sin Archives - Page 16 of 21

Of all the violent texts in the Old Testament, the portrayal of the flood in Genesis 6–8 may be the most difficult text to understand.

As I was struggling with the way the flood is presented in Scripture, I had frequent conversations with my wife about this troubling text. One night, as we went back and forth on how to understand this passage, she playfully said, “I don’t know what the flood story means! All I know is what I was taught in Sunday school, that it’s a beautiful story about rainbows!”

We laughed, but the tragic reality is that this is what most people think about the flood. It is often read and taught sort of like an old-wives tale about how rainbows came to be.

The Flood Story is Appalling

The flood story, however, is anything but a beautiful fairy tale. On its surface, the flood story is an appalling account of how millions (and possibly billions) of people died a horrible death by drowning because God was angry at them.

Aside from the grim image of every living thing on earth gasping for breath and choking on water as they sink beneath the waves, the flood story also paints a troubling portrait of a God who seems incompetent because He regrets that He made mankind (Didn’t He know this would happen?), and who then foolishly tries to solve the world’s addiction to evil and violence by committing the greatest atrocity of all: worldwide genocide. One author describes the story with these words:

The Old Testament also describes God as a mass murderer. …Despite cute songs, child-friendly play sets, and colorful artistic renderings of the story, “Noah’s Ark” is not a happy tale of giraffes and panda bears clambering aboard a floating zoo. It is a story of catastrophic death and destruction that, incidentally, results from divine decree. Nearly the entire human population perishes because God drowns them. It is a disaster of such epic proportions that even some of Hollywood’s doomsday scenarios pale by comparison (Seibert, Disturbing Divine Behavior, 20).

Strong words! Yet the apparent genocidal behavior of God in Genesis 6–8 is not the only troubling element to this text. Although there is a rainbow at the end and a promise by God that He will never do such a thing again, one is left with several questions about the way God is presented in this text.

The Troubling God of the Flood

For example, if He can promise that He will never do it again, why did He send the flood in the first place? Did He realize the flood was a mistake? If so, He sure seems prone to mistakes, for He first regretted making mankind, and then He regretted killing them all. So is God schizophrenic? Is He bi-polar? Did God realize the flood didn’t work as intended, and that mankind would not learn to refrain from evil simply because God annihilated them all? Maybe He realized this isn’t the example He wanted to set for mankind, and so resolved to be a nicer, gentler, more merciful God in the future? Was the flood “Plan A” and when the violent drowning of all mankind didn’t work, God decided to go with “Plan B” in eventually sending the Messiah?

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Why Accountability Groups Don’t Work

By Jeremy Myers

63 Comments

I have never been fond of accountability groups. I have been a part of several over the course of my life as a pastor, church member, and seminary student. I always felt like there was something… manipulative about them.

Accountability Groups I Have Been In

Here is my sense of every accountability group I have ever been in: they pretty much only force people to become liars. Oh sure, maybe the specific sin that the group meets together about is discussed and out in the open, but most often, the other sins are kept hidden and safely locked away. Furthermore, what happens most often in accountability groups is that if a person doesn’t want to talk about his sin, all the accountability group does is make him feel more guilty about it, which then makes him fall into the sin even more.

I was in one accountability group where we were dealing with issues of sexual temptation. The group lasted about two years, and we all did pretty good admitting our failures and praying for and encouraging one another. The group fell apart when one of the members got arrested and sent to prison for molesting a young girl. In the two years we met, he never said a word about any such struggle, temptation, or risk he was facing in this area. Not one word.

I was part of a different group a while back, and I recently learned that one of the men in the group is facing the possibility of divorce because of an addiction to pornography which he hid all those years.

I am not judging or condemning these men. What I am saying is that accountability groups don’t “work.” Some people will swear that accountability groups do work, and that every person should be part of one, but I’m just not so sure….

While counseling and accountability groups might be temporarily helpful for some, they do not result in lasting success for the vast majority of people who participate in them.

What Accountability Groups Focus On

Accountability groups usually focus on guilt and peer pressure to modify behavior. There are other behavioral management techniques that are sometimes used as well, but for the most part, there is very little about an accountability group that is overtly “Christians.” Oh sure, the accountability group might pray and talk about the Bible, but in general, there is very little difference between a Christian accountability group and any other form of behavioral management group. And usually what is discovered in these groups is that even IF a person is able to modify one behavior or overcome one addiction, they often fall into some other sort of destructive behavior or addiction, which often makes their overall condition worse than it was before.

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What is the Sin Against the Holy Spirit?

By Jeremy Myers

21 Comments

A reader recently asked me this question: “What if you incorrectly identify something as demonic?” While I will answer that question, I think the fear behind it is something related to the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. The real question that was probably being asked was this: “What is the sin against the Holy Spirit?”

The reason I say this is because there is an event in the life of Jesus that is often used by some power-hungry and control-freak pastors to beat and cajole the people in their church into submission, to quell all dissension, and to quiet all objections. These pastors usually accuse people of committing a sin against the Holy Spirit (or blasphemy against the Spirit) if they challenge or question the pastor, and especially if someone accuses the pastor of doing something demonic.

Let me just say this: Some of the most demonic things that have ever been done in the history of the world have been done in the name of Jesus Christ. In fact, I would go further and say that if one person does something evil, and another person does the exact same thing but does it in the name of Jesus Christ, the second action is way more demonic and evil than the first.

Doing evil is bad enough, but there is nothing worse than doing evil in the name of God.

