Elephant in the Room
As a medical writer, I’m always thinking about metaphors to help explain what cancer is like, or how certain drugs work.
I have been thinking lately about how I could describe sin. What is sin like? Maybe it’s like toilet paper stuck to your shoe, or a massive green booger stuck to your face. Yuck! Or maybe it’s like the insanely large Palmetto bug (cockroach) that crawled on the auditorium wall at Clemson last week, disrupting my niece Caroline’s anatomy class (ironically, on the parasympathetic nervous system – “fight and flight” reflexes).
No, those metaphors don’t work. Toilet paper is only embarrassing, and a booger is only gross, and a giant bug is only creepy. None of those things will kill you.
But sin will. Sin is like a bullet hole to the heart.
It’s a fatal wound we were born with; we had no say in the matter. It is the consequence of the Fall. Adam and Eve messed it up for everyone; and now we inherit sin, and we pass it on. We live in it and breathe in it and left to ourselves, we would die in it.
The Bible says that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God – in our thoughts, even more than our actions. We have pride, greed, envy, discontentment, vanity, self-righteousness, jealousy, we judge others, we have selfishness, lust, hatred. We make idols of things that comfort or please us, substitutes for God. We have thoughts we would be ashamed to see broadcast on the Jumbotron; I know I do!
We have a problem we can’t fix. The inclination may be to point to others, and think, “Hey, compared to that guy over there, I’m pretty good! A lot of people are a whole lot worse than me! I’m probably fine. I’m a good person.”
And then there’s God, the Lord of hosts, Creator of the universe. Our planet, and all that is in it, and trillions of stars and galaxies exist because he made them. They reflect his glory. Turning from the telescope to the microscope, he is in the intricate workings of every single cell. As R.C. Sproul famously said, there’s no maverick molecule. God is sovereign over all.
And he allowed sin. But amazingly, he also came in person to save us from the power and penalty of it. Jesus humbled himself, coming down from Heaven to be born to a poor family in a tiny, obscure town, knowing he would be hated and rejected by the very people he created. He lived a perfect life, did not sin, and when he died, not only was he nailed to the cross, but so were the sins of those he came to save.
How good or bad that guy over there is, is not the standard we need to worry about. God is not comparing us to other people; he’s comparing us to Jesus, and nobody wins that comparison. But we don’t have to, and that is great news! When Jesus suffered and died, he traded our sin for his righteousness. When God looks at those who believe and repent of their sins, he doesn’t see a messed-up sinner anymore. He sees someone whose debt has been paid.
Nobody is too good to need God, and nobody is too bad for his saving grace. God’s great love is so powerful that it can wash clean even the most grubby, sooty and grimy heart. One thing all of God’s children have in common: there’s nothing we did to earn our salvation. It was all Jesus.
I have been thinking a lot about sin because a lot of people don’t like to talk about it. It’s not a pleasant subject. It makes people uncomfortable. A lot of churches don’t want to bring down the room with it. They would much rather think of God as a celestial Mr. Rogers, everybody’s good neighbor, friendly and kind, only loving and supportive, never holding anyone accountable. I once heard a singer at such a church introduce the great gospel song, “I’ll Fly Away.” She talked about heaven, and then said, “Don’t worry, you’re all going!” Really? Please find that in the Bible.
A guy I know, Rob, told me that “the God of the Old Testament” is unloving, because that God hates sin, although “Psalms and Proverbs are okay.” So Rob basically made up his own version of God, one who is as tolerant and enlightened as Rob is. At his church, Rob says, “we don’t talk about those parts of scripture,” because bringing up sin – except for the sin of intolerance – is polarizing and might offend someone. Much better to soft-sell God. God forbid we scare anyone away!
A while ago, I invited a friend, Kate, to my church and she said no thanks. “Nature is my cathedral.” And true, nature does point us to the God who created everything. But it doesn’t point us to Jesus, and it doesn’t tell us to repent of our sins. I didn’t push it, and I really wish I had asked Kate repeatedly, or at least talked to her about the Gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ. I thought I had more time. Devastatingly, Kate developed cancer, it spread like wildfire and she died within four months, heavily sedated for pain and not able to see visitors. She was a good person. But she didn’t know Jesus.
When I told a former neighbor that Mark and I got baptized and joined a church where the Bible is preached verse by verse, he said: “I looked at your church’s mission statement. That’s not very loving, is it? Not very Christ-like.” Because it talked about repentance, forgiveness from sin, saving faith, and the word of God. He un-friended me on Facebook.
Actually, what’s not loving is knowing and not talking about this unpopular truth: one day we are all going to face the white throne of God*, a place so terrifying that there is nothing in between God and us. No sky, no earth, nothing. It’s all peeled back like the skin of an orange. Or rolled up like a window blind. Or maybe a scroll – but there I go again with the metaphors.
On that day, our only hope is that Jesus will point to us and say, “That one’s mine. I died for this one.” Jesus took the bullet for us. He bears the scars that should be ours. Because of him, we can be washed clean of our sin. He also promises that anyone who comes to him he will never turn away.
But how can we come to him and be washed clean if we don’t repent, and how can we repent if we don’t know we’re sinners, and how can we know we’re sinners if we don’t see it, because nobody tells us? And how can we live with ourselves if we know this and don’t talk about it? It is, if you’ll pardon another metaphor, the elephant in the room.
*Revelation 20:11-15
©Janet Farrar Worthington