Holiness, Sin and Forgiveness (Part 1)

Announcer: Welcome to Sword of the Spirit; Written and presented by Colin Dye, Senior Minister of Kensington Temple and leader of London City Church.  Sword of the Spirit is a dynamic teaching series equipping the believers of today to build the disciples of tomorrow.  We pray that you find these programs inspiring and a catalyst in deepening your knowledge of God, your relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ and your intimacy with the Holy Spirit.

Colin Dye: Hello and welcome to the Sword of the Spirit, a school of ministry in the Word and the Spirit and we’re beginning a new topic for this series, it’s called: “Salvation by Grace.”  And I’m so excited as we come to approach this teaching today because there’s nothing more I would rather talk about than the grace of God that He’s revealed to us through Jesus Christ His Son and our Lord.

The grace of God, that’s God’s unmerited favor, it’s the gift of Himself to us in our lives.  And it’s such a wonderful thing to know that we don’t have to anything to try to impress God, to please Him in order to be accepted by Him, no, we are accepted by Him through His grace and we receive this gift freely by faith.  Now of course once we have been saved by grace there’s nothing more we would rather do than please Him and so we please Him because we’ve been accepted by grace.  We don’t have to try to impress Him and convince Him to accept us; He has already given us the gift of His Son.  When Jesus died on the cross, He was the gift of God for all humanity and so we receive the gift of salvation by faith because God loves us and does show in His grace towards us.

Now in today’s program, we’re going to be looking at sin, holiness and forgiveness, you see, we need God’s grace because we’re all sinners and we can’t save ourselves.  And sin is something that we understand when we see the holiness of God, He’s a Consuming Fire but by His mercies we’re not consumed because of the forgiveness that’s available in Jesus Christ.  And I pray that as you watch today’s program, God will touch your life and you will experience more of His grace and you will understand what it is to receive the gift of forgiveness as a result of believing in Jesus Christ as your Lord and your Savior.

Hello and welcome to this session of the Sword of the Spirit series, we’re coming to the subject, “Salvation by Grace” and I’ve been looking forward to this subject in many ways, it’s the most important subject of all in the whole series.  I smile to myself because I say that practically of every single one of these manuals but really “Salvation by Grace,” brings us to the heart of God and to the very central part of His purpose for our lives which is to rescue us from a lost eternity, deliver us to Heaven for ever, to see His glory and it’s all by His grace.

Now we begin with that little English word, save, it’s a very common word; it’s used in so many different contexts in the English language.  It’s used of saving money, it’s used of saving goals in football, it’s used of saving fuel, of animals, paper, saving inner cities, saving your files on your computer, saving derelict buildings, saving drowning people and so it goes on.  Now while this word save is used in an amazingly wide range of different uses, its central meaning is clear, it means to preserve something to rescue it to reclaim it to deliver it from danger or to prevent it from falling into some kind of misuse.  Now when it comes to using this word in our Christian life, sometimes for some people the meaning seems to be less clear.  Most of us understand that being saved means being preserved being rescued or reclaimed being delivered or resuscitated but we’re not always so sure how this salvation happens or why it happens and what are its consequences in our human lives.

Now the basic idea of course is easy to grasp, God finds the lost, He gives life to the dead He cleanses the dirty He forgives the guilty He turns the defeated into victors He releases those who are in prison but the why the how and the what of salvation involve some very hard thinking.  And so in many ways, this manual “Salvation by Grace,” is one of the most demanding manuals.  It just stretched me as I’ve written it and prepared it and every time I come back to it, it stretches me still further and so I fully expect it to stretch you.

Now one of the reasons why people find the doctrine of salvation difficult, particularly when they try to study it in depth is because of the wide range of Bible words which are used to describe our salvation.  For example, atonement, covenant, election, glorification, judgment, justification, predestination, propitiation, redemption, regeneration, sanctification and the list goes on and on.  Now these words sound very technical to our ears today, in the original context of course they were ordinary words used in everyday language but today they’ve taken on a kind of technical field and so when we try to understand these words and to stretch our mind to see the why the what and the how of salvation we need to grasp what these words mean in their context.  We’ll be coming to them but I want to encourage you to begin with because this hard work is necessary if we don’t do this hard work if we don’t do this thoughtful, prayerful study then our focus will be taken off God’s central purpose in salvation and we will find ourselves to be much more man centered in our thinking than God focused which is the Biblical way.

Now, this series on the Sword of the Spirit has to do with the Word and the Spirit and I know that this is going to bless you spiritually but in this particularly topic especially salvation by grace I want you to learn to dig deep into the Word of God, to learn about salvation to discover God’s purpose for salvation and the nature of the death of Jesus Christ the means by which this salvation has been brought to us.  Now of course the whole goal of this study throughout this series is to bring you closer to God so that your knowledge of God would grow and you’d be prepared then for your ministry in your relationship with God and your ministry to other people.

