Sin is the usage of a gift that God wove into his creation to point to his glory in a way that the Creator never intended.
That’s how God’s good gift of relaxation degenerates into vacations that end in frustration because they fall short of our self-centered expectations. That’s how God’s gifts of food and drink are perverted into pathways to gluttony and addiction; it’s how sex becomes twisted into pornography and fornication and homosexuality; the natural world is distorted into an economic resource to be exploited without regard for human communities or the beauty of God’s creation, and on and on it goes.
“I Just Wanna Be God”
Each time we misuse one of these gifts from God, we declare that we are the lords of the universe and God is not. This is a form of cosmic treason, a collective thumbing of our noses at the Lord and Ruler of all. And the one thing God cannot do in response to this treason is nothing. Shock rocker Alice Cooper clearly described what each sin declares when he sang:
“I’m in control,
I got a bulletproof soul,
and I’m full of self-esteem. …
Ain’t gonna spend my life being no one’s fool.
I was born to rock and I was born to rule.
I really want to build my statue tall.
That’s all! …
I just wanna be God.”
That’s not just what this character in Alice Cooper’s song wants. Deep inside, it’s what we all want—to be our own god.
The penalty for this treason is death (Genesis 2:17; Ezekiel 20:21-26; Romans 6:23)—and not just the death of our bodies. The rightful penalty for our rebellion is the infinite agony of spiritual death (Revelation 20:13-15). “God’s righteousness requires that the sins we have committed against his infinite mercy be punished with both temporal and eternal punishments, of soul as well as body,” the pastors at the seventeenth-century Synod of Dort declared. “We cannot escape these punishments unless satisfaction is given to God’s righteousness.”
The only way to satisfy God’s righteousness is…continue reading here.