Anyway, back to the point…

Matthew 12 and the Sin Against the Holy Spirit

The event from the life of Jesus that some pastors and church leaders refer to is found in Matthew 12. Jesus performs some miracles and the religious leaders accuse Jesus of operating under the power of Beelzebub (aka, Satan). In turn, Jesus accuses these religious leaders of being close to committing a sin against the Holy Spirit, or blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.

So when one Christian accuses a church leader of doing something evil or wrong, the pastor often feels justified in retorting the same way Jesus did, and accuses his accusers of committing a sin against the Holy Spirit. They teach that if someone is doing something by the power of the Holy Spirit, and someone else says they are doing it by the power of the devil, that this is a sin against the Holy Spirit, and those who commit this sin will never be forgiven.

You see how this works? Some pastors use Matthew 12 to make sure that no one ever challenge or questions their ideas, teaching, actions, or motives. For they are “God’s anointed” and if you do question them, then maybe you are committing the sin against the Holy Spirit and will end up damned for all eternity as a result.

Hmmm…. is this true? Let’s consider the specific situations where this occurs a little more closely.

There are some churches out there that have times in their weekly services where they engage in practices like speaking in tongues, prophetic utterances, and miraculous healing. A second group of leaders and churches (which do not practice these things) often accuse the first group of doing these miracles in the power of the devil rather than in the power of God.

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Does God Shame Us at the Judgment Seat of Christ?

By Jeremy Myers

89 Comments

It is sometimes taught in Christian circles that when we stand before the judgment seat of Christ, God will replay all of our sins and mistakes before the entire mass of other Christians who are there as well.

I have heard the judgment seat of Christ described as though there will be a big movie screen and as we are all gathered together on judgment day, God will show a movie of all our sins, mistakes, and failures for everybody to see.

Have you ever heard something like this taught about the judgment seat of Christ?

I was reminded of this idea recently when I saw this picture:

This guy cheats on his girlfriend, and so to teach him not to do this anymore, she makes him stand at the mall wearing this sign. He shouldn’t have done what he did, but at the same time, I am not sure that this is going to get him to love his girlfriend more…

Some people view God this way. We sin. He gets angry. So He tries to punish and shame us into obedience. Ultimately, when we all get to heaven, the first thing we have waiting for us is the worlds longest horror movie ever of everything bad we have ever said, done, or thought. Not every sin is sexual, but the sexual sins alone would make a XXX-Rated movie millions of hours long. Then you have all the violence, murders, anger, slander, gossip, greed, hate, jealousy, etc., etc., etc.

I cannot imagine a worse way to start eternity….

We Must All Appear Before the Judgment Seat of Christ

I suppose the idea is that since none of us want our deepest secrets and darkest sins revealed to the whole world, this sort of idea is to keep us from committing sins. There are even a few verses which seem to back up this idea. For example, 2 Corinthians 5:10 says that we will all appear before the judgment seat of Christ to give an answer for the things done in the body, whether good or evil.

So the teaching is that at the judgment seat of Christ, Jesus is going to call us one by one before His throne and replay our life for us, pointing out in excruciating detail all the things we did–both good and bad–during our life. And since everyone else is going to be there too, well, they are going to overhear what Jesus says or be able to watch the movie of our life along with us.

Again…. this is NOT a good way to start eternity…

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God Sometimes Withdraws Protection

By Jeremy Myers

35 Comments

Frequently, due to sin, rebellion, and the other factors, God simply withdraws His protective hand and allows sin, Satan, and chaos to have their way.

Everything we have seen in the Chaos Theory leads up to this final point. God has incarnated Himself into the world in such a way that He gives away aspects of true freedom and power to His creatures to do with it what they will. But when we misuse this freedom and power, God does not (indeed cannot) simply stop the ways we abuse our freedom and power, for then it would no longer be genuine freedom or power.

As a result of our rebellious decisions and misuse of power, nature flies out of control and creates chaos all around us. Satan, who is at war with God and His creation, seeks to destroy anything that comes from God or aligns itself with God. And wherever sin is found, it eats away at everything it touches. Through His incarnation and by His infinite wisdom and foreknowledge, God slows the death and decay down, and rescues those who are perishing in sin and destruction, but frequently, due the nature of sin, the consequences of abused freedom, and the misuse of power, God cannot stop the natural results of rebellion. When this happens, nature falls into chaos, the destroyer destroys, and sin brings death.

When humans persist in sin despite God’s frequent attempts to call them toward obedience and to warn them of what will happen if they continue down the path they are on, there comes a point where sometimes, God simply withdraws His hand of protection and allows people to suffer the consequences for their sin, for chaos to reign, and for Satan to bring death and destruction. I have put this principle last because I think that this element of the Chaos Theory is the last resort for God.

When bad things happen to us in life, we should not be too quick to believe that God has withdrawn His hand of protection, but instead, should go first consider some of the other elements of the Chaos Theory as possible explanations for what has happened to us. So also with some of the terrible events in Scripture. We must not be too quick to say that God has withdrawn His protection from a certain person or place so that sin, death, and the devil can have their way.

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Is the Flood Account a Beautiful Story about Rainbows?

The Flood Story is Appalling

The Troubling God of the Flood

Why Accountability Groups Don’t Work

Accountability Groups I Have Been In

What Accountability Groups Focus On

What is the Sin Against the Holy Spirit?

Matthew 12 and the Sin Against the Holy Spirit

Does God Shame Us at the Judgment Seat of Christ?

We Must All Appear Before the Judgment Seat of Christ

God Sometimes Withdraws Protection

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