Sin and Love

by Elanor

I've been listening to some old hymns redone by Jars of Clay and one in particular struck me as being a perfect encapsulation of the message of the Old Testament. Speaking of Jesus' death it says,

O Love of God, O Sin of man,
In this dread act your strength is tried,
And victory remains with love:
Jesus our Lord is crucified.

As I've been reading through Genesis again, the thing that keeps jumping out at me is the interplay between God and humanity. The pattern goes like this: man sins, God blesses man, man sins, God shows mercy, man sins, God relentlessly keeps on loving and pursuing man.

This pattern helps make so much sense of a lot of the moral ambiguity that I used to believe was in the Bible. I remember at Ravencrest having a debate during class over whether or not God approved of what Jacob did when he deceived his father and stole his older brother's blessing. We know from elsewhere in the Bible that God does not approve of lying. In fact, He counts lying as a sin. But are there extenuating circumstances?

Directly after the account of Jacob lying to his father, he is sent from his home and God appears to him in a dream. Not only does Jacob remain unreprimanded for his deception, God says this: "I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie, I will give it to you and to your descendants. Your descendants will also be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and in you and in your descendants shall all the families of the earth be blessed. Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you" (Gen. 28:13-15).

I have heard it said that God overlooked Jacob's lie because Jacob wanted to be part of God's plan, whereas Esau didn't really care. (A similar thing is said of Rahab, who lies to protect the Israelite spies in Jericho: she did it for God, so that made it ok.) But what if God does not "overlook" the lie in that He says it's not morally wrong this time, what if God deliberately reacts to Jacob's overt sin, not with judgment, but with blessing?

I said in the previous post that God’s covenant with Noah after the flood was the first of a long series of incidences where God counters man’s evil with mercy. That is the pattern that I see throughout the book of Genesis, and throughout the entire Old Testament. I suppose that is the pattern I will be tracing with these posts. My dad wrote recently on his xanga that we are all part of an unseen battle between good and evil; I want to say that it is a battle between God’s love and our sin.

Usually in a battle, you have two opposing sides using the same kind of weaponry: swords, cannons, nuclear bombs, etc. The thing about this battle is that the two sides have completely opposite modes of assault: sin breaks relationships and drives people apart, whereas love creates relationships and brings people together. Throughout all of history, people have been trying, unknowingly perhaps, to push God away. They want nothing to do with Him, they want to govern their own lives without His interference. They ignore His laws, tear down His temples, and spit in His face so that perhaps He might eventually leave Him alone. But God was not to be deterred; He pursued even to the point of death, and, dying, won: even death could not separate Him from the ones He loves.

When I was in Sunday School, we were taught to see the Bible as a morality lesson, full of godly men whom we were supposed to emulate in obedience and piety. As I read the Bible now, I see that it does not talk about godly men. It tells stories of sinners, and the only godly one is God Himself, as he “turns the other cheek” over and over again, trying to win the battle against humanity so that He can win us back to Himself.