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As we come to Genesis 3, we come to one of the most distinctive and controversial teachings of the Bible: namely, sin. It is surprising how deeply our society misunderstands and/or rejects the doctrine of sin. Surprising because we see sin all around us. I would like to say I hope you enjoy this episode, but the necessity of sin is not enjoyable, even though the Bible speaks of it’s fleeting pleasures.
Yours,
Phillip
Phillip: Hello and welcome to Two Ways News. I'm Phillip Jensen, here with Peter Jensen, and before our topic today, we have some feedback to respond to.
Peter: We appreciate it; it's interesting.
Phillip: Jim has written to us saying, “Can ‘the image of God’ be translated ‘the image from God’?” That’s an interesting question to posit, and I’ve got to admit, I’ve never thought about it before. New translations can be discomforting. You think, ‘That can't be right!’ That might be the knee-jerk reaction, especially to a phrase as well known as ‘the image of God.’ But just because it's uncomfortable doesn't mean we should reject it out of hand. Just because you don't see it in any of your Bible translations doesn't mean you should reject it either.
So, I looked it up, checking the Hebrew and the Greek. The Hebrew preposition can be used in all kinds of ways, so it's possible. But there are also discussions of this in different commentaries and books: for example, the book, In the Beginning by Henry Blocher,1 which is very helpful. The commentary in the Word Biblical Commentary series also sets out three problems with this phrase that have been discussed over the centuries, and one of the problems is the actual translation of it. But it points out that the parallelism between ‘in the image’ and ‘in the likeness’ is too strong to ignore the meanings thereof. Also, the meaning of a particular preposition is not as important as the context and the words themselves; the very words ‘image’ and ‘likeness’ must imply something else. It's not 'from the image': you'd still have to say, 'the image of what?' These words require an ‘of what’ at the end of it. You've got to say, ‘The image of God’ comes from God, because God is the one who creates us. This made me think of the Nicene Creed about Jesus, who is God from God. It must be the image of something, so you go to the Greek New Testament, and the same thing is there: for example, the coin which has the image of Caesar.
So we thank Jim for the question, but I can't see whether that's a good translation, and he didn’t give any evidence for the translation; he just asked the question. So, if you've got particular reasons for thinking it is a good translation, please tell us. The other thing is, I don't know the consequences of it. If we did change it to ‘the image from God,’ how does that help us in our understanding? Accuracy is important, but I'll stay with the old translation, and thank you, Jim, because it made me read my Bible again.
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I want us to talk now about a bigger issue, that is, the subject of sin and judgement. We're on chapter 3 of Genesis, and sin and judgement continue in our world. Rutger Bregman has written a book titled Humankind.2
Humankind argues for the goodness of humanity, and I agree you do need to see that humans do good things. Bregman is saying that humankind is like that, and he contrasts Rousseau and Hobbes: Rousseau the optimist, Hobbes the pessimist. Rousseau argues that the world is made up of good people, but the institutions are corrupted, while Hobbes says that people are corrupted and wicked in their nature. Bregman argues for the optimistic perspective of Rousseau. For those who don't like philosophy or names of people from the past, the illustration he gives very strongly is that of Lord of the Flies.3 Peter, what’s the story?
Peter: In Lord of the Flies, a group of young lads are cast away on an island. It reveals that these boys become corrupt, and their behaviour towards each other is terrible. They have brought sin with them, in other words.
Phillip: It’s a great novel of sin. They are English schoolboys, let it be said. But what Mr. Bregman says is that in the 1960s, something like this really happened. So, we've got an experiment. Rather than a fictional novel, a group of castaways: Tongan boys who borrowed a boat, went out to sea, and were on an island for 18 months. When they were found on the island, they were living in harmony and civilization, being kind to each other, and working together well. Bregman argues that, while you may think that people are sinful, these real boys were not sinful.
However, they were not English boys; they were Tongans who knew how to live on an island. When they arrived, they held a prayer meeting, and they organised prayer each day because they were Christian boys. The parallel fails at a couple of very critical points. Firstly, they knew how to live on an island, which the English boys didn't. Secondly, unlike English schoolboys, they believed in Christ because they were Tongans raised in a Christian culture. But what about sin?
Do we believe Rousseau or Hobbes?
Peter: I find it hard to imagine that people believe Rousseau was correct. That’s probably a majority view, but given the experience of humankind, we repeatedly fail each other. We do it spontaneously. I'm a pessimist, so I am with Hobbes, but this is what makes the Bible such a great book. It looks straight at humankind, at human weakness; it sees human sin, and it names it. Sin is one of the greatest themes of the Bible. What would you say is the essence of sin?
