“My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.” (John 10:27)

© Brian Labosier  July 18, 2022

This truth builds on the previous one.  Since God is our Creator, He has a claim on our lives.  In other words, because He created us in the first place, we are accountable to Him and owe Him both our allegiance and our obedience.   

The story of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3 is often described as the Fall of humanity.  This biblical story of our first set of human ancestors reminds us that God is our King and Ruler in all our dealings with Him.  Since God is our Creator, He is in a proper position to tell us what He wants us to do with our lives and to hold us accountable for how we respond to His instructions to us.  The opening chapters of Genesis also reveal how He is perfectly holy, and thus such moral qualities as righteousness and justice an important to Him.  We also discover that God is a God who requires our total obedience to His perfect moral standards. 

The story of the Fall in Genesis 3 concludes with God exercising His prerogative as our Ruler and Judge to punish Adam and Eve for their disobedience to His just requirements.  God specifically punished Adam and Eve along with Satan himself for their respective areas of disobedience.  We also discover in Romans 5:12-19 how Adam and Eve served as our representative heads, and thus the punishments they experienced extend to each and every human being after them.  The temptation to sin didn’t stop with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.  The effects of this ongoing curse on humanity are sometimes described as the effects of original sin.   Thus, although God’s judgment began in the distant past at the time of Adam and Eve’s Fall, we continue to experience the ongoing implications of their sin and God’s resulting judgment on this world in which we live on a regular daily basis, both in our own lives and more broadly in the world around us. 

Ever since the Fall of Adam and Eve, we have all been broken people living in a broken world surrounded by other broken people—and as fallen people we are accountable to God and under both His present and coming judgment. Our daily lives continue to be impacted by our own wrong choices and those of others around us.  We, like them, continue to sin “and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23).  Like arrows missing their mark, we miss the mark of God’s glory, and we continue to suffer the consequences of our own sins as well as those of other people around us.  This brokenness and its resulting consequences are simply a foretaste of God’s still future judgment on sin and rebellion. 

God’s judgment involves both His present judgment here in this world as well as His future judgment in the life to come.  The biblical doctrine of the final judgment focuses on the time when God will require a final reckoning for all the sins and offenses we have committed against Him.  The unmistakable presence of evil in this world has suggested to most people, regardless of their religious persuasion, that the time will come when all these things will need to be set right.  The Bible simply confirms this natural assumption.  Jesus even goes so far as to warn us that the time will come when we will even need to give an account “for every careless word [we] speak” (Matthew 12:36). 

God also tells us in His Word of the existence of two final destinies: heaven and hell.  Jesus warns us in Matthew 7:13-14, “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many.   For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.”  We must not make think lightly of the seriousness of hell.  Jesus Himself tells us that hell is a place of “outer darkness” where “there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matthew 8:12).

Knowing God as our Judge and Ruler begins with recognizing the reality of our own sinfulness.  In other words, knowing God means that we need to acknowledge our own rebellion and guilt before a perfect and holy God.  Each of us is a sinner, not only through the ongoing effects of the original sin of Adam and Eve at the beginning of the human race, but also through the countless times we ourselves have resisted and rejected God by disobeying Him and going our own way.  We must recognize His claims on our lives and how far short we fall.

Truly, we are guilty sinners before a holy God.  Our sin involves three realities:

• the guilt of original sin we have inherited from Adam and Eve.  Deep down inside, we are not basically good—as we like to think.  Instead, our very nature has been corrupted.  We are guilty before God, not simply because we sin, but because we are sinners by nature.
• all the direct violations of His standards, as He has revealed them to us in His Word.  These violations include both sins of commission we have committed that directly violate God’s explicit instructions as well as sins of omission that represent our failures to do the good things God has commanded us to do.  We are guilty not only of disobeying Him directly, but also by belittling Him, doubting Him, and for failing to trust Him.  Even our desire to live lives independently of the God who created us is an offense in His sight.
• our consciences.  God has made us in such a way that each of us by nature have an internal moral compass that reveals what is right and what is wrong.  Our consciences are not infallible, but they are a gracious gift from God given to guide us in making decisions throughout life.  The problem is that every time we violate our consciences, we reveal afresh how sinful and fallen we are.

The tragedy of sin is that it separates us from God, from one another, from the world around us, and even from ourselves.

            (1) Sin is ultimately always an offense against God and separates us from Him.  We see this truth fleshed out for us in the story of the first sin in the Garden of Eden.  The previous joy and intimacy Adam and Eve had experienced in their relationship with God was no more.  Instead, “the LORD God sent [them] out from the garden of Eden” and “placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life” (Genesis 3:23-24).  Another example involves King David, at the time of his sin against Bathsheba and her husband Uriah—as grievous as these sins were to the people involved.  David recognized that his sin was first and foremost a sin against God Himself and confessed to God in Psalm 51:4, “Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight.”  The Prophet Isaiah describes the consequences of our sin; it separates us from God: “Behold, the LORD’s hand is not shortened, that it cannot save, or his ear dull, that it cannot hear; 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 59:1-2).

            (2) Sin separates us from other people.  Again, the first example of this consequence is Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.  Whatever previous marital harmony Adam and Eve had enjoyed with each other was now gone as well.  Adam now turned against Eve and blamed her for the tragedy in which they found themselves.  He complained to God: “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate” (Genesis 3:12).

            (3) Sin destroys harmony with the natural world around us.  Pain and suffering are introduced into God’s created order.  God’s judgment was clear: “To the woman he said, ‘I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you.’  And to Adam he said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field.  By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return’” (Genesis 3:16-19).

            (4) Even our minds, wills, and emotions no longer function as they once did.  For the first time ever, human beings could think logically to the wrong conclusions, desire wrong things, and experience inappropriate feelings.  We no longer desire God the way that we should, but instead substitute a whole host of self-centered desires.  The Apostle John warns us that “all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world.  And the world is passing away along with its desires” (1 John 2:16-17).

The simple fact is whatever human efforts we make to live good and appropriate lives never reach the perfection God requires.  We remain hopelessly under His judgment.  

Pause and Reflect

(1) How does God’s role in creating us logically mean we are accountable to Him?

(2) The biblical doctrine of original sin means that when Adam and Eve sinned, we inherited their sin nature.  We are born with a heart bent on going its own way.  The doctrine of original sin simply reinforces how desperate and hopeless our situation is before God.  And we can’t excuse ourselves and pass the blame to others since we each go on to confirm our guilt before God through our own active disobedience, making our plight that much more serious. 

(3) Theologians have sometimes distinguished sins of commission from sins of omission.  Sins of commission are easier to understand since they are direct violations of God’s revealed standards in His Word.  Sins of omission are sometimes harder for us to grasp.  What examples of God’s positive commands can you think of that you have failed to do?  If you are stumped, look at Jesus’ two great commandments in Matthew 22:37-40.

(4) Appreciating the sinfulness of sin is the task of a lifetime.  Recognizing our sinfulness before a holy God is an essential step in coming to faith in the first place, yet it is often only as we grow in our understanding of God’s perfect holiness and righteousness that we begin to appreciate the horrendous nature of sin.  What has been your experience in this area?

(5) How does an appreciation of the costliness of Christ paying the penalty for our redemption remind us of the depths of the seriousness of our sin in God’s sight?