Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin

In the Bible, shalom means universal flourishing, wholeness, and delight--a rich state of affairs in which natural needs are satisfied and natural gifts fruitfully employed, a state of affairs that inspires joyful wonder as its Creator and Savior opens doors and welcomes the creatures in whom he delights. Shalom, in other words, is the way things ought to be.

Recalling and confessing our sin is like taking out the garbage: once is not enough.

All sin is equally wrong, but not all sin is equally bad.

The point of our lives is not to get smart or to get rich or even to get happy. The point is to discover God’s purposes for us and to make them our own.

A third complication is that the same tradition that held pride to be a sin and humility a virtue has often been dominated by whites who have preached humility to blacks, by men who have preached submissiveness to women, by rigid and unimaginative persons who have regarded every creative impulse, every struggle for personal dignity, as a shameful show of arrogance. In the eyes of such persons, anyone who wanted mere self-respect was cheeky. What is troubling is that the advocates of humility and submissiveness have often had a personal stake in the popularity of these virtues and have therefore made adopting them look like the project of a special-interest group. In

God hates sin not just because it violates his law but, more substantively, because it violates shalom, because it breaks the peace, because it interferes with the way things are supposed to be.

We blunt our own conscience, darken our own judgment by self-interest, and rebuke in others the very vices for which we are famous. Each of us carries around a “deep and calm source of delusion, which undermines the whole principle of good.”173

The story of the fall tells us that sin corrupts: it puts asunder what God had joined together and joins together what God had put asunder. Like some devastating twister, corruption both explodes and implodes creation, pushing it back toward the “formless void” from which it came.

Perversion is an ends-and-purposes disease. Most broadly understood, perversion is the turning of loyalty, energy, and desire away from God and God’s project in the world: it is the diversion of construction materials for the city of God to side projects of our own, often accompanied by jerry-built ideologies that seek to justify the diversion.

Sin hurts other people and grieves God, but it also corrodes us. Sin is a form of self-abuse.

An envier doesn’t care whether you have earned part of your success or whether some golden parachute from heaven has dropped straight into your lap. To an envier, your advantage is totally unfair either way. In this respect, enviers are theological switch-hitters: sometimes they are Pelagians and sometimes they are Augustinians. But always they are potential killers.

To speak of sin without grace is to minimize the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the fruit of the Spirit, and the hope of shalom.

Sticks and stones can break our bones, but lies can break our hearts and our careers.

human society,” as C. S. Lewis puts it, “inside which minimum decency passes for heroic virtue and utter corruption for pardonable imperfection.

Sin is disruption of created harmony and then resistance to divine restoration of that harmony. Above all, sin disrupts and resists the vital human relation to God,

Vices have to masquerade as virtues — lust as love, thinly veiled sadism as military discipline, envy as righteous indignation, domestic tyranny as parental concern.

The image of pollution suggests bringing together what ought to be kept apart. To pollute soil, air, or water is to blend into them foreign materials — machine oil, for example — so that these natural resources no longer nourish or delight very well. Similarly, the introduction of a third lover into a marriage or an idol into the natural human relation to God adds a foreign agent to them; it corrupts these entities by addition.

To try deliberately for self-actualization is like trying very hard to fall asleep or to have a good time.

Unbelief is not the only way of suppressing the truth about God,” says Westphal. “It is only the most honest.

People tethered to God by faith can let themselves go because they know they will get themselves back.