The Effects of Sin
We’ve been thinking together about what it means to be human—what it means to be made in God’s image. In the first three lessons we looked at three different takes on what it means to be made in God’s image, and in a recent discussion video, we looked at how together these views give us a fuller picture of what it means to bear God’s image.
By the end of day 6, God looks at his creation, and announces that it is very good. Humanity is given pride of place as the final step and climax of his creation, and is given the job of ruling over and caring for his creation. But things didn’t stay very good. In Genesis 3, the man and the woman placed in the garden of Eden take from the tree God told them not to, grasping for the knowledge and wisdom God wanted to cultivate in them in his own time and in his own way. A rift was created between God and humanity, and they were banished from his presence. A rift was also created between the humans themselves: when confronted by God, their first instinct is to throw each other under the bus. And, although God hadn’t given up on his plans to extend his blessing and rule over all of creation, expanding the borders of the order and abundance of the garden of Eden to encompass the whole world, we have to admit that for most of the Bible story all of humanity, even God’s chosen people seem to spend a lot of time doing exactly the opposite.
We see, then, that for all three of the views of being made in God’s image, damage has been done. And the Bible has a word for this: sin. Sin is a failure to reflect God’s image as we ought. In other words, sin, both theologically and philosophically, is the failure to be truly human. That’s how we’ll divide it up: theologically, we’ll see that we become what we worship; and philosophically, that we become what we want.
We become what we worship
Psalm 115 gives a comparison between Yahweh and the gods of the other nations:
Not to us, Lord, not to us
but to your name be the glory,
because of your love and faithfulness.
Why do the nations say,
“Where is their God?”
Our God is in heaven;
he does whatever pleases him.
But their idols are silver and gold,
made by human hands.
They have mouths, but cannot speak,
eyes, but cannot see.
They have ears, but cannot hear,
noses, but cannot smell.
They have hands, but cannot feel,
feet, but cannot walk,
nor can they utter a sound with their throats (vv. 1–7).
The gods of the other nations, it seems, are no gods at all; they’re just idols—“silver and gold, made by human hands” (v. 4), inanimate objects, completely unable to do anything. We find similar pictures in Isaiah, where you have someone who cuts down a tree, and uses half of the wood to make an idol for himself, and the other to make a fire to cook his food, the point of course being how ridiculous this is, and that the Israelites mustn’t copy them (Isa. 44:12–23).
Now, even at this point this would have been quite a thing to say. The nation of Israel was actually very unusual for not having any sort of representation of their god. In Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5 they were, of course, explicitly told not to make any sort of idol (Ex. 20:4–5; Deut. 5:8–10). But, as one writer explains: “In the world of the ancient Near East, where the gods of the nations were depicted with human and/or animallike images, a God who had no physical image was difficult to comprehend or embrace.”
But the real blow comes in Psalm 115:8: “Those who make them will be like them, and so will all who trust in them.” Greg Beale writes: “if we worship idols, we will become like the idols, and that likeness will ruin us.”
Although it’s a bit more subtle, the same thing can be seen Israel’s prime example of idolatry, the golden calf in Exodus 32: the Israelites get sick of waiting for Moses to come back from his meeting with God up Mount Sinai, and decide to make a representation of God for themselves. But, having done so, look at the way they’re portrayed: they’re called “stiff necked” (v. 9), they were “left to run wild” (v. 25), and apparently needed to be brought in again (v. 26) so that Moses could lead them where God wanted them to go (v. 34). He’s talking about the Israelites like they’re animals. Again, quoting Greg Beale: “Sinful Israel [is] mocked by being depicted metaphorically as rebellious cows running wild and needing to be regathered because it had become as spiritually lifeless as the calf that it was worshipping.”
But it goes both ways: if idol worshippers become as blind and deaf as the logs they bow down to, the reverse is true of those who worship Yahweh. In Psalm 103:6 we read: “The Lord works righteousness and justice for all the oppressed”—but that’s just how those who worship Yahweh are portrayed in Psalm 106:3: “Blessed are those who act justly, who always do what is right” (see also v. 2). In fact, imitating God is something that was expected of God’s people. The Israelites are called to care for the poor, not take bribes, to care for the vulnerable and the foreigner, and to treat their slaves well (Ex. 23:1–9; Lev. 19:34) because that’s how God is, and that’s how God has treated them (Deut. 10:17–18; 15:12–15).
And at a more fundamental level, we can spell it out in terms of how we reflect God’s image in our vocation: instead of reflecting God’s image by ruling over creation, we set up man-made idols and allow ourselves to be ruled by creation. This explains the oddity we saw earlier: the Israelites were very unusual for not having image representations of their god. But the reason they didn’t need images of their god was because they were supposed to be images of their god.
