Part 4: The Uniqueness of Christ and His Assessment of Humanity - Sin

As we ended our post yesterday, we closed with a passage from Hebrews 4 where we read that Christ can empathize with our humanity because He too experienced that humanity.  The other key portion of verse 15 is our topic for today.  The verse closes by stating, "...yet He did not sin."  An understanding of humanity's sin is the other key element that shows the uniqueness of Christ and His assessment of humanity.

Sin is an antiquated word to many people.  It can be viewed as overly-pious, an attempt to spiritualize everything.  And yet it seems that we cannot escape the usefulness of this word.  Sin is often described as transgression, wrongdoing, making a mistake.  But these terms fail to address to egregious nature of sin.  One can make a mistake (stating that 2+2 = 5 is a mistake) and yet not sin.  It is true that sin is a transgression of God's higher moral law, but it is also more than this.  Biblically, sin is not just an action (sins of commission) or a failure of action (sins of omission).  Sin is a state, often helpfully described as a disease that has infected humanity.  Sin is not just "doing wrong" - sin is the soul-level infection that causes us to do that wrong.

It seems to me that the very word sin brings about in people's minds a grander sense of malfeasance than just "messing up", and thus we are careful to use it, most often simply avoiding it.  It is perhaps the most contentious concept used to describe humanity, but also one that is the most clear to see.  For this reason we cannot eliminate it from our vocabulary.  Just as we find times to use the word 'evil' instead of 'doing wrong' (the tragedy of 9/11 being such a situation - the word 'evil' was used to describe the heart of those who carried out those heinous acts), we find that sin describes a wrong-doing or a state more effectively than other words in our vocabulary.

Christ understood the nature of humanity, both the grandness and its failure.  In His interaction with a Jewish leader named Nicodemus, He stated that to enter the Kingdom of God, one must not merely do good works, but one had to be born-again - given a new internal compass that would guide us toward the good (John 3). As He spoke with the Pharisees in Matthew 23, He warned against the idea of looking righteous on the outside while still be plagued by sin within.  In Matthew 7, Jesus tells His listeners that good fruit (actions) come from a good tree (source), and that if the internal reality of a tree has been corrupted, it cannot bear good fruit.  Over and over in the Gospels, Jesus describes the need of human beings as not a set of more specific rules to follow, but instead He describes the need for a heart-transformation.  And He speaks this way because He saw the power of sin in people's lives.

This aspect of Christianity is not one of the more popular propositions.  But if we are to consider Christ, we have to consider how He described humanity - as both grand and fallen, as in need of acceptance, but also in need to forgiveness and transformation in the soul.  Christ alone, when contrasted with other world religions, give this pin-point precise analysis of the human state, an analysis that aligns with what we have seen in others and what we have experienced in our own lives as well.  He does not write-off sin as an illusion, nor does He say it is deal with by simply working harder at being more.  The serious disease of sin could only be rectified at the atonement on The Cross.    

Tomorrow, we will address the uniqueness of Christ's atonement, a place where we find the collision of His understanding of our need for acceptance, our deep sin nature, and the justice of God.

-tC