And so my particular goal in writing this manual and teaching you today is that you would enter into a far better understanding of fallen human nature of the wonderful person and work of Jesus Christ and the way the cross dominates and unites the whole Bible from Genesis to Revelation.  But even more than understanding those technicalities of the doctrine of salvation I want you to be personally overwhelmed by the grace of God the infinite grace of God which has worked salvation at so much personal cost to Himself and that by the Holy Spirit you’ll be led to respond to this grace by living out your salvation in such a way that you will draw other people also into this grace.

Well that sounds like a great agenda, are you ready for it?  You can say amen you know that’s right, ok so we go now to the very first section, section number one, holiness, sin and forgiveness.  And I use the story of the Prodigal Son as my launching pad, we all know the story very, very well, it illustrates the Heavenly Father’s unconditional grace in saving undeserving sinners.  We’ll see a little bit more of this later but this is the key to everything, salvation is the story of God’s unconditional grace for undeserving sinners.  Now in the parable, the son’s repentance was not a precondition of the father’s gracious love, it wasn’t as if the son first has to change his lifestyle before the father accepted him, no, the father embraced him as he was.  He embraced his son still with the filthy rags of his dissolute living upon his shoulders, still with the stench of that pigsty upon his body.  The father embraced him as he was and in the father’s arms by the grace that was expressed there the son’s heart was melted and he discovered the reason for the changed life that the father was calling forth from him.

We must understand in this teaching about salvation by grace that forgiveness comes first.  God gives us unconditional forgiveness by the grace of God through the blood of Jesus Christ and it is that forgiveness that grace that begins to work in our lives so that we become more and more like Jesus.  Now, here we have therefore a gripping story of salvation, now some people look at the story of the Prodigal Son and say, “well, that’s a great story, God forgives us unconditionally, He just embraces us and accepts us as we are!”  And they say, “well what is the big deal that’s God’s glory but what is the big deal here?”  Particularly some people point out that in the parable of the lost son there is no mention of the cross and so they say, “well why can’t we think of salvation like that,” that God simply just says, “sins well forget them, there is nothing else that I have to do but just wipe the slate clean.”  Some people do not understand why divine forgiveness must depend on Christ’s death and they wonder why like the father seems to in this parable which when we see deeply didn’t actually do it that way but why Jesus why the Father doesn’t forgive us in exactly the same way without a costly sacrifice but the truth is there can be no real forgiveness without costly sacrifice.  This parable was told by Jesus who was on the way to the cross.  We must see it in the whole stream of the Bible’s teaching about salvation.  When we understand the broader teaching of the Scriptures we come to the realization that human sin is an immoveable object which is faced with the irresistible force of God’s holy wrath.  Let me say that again, I’m quoting directly from the manual and perhaps you need to underline that in the manual because it’s a very key statement, “human sin is an immovable object which is faced with the irresistible force of God’s holy wrath.”  Can you see the indication there because God is holy His wrath must be poured out upon sin but because we are sinners we are unable to remove our own sin so human sin is an immovable object which is to be faced with the irresistible force of God’s holy wrath.

This means that there is a harder question to ask, the easy question that people ask, “why does God need the cross to forgive us?”  The harder question is this, “how can God show His love by forgiving sinners without destroying His holiness, how can God show His holiness by punishing sin without at the same time abandoning His love?”  So we need to focus on the seriousness of our need for salvation, human sin.  Now, as so often in this series I dig deep into the Hebrew and the Greek words, that’s not to baffle you and bemuse you but it’s to open your understanding to the wonderful revelation of the Scriptures.  Now in the New Testament the Bible uses four Greek words for sin, you understand this in the original language, in the Greek language there are several words for sin and they’re usually translated sin or something similar in the English versions of the Bible.  But underneath that translation lie four main Greek words and although these words are largely synonymous and to some extent interchangeable yet they carry very important and vital shades of meaning, distinctive shades of meaning and when we put those shades of meaning together, the subtle and complex nature of sin is exposed.