Phillip: Well, let's turn to Genesis 3:1-7
Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the LORD God had made.
He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’” But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.
The essence of sin is rebellion against God. It's very specific that it's not just the tree of knowledge; it's the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and that if you eat it, you will know good and evil like God knows good and evil. It's the one thing God said not to do: to become those who are the moral arbitrators of good and evil. That's God's prerogative, which he has retained for himself for our good, because if we can determine good and evil, well, the first thing Adam and Eve see is that they're naked. The first thing they have to do is hide and cover themselves, so it's the revolt against God. It's the pride of becoming like God. They were created in the image of God, but now they become like God in a way that is not God.
I did a philosophy course at New South Wales University, and a lecturer there very proudly declared that he could solve the problem of sin in the world today. He said, “It's simple: get rid of God and you'll get rid of sin.” He understood that sin is not just breaking rules; sin is rebelling against God. The class all cheered and laughed, but I still don't think they understood sin. He did, but they didn't. Sin has to do with rebelling against God by becoming God. It's more about being a lawmaker than a lawbreaker.
Peter: You used the word ‘pride’: what's the distinction between the word ‘pride’ and the word ‘conceit’? Can you be proud and yet not conceited?
Phillip: It will always point to self-centeredness. When I'm proud, I'm not proud of you. I'm proud of myself. It's always about the self. That’s part of why sin is pride, because it's about self. Autonomy is a wonderful word to describe it. ‘Auto’ means ‘self,’ and ‘nomos’ means ‘law.’ It means, ‘I am the boss of me.’ That is the nature of it.
Peter: I would have thought conceited may be regarded as a product of pride. ‘Conceit’ is a word we often use of people who are proud of themselves and strut around, showing off. However, you may not do that, but you may still be deeply proud; that is, you may refuse to trust God. That's pride.
Phillip: It is pride, and it's fascinating that in the 21st century being proud of yourself is positive, whereas in previous centuries pride was seen as negative, and being humble was positive. But any number of articles, courses, and programmes teach you pride. There are other words like it, though: hubris and arrogance. Arrogance has the sense of not knowing how wrong your self-estimate is. It's got a certain element of ignorance to it, but it is that sense that I can run my life by myself.
Peter: And it's vis-a-vis God in particular; it's not just against other people. We may be proud in connection to other people, but the essence of sin is pride, namely our unwillingness to trust in God and to serve him.
Phillip: That’s the good that is said to be pride today. That is, when a person says, ‘I'm really proud,’ they're not saying, ‘I'm proud compared to you.’
Peter: You’re well on the way to answering the next question I have: how universal is pride, and how profound is it in the human being? It sounds as though it is deep within us.
Phillip: I suspect it is more widely spread amongst the successful in this world. If you are living in a world where you are beaten all the time, the sense of pride is beaten out of you by the failures that you are constantly being reminded of.
Peter: But are you more likely to turn to God?
Phillip: Yes.
Peter: Not necessarily. You could be filled with anger.
Phillip: There are other issues, though, but Jesus talks about how hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven. Why does he pick on the rich? There is a sense in which it is harder for the rich. In Australia, and the Western world generally, the hardness towards the gospel is greatest amongst the moral, the self-righteous, and those who succeed in life on their own basis and feel so comfortable with their own standards that they feel confident that they live up to them.
Peter: Yes, but don't confuse two things. You can have pride in your success, but there's also moral pride, which you're referring to. Maybe rich people have that, but it may be that you are not particularly wealthy. The Pharisees may not have been particularly wealthy, but their whole attitude to the law of God and who they thought they were was pride, and even though they thought of God, pride was at the essence of their moralism. In today's world, we have folks who are intensely moralistic, saying, ‘I'm right, you're wrong.’
Phillip: I take your point; it's a good one in saying riches are one thing and morality is another thing. Both have self at the centre. Most rich people think that they're rich by their own efforts, but we're rich because we live in a wealthy country. There are all kinds of reasons why we're rich, but it’s self-satisfaction. But the moralist kind of pride is closer to what is being said. That is, the lawmaker is actually the outlaw. We tend to think that outlaws are worse than criminals or people who break the law. In America they have a sovereign citizen group who claim they have no obligations to keep the laws of America because they are the sovereign citizens themselves. They can choose whether they do or do not obey a policeman, and they won't acknowledge the authority of the police, or courts, or anybody.
Prince Leonard in Western Australia didn't like the taxation system, so he declared his property as a separate kingdom and appointed himself as a prince. That's the essence of sin in the rejection of the government over you, but it's really the rejection of God over you.
Peter: But it’s not just rejecting the government that is pride. It exposes pride, which is rebellion in your home; it is all around us; it is the ordinary people who say no to God.
