Excessiveness 4-5-09
I came upon a quote last week from a woman describing why she divorced her husband, in which she said the reason was his “excessive cheating”. That really had me thinking: “excessive” cheating? So, if he had only engaged in a “normal” amount of cheating, she would have been okay with it? That is completely absurd!
This is fairly indicative of how we have become desensitized to evil: we do not pay attention without some form of emphasis. A man kills another man in a bar fight, he gets put on trial for murder; a man shoots another man “execution-style” and it is called a “heinous” crime. So-called hate crime legislation is just more of this insanity; by making it worse to commit crimes against certain protected classes, the laws indicate that it is more acceptable to commit crimes against those who are not of those classes. In other words, if it is a hate crime to assault homosexuals, then it is not as bad to assault a heterosexual! The reason behind these ridiculous hate crime laws is that we do not pay attention to assault, so we have to call it a hate crime assault.
This is how it is with mankind. We do not really care about evil, unless it is done to us. We certainly do not view the evil we commit in the same light we shine on the evil committed by others! But God is different.
You are not a God who takes pleasure in evil; with you the wicked cannot dwell. The arrogant cannot stand in your presence; you hate all who do wrong. You destroy those who tell lies; bloodthirsty and deceitful men the LORD abhors. (Psalm 5:4-6 NIV)
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the LORD. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. (Isaiah 55:8-9 NIV)
If you really keep the royal law found in Scripture, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” you are doing right. But if you show favoritism, you sin and are convicted by the law as lawbreakers. For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it. For he who said, “Do not commit adultery,” also said, “Do not murder.” If you do not commit adultery but do commit murder, you have become a lawbreaker. (James 2:8-11 NIV)
God hates sin. God hates the excessive sin. God hates the casual and infrequent sin. God hates murder as well as adultery, and he hates thievery as well as lying. God does not view certain sins as harmless or cute.
Man sees the severity of the sin and the impact on others. God sees imperfection. And so just as man and God disagree on sin, they also disagree on forgiveness and justification. Man forgives and justifies based on his own sinful experiences; God forgives and justifies based on absolute truth and clarity. Man will forgive others what he can accept according to his nature: for example, we are always more ready to forgive others the transgressions they commit against other people, but are less forgiving when they transgress us. God, on the other hand, freely offers forgiveness to all mankind the transgressions they have each committed against God. Man is very quick to judge others and equally quick to justify himself; God has even held back judgment in order to give mankind time to obey the gospel that leads to true justification.
It is common for us to use phrases like “too much adultery” and “too many murders”, but it only serves to illustrate how far off the mark we have become. God is calling all of us back to his viewpoint, in which not only is murder wrong, but being angry with your brother is wrong. As we are transformed into having a more Christ like mindset, we will stop worrying about how much wrong we can do before God gets really angry, and we will instead worry about how we can please God more each day.
So then the path is a transformation from an excessive sinfulness to an excellent righteousness. Remember that path is the straight one that narrows as it goes along.