Sin: Blocking the Flow of God’s Love
The way we speak about sin is key. The metaphors we use to speak about reality always end up “using” us. Our language isn’t merely a tool we use, it shapes the way we see reality. I want to juxtapose two metaphors for speaking about sin: breaking God’s laws vs. blocking the flow of God’s life/love. It’s not that one is wrong and the other is right. It’s that the overuse of the one has misshaped and malformed us, and we need a correction.
Most of us will have been taught to speak about sin as “breaking God’s laws.” That’s right, insofar as it goes, but it remains too impersonal and abstract. The human conscience loves the idea of a law that it can manipulate, weaponize, and control.
I think it could be more helpful for us to speak about sin as “blocking the flow” of God’s love and life for our neighbors. The legal metaphors for sin are too impersonal. The metaphor of “blocking the flow” keeps us anchored in the personal. It keeps our eyes focused on our neighbors.
Theologian Kathryn Tanner is puts it like this:
“God’s gifts can be blocked by our sins and the sins of others against us; but God does not stop giving to us because we have misused and squandered the gifts that God has given.”
Think of the “blocking” here as a garden hose. You can step on the hose and make the flow a little weaker. You can put a kink in the hose to temporarily cut off the flow. But you can store the hose in a kinked position for long enough that you create a break in the hose.
Think of sin as the ways we block the flow of God’s life and love to our neighbors and ourselves—kinking the hose in some way.
It is key to notice here that the water continues to run even if we clog the flow. God is always fully God to every human being. His love and life is always flowing to them. Our sins make it harder for them to receive that flow of life and love. Our sins are what make it harder for our neighbors to receive the good gifts God has for them. But the flow does not and cannot stop.
Sin is the harm we do to our neighbors (including ourselves). Anything that we do or fail to do that makes it harder for our neighbors to believe God, trust God, know God, and receive his love—that’s sin.
“A Sick Holiness”
The legal metaphors for sin, when they are used in isolation from other metaphors, almost always lead us to moralism. And moralism is, perhaps, the greatest enemy of the truth of the gospel.
Moralism is “preaching” that aims to get people to behave a certain way. It is an attempt to conform others to some system of morality. But the gospel conforms people to the Christ. The difference is easy to see: systems of morality are always dead ideas, Jesus Christ is a living person.
This is why when we define sin as missing the mark we should immediately think: Whose mark? Societies’ mark? My family’s mark? The democratic/republican party’s mark? My own personal mark? Some might say, “No! Sin is missing the Bible’s mark!”
But whose reading of the Bible? Saul’s? The Pharisees’?
Jesus challenges every system of morality precisely because he is alive. No moral order can capture him. No ideology can cage him in.
So it is key for us to see that holiness and morality are not the same thing.
Chris Green puts it like this:
“We often, always at terrible cost to ourselves and to others, confuse the sanctified life for a moral life. But the truth is, holiness is beyond morality and immorality.”
The gospel is not about making us more moral. In fact, the holiness that the gospel intends for us has very little to do with what consider to be morality and immorality.
Bonhoeffer makes just this point. In the Gospel accounts Jesus makes some very high moral demands on people: You have heard it said, “Do not commit adultery,” but I say to you if you so much as look on a woman with lust you have already committed adultery in your heart. With these high moral demands we would expect that he would hang out with the moral heroes of his world. That’s what Plato and Buddha did.
But when we read the Gospels we find Jesus among the morally weak and the outright immoral: Children, prostitutes, tax collectors, and sinners. (He even tells the moral heroes of his day that the immoral ones will enter the kingdom ahead of them.)
Why? Because God chose what is foolish and weak in the world to shame the wise and the strong. So, Bonhoeffer says:
“Religion and morality contain the germ of hubris… In this sense, religion and morality can become the most dangerous enemy of God’s coming to human beings, the most dangerous enemy of the Christian message of good news. Thus the Christian message is basically amoral and irreligious, paradoxical as that may sound…”
We need to reckon with Bonhoeffer’s stark warning. Morality is one of the greatest dangers to the gospel. Do we believe that?
We often think of becoming “holy” as becoming sinless. But God wants more for us than to become blandly sinless. He wants us to be conformed to Christ, to be one with the Father as Jesus is. In Christ we see that holiness is never identical to being moral.