We see the same thing in Romans 1. In Romans 1–3, Paul mounts a lengthy case that all are under sin, Jew and Gentile alike. In 1:21–25 we’re shown the root of the problem: they “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images [of creatures]” (v. 23), echoing Psalm 106:20: “They exchanged their glorious God for an image of a bull”—which is itself a reflection on the golden calf incident.
Echoes can be heard of Genesis 1–3 in the way the animals are listed, and the perversion of knowledge, which should probably make us think of a particular tree in the middle of the garden. One scholar explains it this way:
[M]an did not only exchange the worship of the true God for that of idols; he also exchanged intimate fellowship with God for an experience which was shadowy and remote, and he exchanged, too, his own reflection of the glory of God for the image of corruption. Paul… does not say that man ever lost the image of God—though… he regarded it as being almost effaced. The things which man did lose were the glory of God and the dominion over nature which were associated with that image; and he lost them when he forgot that he himself was the εἰκών θεοῦ and sought to find that εἰκών elsewhere.
This is also what Paul has in mind when he says in Romans 3:23 that we have “all sinned, and fall short of God’s glory”: sin is a failure to reflect God’s image as we ought; sin is the failure to be truly human.
We become what we want
The same thing can be seen if we look at what sin is philosophically: sin is to fail to be truly human. But before we can talk about that, we should first revisit what it means to succeed in being truly human. We’ll mainly be building on what we saw in lesson 1, where we looked at the substantive view of being made in God’s image.
In our first lesson, we saw that everything in the world around us is composed of form and matter: the form is what makes a thing to be the sort of thing it is, and that “form is functionally characterized. That is, form is defined by what form does.” A thing’s form isn’t determined simply by what it looks like, but by what we would expect that thing to do. And a good instance of that thing is one that does those things well. A house that provides shelter and protection is a good house; a house with a leaky roof is not. A squirrel that climbs trees well is a good squirrel; a squirrel that keeps up with the Kardashians is not.
The same, of course, is true of us—of humans. We saw in lesson 1 that the human form is a rational soul. So, while we might share some of the same functions and inclinations as other animals, what sets us apart is that these are “mediated through the rational intellect which is capable of forming judgments about what counts as good.” Not only does our nature incline us to some or other good; by virtue of the fact that we’re rational beings, we decide for ourselves what that good is. We only ever do something insofar as we think it’s good, at least in some way.
We can talk about this on two levels. We can talk about the good of individual actions, or we could talk about the overarching good of all of our actions—what Aquinas talks about as the ultimate end. When we talk about the good of individual actions, we can usually explain them in terms of some further good. I might decide to go for a run; why? To get fit. Why do I want to get fit? To be healthy. Why do I want to be healthy?—and we could keep going. Or I might decide to read a book. Why? To learn. Why? To be able to reason better about life, the universe, and everything—and, again, we could keep going. But in the end, “every act terminates in something done simply because it is good and for no further end. But this ultimate good, as we can call it, is simply the good that corresponds to the ultimate human activity of which every other activity is but an ingredient: the living of the human life in all its fullness.”
So, we only ever do something insofar as we think it’s good, and we do it because we think it’ll lead to our ultimate good, whatever we take that to be. But what we perceive to be good might not be what is actually good, which is what opens up the possibility for sin. As one scholar explains, we sin when “reason has presented a false good as if it were a true good.” He goes on: “Everyone naturally desires his ultimate good… When he is morally well ordered, a person identifies his overall good with the divine good”, which means that the “choice between the divine good and some creaturely substitute, is the fundamental choice between good and evil.” Sin, then, is when the (subjective) good we order ourselves to isn’t in line with the (objective) good set by God. Or, put differently, sin is an inordinate desire for a subordinate good.
We can talk about this on two levels, which Aquinas called “mortal sin” and “venial sin”, which are categories still used by the Roman Catholic church. The basic difference is an intuitive one, and one I think we can get on board with: mortal sin is a rejection of God as our ultimate end; venial sin is when we are still oriented towards God, but we act inconsistently with our ultimate end.
In either case, sin is an inordinate desire for a subordinate good. It’s a failure to act in accord with right reason, which, since we are rational beings by nature, is a failure to act in accordance with our nature. And it’s a failure to orient ourselves toward God, which puts a rift in our relationship, either in smaller ways, that don’t mean the end of our relationship with him, but nevertheless are offensive to him, or in bigger, ultimate ways, where we choose to reject him wholesale.
Conclusion
God didn’t leave us that way. In his son, God opened the way for redemption and restoration. He promises new life and a renewed relationship with him. Through Jesus we have hope that we can be truly human once more, and reflect God’s image in all its fullness. But the details of that are for another time. For now, what I hope has been clear is that sin, both theologically and philosophically, is the failure to be truly human.