What the Old Testament Means to Us. . No.9

THREE DEADLY SINS

We learn a lot about a person by what he hates as well as loves, by what he’s against as well as for, and by what he believes to be wrong as well as right. It is also true of a nation, as we learned in the case of Nazi Germany. In the time of Hitler something drastic happened to Germany’s sense of values, even though at the time it was one of the world’s most enlightened nations. We need to examine our own values when one can write from a presumably peaceful American city and talk about living in a “War Zone,” as a minister does in a church bulletin out of Houston, referring to a dozen murders in that city within a few days. But murder and crime in our streets are but the beginning of the ills that plague our nation. What has happened to our values in this generation may well be reflected in the title of Dr. Karl Menninger’s book, Whatever Happened To Sin?

Our study of the Old Testament in terms of what it means to us is the study of a nation, a nation that began when the God of heaven called one man to be the father of his special people. God called Abraham because he was a man of faith, and so Israel became a nation founded upon faith. The Old Testament is therefore the story of Israel’s faith, which was not always triumphant. The people’s faith was always in a struggle with a deadly and persistent plague, sin.

It would serve us well to learn what Israel thought about sin, its origin and nature, its power and dominion, its penalty and cure (if any). While it is a subject too vast for a single article, we can at least get inside the subject by looking at it from one angle, what Israel came to regard as the three worst sins. Such a subject should help Christians to realize that some sins are far more serious than other sins, a truth we are often slow in accepting. Another truism to keep in mind is where there is no God there is no sin. If Judaism gives us a deeper understanding of the nature of God, it gives us a better understanding of the nature of sin.

The three deadly sins of Judaism, as suggested by their rabbis, were heathenism (idolatry), murder (unjustifiable homicide), and incest (along with all sexual sins). These were deemed so serious as to be almost unforgivable. While all three sins are overt, they are first of all sins of the heart, which are more serious than sins of the flesh. They are rebellion against the authority of God and an encroachment upon His holiness. To murder is more than taking the life of another; it is to destroy one who is made in the image of God. Heathenism is to act as if there is no God, or, if there be a God, He does not matter. To make anything an idol is to displace the God who created us. To commit adultery or any form of sexual perversion, is to treat wantonly what God has made holy. All three sins reflect a heart that has turned from God.

Sins of the heart! These are the sins that matter most, and when Jesus spoke of such sins he was on familiar ground with informed Jews. They understood, as our Lord taught, that adultery is first of all in the heart, and it remains sinful even if it goes no further than one’s thinking. Jesus insisted that it is from the heart that evil comes, and he named such sins: lust, theft, murder, greed, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, arrogance, folly (Mk. 7:21-22, Phillips). When he taught that all such sins come from inside the person, from his heart and mind, and that it is these things more than externals that defile the person, it was good Judaism even if some Pharisees saw sin mostly in terms of externals.

This gets at the heart of the nature of sin, and this is why sin must be taken seriously. Religion never goes deep when sin is treated lightly. Even Christians are often like the fashionable women at a garden party, who, when told that a lion was loose and only a short distance away, responded with, “Really?,” as she took another bite of her cucumber salad. In a world where sin is taken lightly, it is difficult even for believers to hear the Bible’s warning: “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour” (1 Pet. 5:8).

Responsible thinkers through the centuries have attempted to pinpoint the meaning of sin. Theologians get close when they see sin as centered in pride and inordinate self-love. Augustine classed all sin as either carnalities (of the flesh) or animosities (of the soul and mind). He wisely observed that it is not fleshly sins that corrupt the soul, but the sinful soul that corrupts the flesh. That is, it isn’t “sowing wild oats” that blemishes a young man’s soul, but it is the blemished soul that leads to his profligacy.

Some recent theologians, like Reinhold Niebuhr, have referred to pride as the primal sin, whether of men or of angels. Niebuhr especially has projected sin in our materialistic world as the pride of power. We all want power over others, and so we use money, position, fame, sex—and even knowledge, virtue, and religion—to dominate others. Niebuhr has probably done more than any other theologian to alert the consciousness of the modern church to the gravity of sin. He did it by talking about the pride and power of religion.