Think of Jesus’ life as the gospels tell it. Jesus is called “the holy one of God,” he is holiness incarnate, but he was repeatedly accused of being immoral by the moral heroes of his day. It was this charge of “immorality” that led to his crucifixion. Why? Because his way of life did not (and does not) fit within the moral standards of his day (or of any day).
Jesus reveals to us how bankrupt all of our moral systems are. Our concepts of “goodness” have to broken open by the Spirit. To follow Jesus requires that we leave behind our own moralisms. Jesus and our morality cannot coexist.
Peter is a perfect example. Peter famously makes the true confession of Jesus’s identity. Jesus asks Peter, “Who do you say that I am?” Peter responds, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Jesus tells Peter that the Father has revealed this to him. He has made a true confession. God has spoken to Peter. But Peter’s true confession still ends up distorted by his own understanding of morality. Jesus responds to Peter’s true confession by saying, “And the son of man must go to Jerusalem and suffer.” “No!” Peter says. He won’t allow it! He’s still operating within his own understanding of morality. He hasn’t let Jesus show him what true holiness is.
Peter, like all of us, takes what God has said to him and squeezes it inside his own understanding of what is good and right. The words of Peter’s confession are true, but the sense he makes of them is wrong. He’s got the right words—“You are the Christ”—words that are truly from God, but he’s interpreting them within wrongly.
We have to “unlearn” our systems of morality in order to truly follow Jesus. We must allow the Spirit to tear down our conceptions of morality and replace them with genuine holiness—Jesus.
Chris Green concludes:
“We learn holiness only by unlearning ‘goodness.’ The call to holiness is a call to break free from morality, which, at its heart, is always about power and control.”
Holiness has as little to do with morality as it has to do with immorality. Very often in our circles, holiness is defined as a move away from the world. “The world does x, y, and z, so we DO NOT do x, y, and z. That’s what makes us holy/moral.”
But we have to ask: Who is defining the “mark” that must be hit here? Is it Jesus?
Just because you are moving away from the world does not mean you are moving towards Jesus. In fact, to move away from the world almost always means you are moving further away from Jesus. In the Gospels Jesus is most often found in worldly, immoral places—with the sinners, tax collectors, and prostitutes.
This is the problem with moralistic thinking: it confuses morality with true holiness. True holiness is always a move towards Jesus, not merely a move away from the world.
Moralism attracts our attention to what it deems to be immorality (for many of us we have heard things like: smoking, drinking, dancing, the clothes you wear, going to the movie theater, etc.) But precisely by focusing our attention on these things, it hides the deeper sins of pride, greed, and self-righteousness.
Bonhoeffer calls this a “sick holiness.” “Sick holiness” is holiness defined by our own moral standards. We need to be cured from that deadly disease. Sick holiness might follow every letter of the law of God, but it ends up blocking the flow of God’s life and love to ourselves and our neighbors.
“All Sins Are Equal”
Right at the heart of “sick holiness” is something most of us have been taught about sin: “All sins are the equal before God.”
Intuitively we all know this isn’t true, but it takes some work to unpack. We’ve often made things that are not sinful out to be terribly sinful because of our moral systems (think of the catalogue of vices you’ve heard). But because we’ve said that all sins are equal we’ve made “minor sins” out to be “major sins,” which end up ignoring our deeper problems.
Not all sins are equal. They don’t all have the same consequences in our lives or in the lives of others. Some things we have done are deeply wounding and have caused tremendous havoc in the lives of our neighbors. But there are also things we have done that were wrong, but did not have the same catastrophic effects.
Scripture often talks about “sinning against God.” And we are called to confess our sins “against God and our neighbor.” But if sin is the harm we do to our neighbors, what does it actually mean to “sin against God”?
Is it that we can divide our sins up into two categories? Some of our sins are against God and others are against our neighbors? I don’t think so.
Theologically I think we have to say that our sins are never violating or harming God. God cannot be harmed by what we do. Our sins do not block the flow of God’s love and life that he has in himself. We actually cannot trespass against God directly. But we can violate his will by violating our neighbors.
The damage our sins do is not to God, but to ourselves and to our neighbors. All of our sins are against our neighbors and in that way they are ultimately against God.
But it also isn’t true that our sins are only against our neighbors. To sin against our neighbor is to sin against God. Why? Because of Jesus. Jesus is God who has become your neighbor. God and neighbor are held together in him—in one person!