Phillip: Yes, but the way they say it most commonly is satisfaction with their own morality. The decision to live my life my way. Prince Leonard was great fun and entertaining for many of us. But the person living next door to me who says….
Peter: I am the captain of my fate; I am the master of my soul.
Phillip: Yes, that captures who they think they are. To be like that, you actually are not under the law; you're over the law. You're an outlaw in that you're no longer under the law, but you are judging the law of God as not adequate for you; you're choosing your way of life.
Peter: That's a very funny thing to say about the Pharisees in the New Testament, for they had God's law, and they believed they were under God's law. Is it right to include them in the list of those outlaws?
Phillip: Yes, because what they did was to reconstruct God's law to fulfil what they wanted.
Peter: Let’s move the focus onto the immediate and ongoing consequences of sin. Sin is the great anthropological disaster. It distorts the image of God. Yes, we are still image-bearers, but our image-bearing is now distorted. We do not do what the image-bearers are meant to do, except the government of God, but use the powers that we have in doing ill.
Phillip: What do you mean by anthropological?
Peter: ‘Anthropological’ is a word I use these days, particularly to describe the doctrine of humanity, our anthropology. Not the subject we study at university, but the whole question of, as Psalm 8:4 says, “What is man, that you are mindful of him?” Who are we?
Phillip: Is it like identity?
Peter: Identity arises from something deeper. You can't make a full description of humanity without acknowledging, recognizing, and making allowance for sin in each individual. Let me illustrate: is sin ever mentioned in university subjects, particularly those subjects that are discussions of who human beings are? In social work, do people talk about sin? This is not a subject that should be alien from such a discipline. Otherwise, you get a sort of reductionism. The question, ‘Who are we?’ can't be properly answered without thinking about the impact of sin.
The disaster I mentioned is something like the growth of the internet. My understanding is that those who had much to do with the invention of the internet did so in the belief that it would change our lives forever. It has indeed changed our lives forever and been so much for the good. But that was an assumption that human beings are good and won't abuse this new technological brilliance. The Tower of Babel tells us something different, namely that yes, we do advance, and we do make great inventions and discoveries, but at the same time, it's like baking a cake with dirty hands. Inherent in what we do is sin. The internet is both absolutely wonderful and is used for absolutely evil ends.
Phillip: You're quite right; even now, one of the main uses of the web is pornography, which is a dreadful thing. What about education? What's the consequence of a doctrine of sin for education?
Peter: Part of this is to do the intellectual discipline of asking this question about all the disciplines you teach: ‘What impact does the Christian doctrine of sin have on this?’ All the disciplines are anthropological. They put human beings at the centre. But human beings are perennial failures. You see this in the area of scientific discoveries, which can be astonishing and wonderful. However, at the same time, that which is so wonderful an exploit by human beings is shot through with sin. People twist the facts, publish things that aren't true, or do things for money's sake and hide the truth of what they've discovered so that they can exploit them for their own ends. Therefore, you need to think, as you begin this great work, of the potential impact of human sin on the examination of the natural world and how it can be best taken account of.
Phillip: It wasn't until my fourth year at university, when I was studying sociology, that I finally tumbled to the fact that Christianity was excluded from the humanities by definition, a priori. The understanding of society being taught in my whole education process failed to take into account what is basic and obvious about humans, namely our corruption. Rousseau was not right, yet he was taught to me all the way through my education. But in that fourth year I tumbled to it and confronted the professor. He agreed, but he said I was wrong because he was a humanist.
Peter: To study history without recognizing and even naming human sin is not to give the whole picture, which you are allegedly giving.
Phillip: I can't remember ever studying in the humanities and sociology or being given a lecture or a class on the universality of telling lies. It's extraordinary to study humans without ever studying telling lies, which is one of the very few undisputable universals about humans.
Let's go to the subject of judgement. Sin has consequences; their eyes are open, and they see they're naked. But the judgement of God comes with God covering them up too.
Peter: Yes, people wonder how God's judgement and kindness can be reconciled. God is, to use the technical word, ‘simple.’ That is to say, he is not in conflict within himself in any way. So God's judgement is an expression of his love. If we were not loved, we could be cast aside. But no, God loves us. That is why justice comes into the world. But notice that he clothes them as an exhibition of both his judgement and his kindness. It's teaching us from the very beginning not to think of judgement as somehow antithetical to God's character of love.
