then sin at its base is not following these two commandments.

Sin is not loving God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.  Sin is not loving your neighbor as yourself.  So simple: no one answers questions quite like Jesus does.