Paul Tillich thought the word sin had become meaningless through overuse and misuse. He sought for a better term and came up with alienation. All sin has that basic ingredient, he thought, in that it alienates people from God and people from each other.

All these ideas are in the Old Testament where sins are named as transgressions, which is the most profound word for human wrongdoing, as in Is. 59:12: “Our transgressions are multiplied before You, and our sins testify against us.” This depicts sin as willful disobedience and as rebellion against God. It is more than the sin of weakness or ignorance. It means, as does the word for sin in the New Testament, “to miss the mark,” but this is more than moral failure. It is to overstep—transgress—what God has clearly set forth as law.

This is why the three cardinal sins are so serious. They transgress the command of God. The catalogues of sin in the Bible, such as David’s list of six sins in Ps. 15 or Paul’s list of 21 sins in Ro. 1:20-31, where if anywhere we have a biblical doctrine of sin, are listings of transgressions. They are all, whether doing evil to a neighbor, backbiting, deceit, covetousness, idolatry, or sodomy, in defiance of God’s holy law. They are called transgressions. That word goes far in naming the crucial factor in man’s life on this planet. Whatever else man is, he is a sinner, a transgressor of God’s law.

Judaism has always been interested in the origin of sin, which it consistently attributes to the fall of Adam. One commandment was given to Adam and he disobeyed that commandment. Satan the tempter appealed to the lust for power in Adam, which is inherent in human beings. One line in the Bible says it all, “The imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth” (Gen. 8:21). Selfish ambition is what did Adam in, and that sin is in us all. The OT is not Calvinistic in that it teaches that all the children of Adam actually inherit his sin, but that we sin for the same reason he did, and that inclination to sin is with us from birth, even in us in our mother’s womb, as one rabbi put it. One rabbi interpreted it to be saying in Gen. 8:21, “My sons, I created for you an evil impulse.” If that isn’t original sin, it is close to it. But the OT and the rabbis seem to be saying that the same thing that caused Adam to sin causes all of us to sin, our flawed nature, which must have been present with Adam even before he sinned. Gen.4:7 says it well, “Sin coucheth at the door.”

The NT writers not only trace sin to Adam in such language as “For in Adam all die” (1 Cor. 15:22), but also to Cain, who was the first murderer, and that because he “was of the wicked one” (1 Jn. 3:12). Adam sinned against the sovereignty of God by desiring power of nature. Cain sinned against love and brotherhood by slaying his brother. Adam’s sin was idolatry, Cain’s murder. Our sinful pride makes it difficult for us to see ourselves in such sins, and yet Paul is saying that we all sin after the similitude of Adam, and John, while imploring us to love one another, urges us, “Be not like Cain.” It is bad news, but we all must have something of Adam and Cain in us. But John at least sees us as free not to sin as grievously as Cain did. We may be inclined to kill (or hate) a brother, but we can appeal to the law of love. We may not be able to escape all sin, but we can avoid the hate and jealousy that caused Cain to cut his brother’s throat.

The sacrificial system in the OT, a rather baffling subject to the Christian, serves to show us how seriously God views sin and how He intends that we also take sin seriously. It may strike the casual reader of the OT as grotesque that hordes of innocent animals would be slain and offered on an altar as a means of expiating sins. What possible effect could the blood of a quivering lamb have in assuaging man’s inhumanity to man or to his rebellion against God?

One way to see it is that God needed some way to impress upon man the seriousness of his sins, and since “offering something” seems natural to man as a means of correcting some failure, it was reasonable for God to choose animal sacrifices as a way of making His point—that sin is flagrant and intolerable in the sight of God. One is inclined to turn away at the sight of a priest cutting the throat of an innocent victim and laying it on the altar to quiver and die. On a day that hundreds of animals were sacrificed the blood flooded in the trenches. It was a horrible, unthinkable scene, but that is what God intended. That is how gross sin is! Sin is so very bad that something has to be done about it. The sacrifice of an innocent animal was something to do. The shedding of innocent blood also prophetically pointed to the ultimate sacrifice that Christ would make as a lamb slain from the foundation of the world.

