the following is an email sent off to dave clark and soundview last summer. it's definitely an instance of Scripture being a double-edged sword. quite a sharp one. flesh wound inducing, really.
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So I have two main reasons for writing this email:
1. Conveying the overwhelming love for you folks and what God is doing at S/V that He stirs in my heart - the continuing affirmation that you are beloved members of the Church and that Christ is at the center of your work: the only thing that ensures its eternal endurance and status of current praise/glory/exhibition before the Throne.
2. Following up on a brief conversation I had with Blain (?) whilst facilitating. Since I don't have direct access to him, I hope you don't mind being an intermediary. And I'm sure you'll enjoy the rambling foolishness that is to follow.
To recall that setup, we were out at the ropes course and I asked how the LIT Bible study had been going. Blain responded by saying that it had been really good/deep; he then began to summarize what they'd been discussing - something about (and I know I'm butchering this here) which sins are really 'the worst' in God's eyes. The sort that will elicit a "What the hell (literally) were you doing?!" on the day of judgement. Blain continued by noting how Russell suggested that pride occupied the darkest role in the categorization of sin. I responded with some skepticism about the usefulness of such a discussion (in my experience, these kinds of discussion are objectively interesting but tend to lead to the actual practice of self-righteousness and self-absolution) and we agreed that the only Person really qualified to say anything objective about such a hierarchy was God Himself.
In the interest of actually being responsible, we had to focus on transfers and harness checks at that point and so we left it at that. The subject has been on my mind a bit since then, namely ascertaining what God has to say about 'truly detestable sin.'
Oh, and I'm going to ignore the passage in Matthew 12:22-32 where Jesus refers to 'blaspheming the Holy Spirit' as an unforgivable sin, namely because I'm not at all sure what that objectively means. But it should be noted.
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My overall claim is this: the sin that God truly detests and which underlies nearly all other sin is idolatry. This may sound strange to postmoderns who can walk the streets of Seattle and not see anything that resembles a physical incarnation of a deity, but go with me here. We'll come back to the relation to pride by the end.
As Blain and I agreed upon, the only Person Who has Authority to objectively answer this question is God Himself. Therefore we will dispense with all hypotheticals and intuitive psychology/spirituality (that we so often engage in, often led by the Spirit but with the danger of being ungrounded) and go straight to Scripture and God's messages to His people.
- Consider the Ten Commandments. In the canonical Christian reading, the first and second commandments comprise a condemnation of idolatry of any form and an affirmation of the centrality of Yahweh as God of the Israelite nation. There idolatry is given the definition of worshiping anything other than the Creating God. Therefore idolatry is much more expansive than bowing down before a carved pig or reveling in front of a golden calf. More to come on this soon.
- The Israelite nation consistently walked away from God throughout the Prophetic period of the Old Testament. The Prophetic books of Scripture as such are much less about the practice of prophecy as a Biblical version of fortunetelling as they are God's use of messengers to call His people out on how much they were walking away from Him and their resultant need for repentance. Curiously, the most consistent and overhwleming call God makes to His people through the prophets is to stop comitting idolatry. Some of the most gripping and powerful sections of the old Prophets are found in Ezekiel's (Chapter 16 primarily) description of Israel as the bride-of-God, whoring herself out to the gods of her neighbors. Of all the rebellion that His people engage in, God's primary concern is their consistent and blatant idolatry. A thorough study of idolatry in the Old Testament will pull up this theme over and over again and affirm its status as God's central complaint in the midst of a cornucopia of sins.
- Idolatry is even worse. It can almost always be identified as the core of why we sin. Consider the word of Paul in 1 Corinthians 10, writing to a church that is, to put it mildly messed up (my church is currently going through the whole book; the sermon series is accurately titled 'Christians gone wild'): getting drunk during communion, sleeping with each other in ways that freaked out the Romans (a son with his mother for example), scorning the poor, &c. I quote from the NASB where Paul writes about how to overcome the temptations that face them:
'No temptation has overtaken you but such as is common to man; and God is faithful, Who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will provide the way of escape also, that you may be able to endure it.
Therefore, my beloved, flee from idolatry.
I speak as to wise men; you judge what I say.'
- I Corinthians 10:13-15
Paul's response to conquering the massive amount of soon-to-be-repentant sin present in the Corinthian church is to tell them to flee idolatry.
Keep in mind that the Corinthians don't have statues of gods that they worship after singing hymns to Jesus. They aren't sacrificing food/people/anything to carved idols & such and in fact some factions therein are quite worried about eating food sacrificed by pagans to idols (see the beginning of Chapter 9). My point is this: the command to flee idolatry seems to drop out of nowhere and seems almost completely irrelevant.
Here Paul correctly identifies the root of the Corinthians' many sins: idolatry - the construction of a miniature god which you satisfy so as to absolve you from your personal conception of hell. Examples:
1.
Personal hell: loneliness, the absence of community, being unloved
Functional saviour: community and the presence of friends
Acts of service/worship to the saviour: going out of your way to put aside your own time so as to be able to spend time with people [and thereby avoid loneliness]
Sin derivatives: people-pleasing, covetousness and envy, falsehood and lies
2.
Personal hell: being single
Functional saviour: relationships with a significant other
Acts of service/worship to the saviour: seeking out relations for the sake of a relationship; maintaining a bad relationship out of fear of life without close contact
Sin derivatives: ignoring the will of God (rebellion), lust, adultery, deep lies
3.
Personal hell: not being respected
Functional saviour: being shown respect by people
Acts of service/worship to the saviour: demonstration of how worthy of respect you are by being uber-responsible
Sin derivatives: extreme anger, violence, murder, self-centeredness
4.
Personal hell: working too hard/not having free time
Functional saviour: time off, relaxation, vacation
Acts of service/worship to the saviour: half-hearted presence in work/needed deeds; anxious waiting (and thus disengagement of the heart) of rest time
Sin derivatives: sloth, anger, etc.
5.
Personal hell: being lazy, in perception and/or fact
Functional saviour: work-a-holism
Acts of service/worship to the saviour: large numbers of hours invested in work; disregarding your personal needs in the interest of getting more work done
Sin derivatives: self-righteousness, pride, anger
I could go on.
Note one of the common themes to all of the idolatry forms listed above: they are about the pursuit of and enslavement to *good things*. Community is a blessed thing; a God-centered relationship is an encouraging sight and a soothing presence to all; respect is a deep-seeded need in both sexes and all human interaction; rest is a need mandated by God Himself; Paul writes about how our work is to be commendation to the unbelieving world. Thus we see idolatry as the giving over of ourselves to *good* things that God gives, rather than to the God Who created them.
Oh, and about pride.. C.S. Lewis identifies pride in 'Mere Christianity' as perhaps the darkest/blackest sin. That may very well be true, but pride must first be traced back to the idolatry and worship of the self. As such, it is a form of idolatry (which Scripturally is why we see a handful of references to pride and a ton for idolatry).
Anyway, I think that's enough for now. That's a lot of rambling to walk through. =p
Love you all in Christ. May His chief love descend upon and surround you all.
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obedience or rebellion: that's the choice. and it is perilous!
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