Phillip: I've got two different issues I want to follow up on. I'm not sure I agree with you about God being ‘simple.’ But the other issue you’ve already raised is a much bigger, more important topic. The prohibition about eating and the judgement God inflicts upon those who have rebelled against him are indeed his love and goodness. Before that, let me mention God being ‘simple.’ You say God is simple and is not in conflict with himself. However, it does grieve him to have made man in his sinfulness in chapter 6. Further, in Hosea, the love of God is breaking God's heart. Also there is that conflict within himself when it comes to the cross. Jesus doesn't want to die, and yet he's accepting God's will for his life. So, God's a little bit more complex than ‘simple.’
Peter: ‘Simple’ is a technical, theological word. It contains the truth. It doesn't mean he is simplistic. As we see from the doctrine of the Trinity, for example. God is not us. But on the other hand, nor is God in contradiction with himself.
Phillip: Not contradiction, but there can be conflict without contradiction, can't there?
Peter: That raises another whole issue of how he has revealed himself to us, but there can be.
Phillip: Let's move to the more important issue that comes up here. That is the love of God punishing people. How do you put those together?
Peter: We fear justice, in a sense, until we call for justice. We want justice: a just universe, a just society. It is an exhibition of the goodness of a government that it provides justice. All the more so then in God, for God is just. That means that he holds people to account. Thank God for that. We want that to be the case until we suddenly discover that we are those who should be held to account.
Phillip: Surely, God would include people and respect them in their choices. Isn't that the goodness of today?
Peter: I’m saying that because we're not animals, in that sense, we are image bearers of God. Thus, yes, it is out of his sheer respect and love for us that justice will come. He allows us to make those decisions. We make them, but we make them knowing within ourselves that there is justice at the other end. That is what we long for, and that's what will happen.
Phillip: When I hear people speaking in terms of inclusiveness and respecting other people's moral judgements, they're not generally including Adolf Hitler.
Peter: Those terms are very unhelpful.
Phillip: They are emotive, rather than truthful.
Peter: Yes, and they are shed the minute we need justice. Because justice is good. I always say that the first duty of any government is to provide justice, more even than education or things like that. Because without justice, you cannot have a community that works.
Phillip: It's like having forgiveness without atonement. Forgiveness without a price being paid is acceptance of sin.
Peter: That's why we think forgiveness is simple in a way, but it's not. Because when you forgive someone, you are actually bearing the cost yourself. The person who forgives you is the person who gives up their right to take vengeance and says, ‘I will bear that cost.’ So there's always justice in forgiveness, but it is a justice that has moved to the person forgiving.
Phillip: But forgiveness is not the same as acceptance.
Peter: No, I would use the word 'reconciliation.' You can forgive someone, even someone who's now dead. You can forgive someone, but it may not mean there will be reconciliation. That requires other things, such as repentance, which is not the same thing as remorse. That requires a repentance that is genuine. There's a lot to be thought about here, and perhaps we ought to do it sometime.
Phillip: Yes, because it's more than repentance. One of the differences between Islam and Christianity is that Islam sees repentance as a good act that pays for the sin.
Peter: That's not the biblical account of repentance, which is turning back to God, embracing, and trusting him. Say there's some terrible thing that's happened between two human beings: the person who's the victim is bound to forgive, but the reconciliation is not mandatory. Reconciliation follows from that, if the other person is repentant. Repentance involves, for example, not making any demand that there will be reconciliation. It's the acceptance of the forgiveness, but there is no demand that you will be reinstated to the position you once occupied.
Phillip: Reconciliation could be that. Repentance could be acceptance of the judgement rather than the forgiveness. The reconciliation is going to require a price to be paid, either by the victim or by the perpetrator. That's why the cross is so important in our understanding of how God in Christ Jesus was reconciling the world to himself, because he was paying the price for us. So death, the death of the Lord Jesus Christ, lies at the heart of judgement as well as salvation. We speak of sin and of judgement in Genesis. This is necessary background to understand what Christ was doing on the cross. Changing the formula there in Genesis into acceptance, into inclusiveness, or into God's love without justice, or removing judgement, or even removing sin, makes the cross and resurrection of Jesus meaningless. This is really important in terms of our general education, that we have these great truths of Genesis for people to hear and understand the gospel. But I don't think we've talked about death properly, because what God said in Genesis 2 is, “The day you eat of it, you will surely die.”
Peter: And they didn't die.
Phillip: Well, did they?
Peter: Why don't we discuss that next time?
Henri Blocher, In the Beginning: The Opening Chapters of Genesis (IVP, 1984)
Rutger Bregman, Humankind (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020)
William Goldman, Lord of the Flies (Palgrave Macmillan, 1986)
Scripture quotations are from The ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Links & Recommendations
For more on this topic, check out this talk from Campus Bible Study 1997 called The Bite that Shook the World.
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