God gave Israel a reason for offering up an animal as a sin offering: “The life of the flesh is in the blood; and I have given it for you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls, by reason of the life” (Lv. 17:11). While animal sacrifices was part of the culture of nations outside Israel, the idea of life being in the blood was unique to Israel. That life was in the blood underscored the point of offering up the blood of an animal, for sin was deemed so serious by God that the life of the sinner itself had to be sacrificed. The wages of sin was indeed death. But God in His mercy allowed the people to sacrifice the blood of an animal instead of their own blood.

But the blood did not make atonement because of some magical quality in the blood. It was the divine will of God that by means of the animal’s blood expiation for sin would be effected. It was the same with the blood of Christ, for his blood would have had the same chemical qualities of any other person’s blood. It was God’s will that Christ’s blood would make the difference.

Israel’s sacrificial system allowed for no forgiveness for the three deadly sins of murder, incest, and idolatry. They were high-handed sins and could not be expiated by the offering of an animal upon an altar. There was a “sin offering” for ordinary sins of human weakness, and there was a “guilt offering” for unintentional sins. But there was no rite of expiation for one who sinned presumptuously or with a high hand. It shows that even in the OT a difference was drawn between sins, some being considered more serious than others.

Even so, the sacrificial system is not the full story of how God dealt with His people in regard to sin. Even in the OT God reveals himself as ready to forgive sins of all kinds, apart from animal sacrifices. The basic sacrifice that God requires, whether in the OT or NT, is “a broken and contrite heart.” That sacrifice is named in Ps. 51 as the one that God desires, and that psalm makes it clear that David, who committed two of the deadly sins, was forgiven due to the fact that he yielded himself to the mercy of God. David even says in that psalm that it is not animal sacrifices that God wants, but “the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit.” The psalmist grants that God will accept the offering of bulls, but what He wants most of all is the heart. Even high handed sins are forgiven when one humbles himself before God.

This is one of the themes of the prophets, not that they allow no place for the rite of sacrifice, but that God really wants a humble and contrite heart. This is especially evident in Micah 6 where the prophet answers the question, “Shall I come before Him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old?,” negatively. And what does God really want, what does He really require? His answer: “to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with your God.”

This is an important part of what the OT means to us. On the one hand God ordained a sacrificial system for his people in order to impress upon them the seriousness of their sins and to provide a way of dealing with them, which called for the sacrifice of innocent blood. On the other hand such rites were not what really counted with God, not ultimately at least, for out of His mercy He was ready to forgive all sins of those who came to Him in repentance and humility.

This means there isn’t any difference between the God of the OT and the God of the NT. It is the same God, and His basic requirement has always been the same, contrition and repentance. Dispensations, ordinances, and rites differ, but these are, however important, subordinate to the one necessary thing, sincerity before God.

This lesson alone from the OT comes near teaching us all we need to know, whatever ordinances and rituals we look to as signs of fellowship with God, and that is that what God requires above all else is to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly before God. That is what religion is all about, and if that is missing nothing else really matters.—the Editor

The framework of the Old Testament as we know it today makes it clear that this God is the God of the whole world. But as the story unfolds, it also narrows down to tell us how he became a living reality in the life of a particular group of people. What God did for them was conceived on a grand, international scale. In its earliest episodes, it is a story that spans most of the ancient world, beginning with a childless couple—Abraham and Sarah—in the Mesopotamian city of Ur and leading on to a nation in a “land flowing with milk and honey.”

In between, we have the immortal stories of Isaac, the son of Abraham and Sarah, of Jacob, and of how his family unwittingly ended up as slaves in Egypt. This was one of the great low points of Israel’s early history. But under Moses, a dynamic leader trained in the court of the Egyptian kings. it was to become the central focus of Israel’s national consciousness.—John Drane in Introducing the Old Testament