If I had to pick a theme color for each month of the year, red would seem to be a logical one for February. Red (or pink) hearts, red roses or other flowers and red boxes of candy dominate the scene for Valentine’s Day. While we probably haven’t hit that season in full swing yet, it will be coming more to the forefront in the next couple of weeks. I have had something else that is described as red become an emphasis in my life the last couple of weeks. It is the topic of sin. “…though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow” Isaiah 1:18. Sin doesn’t seem like a great topic to write about when people expect to hear about love, but thankfully the two can be connected.
Sin, especially our own specific sin, likely isn’t a favorite topic of many. Recently I have done 2 Bible studies revolving around the first part of Genesis. One on sin and one about Eve which included how sin originated. These chapters are more familiar to me than most and though I shouldn’t have been surprised, they taught me more than I was expecting. I am thankful that neither of the studies finished without continuing to talk about God’s solution to the problem of sin.
One of my recent studies uses Greg Ogden’s book, Discipleship Essentials. In it he uses the descriptions of willfully disobeying God’s authority and distrusting his goodness in his core truth about sin. I don’t think there are any reading this article that would be surprised to hear the description of willful disobedience used in connection with sin, but it was thought provoking to me to have the phrase about distrusting his goodness used so prominently. The more I think about it the more I wonder if that isn’t the bigger problem for myself. Do I really trust that God is good in all circumstances in my life? Or maybe even harder, is God really good in all the circumstances he allows in the lives of those I love? This lack of trust is sin.
The study about Eve was from this year’s WMS study. (If there are any women reading this that would like to join us for the next month’s study, we would love to have you come!) While the story of Eve includes the first sin in the world which included both disobedience and distrust of God, there is also redemption in the story. Redemption through Jesus was part of God’s plan way back in the Garden of Eden when God speaks to the serpent in Genesis 3:15 with a prophecy of Jesus. “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.”
So how do we connect sin and love? The best picture of love ever created is that of a perfect Jesus becoming our substitute and bearing our sin on the cross so we didn’t have to. John Stott, in his book The Cross of Christ, summed it up in this way: “For the essence of sin is man substituting himself for God, while the essence of salvation is God substituting himself for man. Man asserts himself against God and puts himself where only God deserves to be; God sacrifices himself for man and puts himself where only man deserves to be. Man claims prerogatives which belong to God alone; God accepts penalties which belong to man alone.”
Thanks be to God!
Pam Twedt
The full February newsletter can be found here.