As Jesus says to Paul on the road to Damascus, “Why are you persecuting me?” What we do to anyone we do to him. Jesus takes our sins against our neighbors personally. Every sin—no matter who it is against—is a sin against Jesus. If I sin against you, I am not merely breaking God’s laws, I am wronging you “in Christ.”
Thinking of sin as merely breaking God’s laws can hide this deep truth from us. The question always has to be: What wrong have I done to my neighbor? How have I blocked the flow of God’s life to them? How have I made it harder for them to trust in the goodness of God and to believe in God?
When we think of all sins as being equal, we can easily become blind to the harm we’ve done to others because our attention is in the wrong place.
Here’s an example. Why is harmful and abusive speech sinful? Because it transgresses God’s law? Yes, but the reason runs deeper. The reason abusive speech is sinful is not that it breaks God’s law (as if there were a list of words you cannot say because God has forbidden them), but that it makes it harder for our neighbors to receive the love God has for them.
There is a sense in which it is true that all sins are breaking God’s laws. But even Scripture witnesses to the fact that not all sins are equal. In the Old Testament there are some sins that require stoning, but others don’t. The severity is different. In the New Testament Paul says that a man’s sins requires him to be excluded from the community of believers, but not all sins require this.
When we say that “all sins are equal” what we are really doing is individualizing sin and reducing it to be only about me and God, all the while ignoring the harm we’ve done to others, which is the actual problem. And there are different degrees of harm we can cause to other people.
Think of a sliding scale, a spectrum running from “bumping into our neighbors” to “wounding our neighbors” all the way to “violating our neighbors.
Bumping into our neighbors just happens sometimes. And it isn’t always sinful. These are the ways in which we have been impolite or inconsiderate in a moment. Perhaps we have spoken to someone in the wrong tone of voice or not given someone our full attention. Or maybe we’ve offended someone because something we’ve done doesn’t fit within their understanding of morality. These things are not inherently sinful. I think we can place “vices” here, as well. It isn’t that these things are insignificant. They often can reveal a deeper problem within us. But moralism wants to focus our attention only here, on how we “bump” into others and inconvenience them.
Think of the garden hose analogy again. More often than not, “bumping” into others does not block the flow of God’s life and love to them. It’s more of an annoyance.
“Wounding” others is a different story. We wound others when we fail to show the love of Christ to the people around us. Usually we “wound” others by the things we have left “undone.” Wounds are not annoyances. They take special care and attention to be healed.
But then there is “violating” our neighbors. These are the ways we’ve sinned against others in high-handed ways. We’ve traumatized them. We’ve completely kinked the hose. We’ve made it almost impossible for them to receive God’s love. These are the ways we’ve marred their understanding of who God is. When we “violate” others we put them in critical condition. What they need is an E.R. in order to be healed.
But question always has to be this: Am I blocking the flow of God’s love and life to them? Am I making it harder for them to believe in God, to trust that he is good, to truly know who he is?
Moralism wants to keep us blind to the ways we’ve “wounded” and “violated” others. It keeps our attention firmly focused on our implolite behaviors, our vices, things that we can manage, so that we become self-righteous.
This is where the deepest danger of sin lurks. Pastors and teachers the most susceptible to wounding/violating others because of how we’ve spoken of God, the ways we’ve imaged him for others can be deeply traumatizing.
Parents are also very susceptible to this in their relationship with their children. We can become so concerned with how well-behaved our children are, that we deal with them in ways that mars their view of who God actually is. In our efforts to “fix” their behavior, we may be sinning against them in far deeper ways.
Obviously it isn’t only true of pastors and parents. We all become susceptible to this in the ways we talk to our neighbors—our coworkers and family members.
We can be so concerned with moralism, with “fixing” moral behavior, that we make it harder for them to truly know God.
But at its heart sin is anything I do or fail to do to love others with the love of Jesus. Every person I meet, everyone I think about, I am called to love them with the full love of Christ. To unclog the flow.
When we start to understand sin in this way most of us will see that we hardly take a breath without sinning. And all we can do is throw ourselves on the love and mercy of Christ.
But the promise of the gospel is that his love never stops flowing—even to us moralists trapped in our moralisms.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cameroncombs.substack.com
