Sin, sin, sin, sin; I’m tired of talking about it. In the last several sermons from Genesis we’ve explored our fallenness repeatedly as we’ve worked our way through the temptation and fall in the garden, the spread of sin in society in Genesis 4-5, and the story of Noah and the flood in Genesis 6-9. It’s impossible to understand Genesis, the rest of Scripture, or the human condition without reference to sin and fallenness, but it’s a topic that quickly gets old. And I think it should.
Sin is not amazing. It is not a wonder or a surprise. It is weary, tiresome news. In Scripture the subject of sin is like a black background in a painting; it is there not to draw our attention but to provide the background against which the grace of God glistens. The story of the temptation, fall and curse in the Garden (Gen 3) is one such black background which highlights the astonishing kindness of God to us. Since 2:17 it was clear that the consequence of violating the boundary God had set against eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was death. The miracle is not that they (and we) were punished, but that they (and we) live at all. It is against this black background that we also see other grace notes:
· God personally making garments for Adam and Eve and carefully clothing them before He sends them out from the Garden,
· The mark of protection God put on Cain before he was sent out as punishment for murdering Abel, despite a total lack of repentance on Cain’s part.
· The continuing operation of the blessing (“Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it and have dominion…”) in the families of Cain and Seth despite the spread of sin.
· In the Noah story God chooses – astonishingly - to redeem his broken creation by covenanting himself irreversably to it, and at great cost to Himself, despite the intent of the heart of humankind being evil from youth on. He could have just started over.
The early church fathers, especially Gregory the Great (540-604 A.D.), taught that we need to have knowledge of our fallen condition so that this knowledge might yield humility in us. Humility in turn yields detachment from the world, from ourselves and from our sins, and makes us conscious of our need for God. The name they gave to the experience of this knowledge was compunction. Originally a medical term referring to attacks of acute pain, compunction came to mean a pain of the spirit. It is a suffering resulting from two causes: (1) the existence of sin and our tendency toward sin, and (2) the existence of our desire for God. “Compunction is an act of God in us, an act by which God awakens us, a shock, a blow, a “sting,” a sort of burn. God goads us as with a spear; He “presses” us with insistence, as if to pierce us. The love of the world lulls us; but, as if by a thunderstroke, the attention of the soul is recalled to God.”[1]
And this soul-pain is what I experienced this weekend. Kendra and I were at a retreat for leaders of churches in our area of our Conference and Len Nation spoke on “Confessions of a Limping Leader.” He exposed some of the ways that Christian leaders slip into attitudes and behaviors rooted in pride, selfishness, and greed (to name a few) instead of Christlike love and humility. This was God’s thunderstroke, descending on me out of the blue. This compunction, this soul-pain, was amazing grace to me because by it God recalled the attention of my soul to Himself. God used Len as a Samuel to this David, and God’s words to me through him were “You are that man…”
Yes. This is what the knowledge of sin is good for. Compunction is a great gift from God. This pain of the soul produces in us tears of repentance but also, and increasingly, tears of desire for God Himself. It is this urgent thirst for God - who alone can fill our inner emptiness - which is the proper goal of our knowledge of sin. It hurts, but it is great grace because that is how God awakens us. So, with some fear and trepidation, I am praying that the LORD might grant you and me the grace of compunction increasingly. Living God, awaken your church!
Because of His Grace,
Pastor David
[1] Jean LeClercq, O.S.B., The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture (New York: Fordham University Press, 1974), 38.
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1 comment:
Do you think we ever forget our sinful condition? I don't. And even if I did for one moment, there would always be someone in Evangelical Christendom who would be more than willing, ready and able to remind me.
I don't think we need to focus on it, Christ died for our sins, let's talk about Christ's finished work instead for what does "it is finished" really mean?
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