When Christ bore our sin, He didn’t just go straight to Hell. We often think that He did. Why? Because we treat sin as being bad only for the consequence that we were cast out of paradise.
But that is not the case. Before Jesus descended to Hell, He was beaten, mocked and spit on; He then died a slow, painful death. Notice: this was all on earth.
Our sins, therefore, have a terrible price to to be paid on earth as well: another reason to hate the sin that we have. Hate it as God hates it.
2 Comments
November 19, 2008 at 3:28 pm
And the consequences of paradise lost are more than we know how to count. Everything bad about sin really is something bad about being cast out of Paradise.
You’re also right, though, that Hell (Gehenna) is not the only place that sin has consequences. Sin is deadly to the body and the soul here on Earth as well. An economics major may say that all our injustice toward one another here is an externality of our injustice toward God. Except even that isn’t true: we’ll give an account of that too on the Day of the Lord.
If we think myopically, to sin or not to sin against others is the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma: it’s collectively rational for all not to sin, but it seems individually rational to gain all you can from sinning whether other people sin or not, because the payoffs are greater: this yields what’s called a “dominant strategy”, of sinning no matter the other party’s action. But God resolves this too, because He is the ultimate ruler.
November 19, 2008 at 5:32 pm
Well said about the part about how we know that it’s best for everyone for example to obey traffic rules. But we want to not be late so we cut people off and mess up traffic.
Hmm… Prisoner’s Dilemma…
So all this talk about (secular) social justice, then, is a very big oxymoron: we rectify things caused by our own injustice (to God) while we supplant God by creating our own sense of righteousness. Wonderful. The buzzword “social justice” has always raised my hackles. Just didn’t know why.