Last week our church's discussion was about sin. Now, don't get me wrong, thinking sinful thoughts is not a good idea! However, coming to terms with what is evil about the world and how we ourselves live is another matter. Spending 70 minutes concentrating on what's bad about us is potentially far from uplifting, but that is the reality of life and we have to recognize it. God recognized it and did something about it.
We all sin, don't we? If we're honest, we all do things that we shouldn't. Some of us are quite relaxed about that, others try hard not to do wrong, but everyone makes mistakes. There are deliberate sins, accidental sins and ones that we do because we would rather not, but are weak. Some sins are quite bad, like murder or adultery, robbing a bank etc. A lot of others don't at first sight seem such an issue. However, God doesn't see sin just as doing horrendously bad things. The relevant Hebrew word most often used in the Old Testament and the Greek one most commonly translated as 'sin' in the New Testament both mean 'miss'. We miss the mark. We miss how God wants us to live. We fall short of the glory of God, as we read in the Bible (Paul's letter to the Romans, chapter 3, verse 23). Anything that doesn't live up to God's standard is sin - and His standard is perfection (Matthew's Gospel, chapter 5, verse 48).
So why do we live like this? Because we can't help it. Right back in the beginning, Adam and Eve chose not to obey God. They lived in the Garden of Eden for maybe several decades but then were persuaded by the devil to go for something more than God had allowed. They gave up knowing just good, and absolutely phenomenally perfect good such as we can't experience today, to find out about evil as well. So it all went wrong. They became sinful by nature - and we have inherited that nature from before birth. We are born sinners and the evidence is there to prove it. From as soon as we are able to make any sort of decision, we choose at times to do what is wrong.
Put that all together and there are over 7.8 billion people in the world all missing what God wants them to be thinking and doing. This doesn't just mean 7.8 little slips each day, but wars and oppression, slavery and torture, murder, robbery, adultery and the list goes on: things that make people's lives a misery and worse, things which mess up our planet for future generations, things which ruin our own lives and cause us to be stressed, depressed, even suicidal. Perhaps an extreme example was the second world war, when around 191 countries were involved in a six year long all out fight on land, in the air and at sea, using some of the worst of all possible weapons, including atomic bombs, and subjecting their enemies to unspeakable horrors, including concentration camps. Yet that was just a very visible example of what is going on somewhere in the world, most of the time, probably actually every day.
In our own way, we all contribute to the collective evil in the world. We look at it and sometimes say, "How can there be a God with so much evil in the world?" My answer to that is, "Who does the evil?" God made the world a wonderful, good place and we have turned it into a den of iniquity. We have become a human race that is incapable of living one good life between us, so is it right to accuse God of the mess that surrounds us? No! Not at all! We are the sinners and we have disqualified ourselves from eternal life with God in Heaven. He, though, provided the solution, as our group will go on to discuss next time.