Now all these words in general convey the idea of failing to match God’s perfect standard, that’s what sin is, a familiar to match God’s perfect standard.  And then these words describe the deeds and the attitudes which separate us from each other because sin separates human being from human being and then also separating us from God.  Let’s look at the first word, hamartia, hamartia, this is the most common word for sin, it’s sometimes used for outward sinful acts but it also commonly describes the inner state of sinfulness.  Here it is the irresistible inner moral power which controls us, that’s what sin is, it’s an irresistible inner moral power which controls us, taking us away from God.  The word hamartia actually depicts sin as missing a target or failing to attain a goal, falling short, missing a target and it points both to the inner disobedience which cannot say yes to God, sin cannot agree with God, sin cannot say yes to God and when sin has gripped the heart when hamartia is working on the inside of you there is nothing but sin that comes out of you.  That’s the bondage of sin, it’s that inner non-conformity to God’s standards and that deeply affects your relationship with a Holy God and until all our hamartia, all our sin is removed we are eternally alienated from Him.  Now I give you a long list in the manual of verses which use this word, hamartia, sin.  Then there’s another one, paraptōma, and this word translates so often in the English versions as trespass or offense.  It means a false step, a blunder a stumbling; falling away from what is true and right.  Paraptōma emphasizes here the faultless, careless nature of sin, stumbling, stumbling, careless, thoughtless nature of sin.  And so, we can speak of sin as a kind of careless act but this doesn’t mean that it’s an act that somehow gives you diminished responsibility because you didn’t really mean it, it was an accident.  It’s rather like the reckless driver that drives on the highway at a dangerous speed, not obeying the traffic signals, not obeying the traffic regulations and that kind of recklessness will eventually, inevitably lead to disaster and they can’t plead and say, “well it wasn’t my fault, it was an accident,” it was a kind of careless, reckless approach to driving.  And so sin is like that for us, it’s a careless, reckless approach to living.

Then there’s another word, parabasis, parabasis.  Here it stresses the willful deliberate side of sin, not like paraptōma which is the faultless side of sin; here is the willful thoughtful scheming calculated deliberate side of sin.  It means deliberately overstepping rather than carelessly stumbling and it’s a deliberate deviation from the true path it’s a premeditated, totally focused willful breaking of the law.  It’s translated as transgression in most versions of the Bible.  Let’s have just a couple of Scriptures which show this, here we have Romans chapter five, verses thirteen to fourteen, and here the Apostle Paul is describing sin for until the law, sin was in the world but sin is not imputed where there is no law, nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses even those who had not sinned according to the likeness of the transgression of Adam who is a type of Him who was to come.  This transgression of Adam, it was a deliberate breaking of a rule that God said, God said, “don’t eat of the fruit,” Adam knew what he was doing, he saw exactly what he was doing and he deliberately, willfully transgressed.  He knew the standard and he stepped over that standard.

Then another word, anomia, anomia, this means lawlessness, wickedness or iniquity and it refers to the opposite of whatever is right and good.  Lawlessness is therefore opposite to God, it is the opposite of God and so when we have Hebrews chapter one and verse nine, it’s speaking prophetically of the Lord Jesus Christ, “you have loved righteousness and hated wickedness, hated lawlessness therefore God your God has anointed you with the oil of gladness more than your companions.  So here it is, here we have the Lord Jesus Christ loving righteousness and hating wickedness.  So the whole thrust of this verse is that the Lord Jesus Christ fully embraces everything that is of God everything that is godly.  Therefore He hates everything that is against God everything that is ungodly and everything that is the opposite to God.  And so when we talk about sin it really is the opposite of everything that is good and everything that is God.

Now there are many other words used for sin, I’m gonna go through these quickly, there they are for you in the manual.  Adikia, unrighteousness or not being right, adikema, an iniquity, a misdeed or wrong doing, ponēria , a terrible wickedness or an evil.  Padonomia, law-breaking, afelema, indebtedness, that’s a very strong theme in the Scriptures, our debt to God, sin is indebtedness.  Iteon, fault or crime and so all these Greek words as you study them carefully show that sin is moving away from God’s ideal or these words imply an ideal other an objective standard which we fail to match or a boundary which we deliberately or casually cross.

Now the Bible assumes of course that it is God who established this ideal, God knows what is right and that, that sense of right, that knowledge of right comes from God’s own nature because God is holy and good, He is the One who is able to say what is holy and good and to define holiness and goodness.  This is not some standard outside of God that God has to match up to all coincidentally happens to match up to no, this standard comes out of God’s character, out of God’s nature and is determined by Him because He is who He is, the Holy God.

So, when God made humanity in His image, He also set for humanity His standards, God’s standards.  We see this so many times in Scripture, now the Bible teaches much about sin and whenever it speaks about sin it always stresses sin’s extreme, seriousness.  It shows that sin is a failure to love God with all our being and a refusal to acknowledge and obey Him as Creator and as Lord.  As created beings we are essentially dependant on God and sin therefore at its root, the essence of sin is our assertion against God, self-assertion, our unilateral declaration of independence against God saying, “Lord, I don’t depend on You, I’m my own boss, I go my own way, I depend on myself.”

In other words it is putting human kind in place of the divine being and therefore sin makes us implicitly hostile to God as Creator and Lord.  What are the two things that are the greatest challenges to the human race, the knowledge of God as Creator, that’s why scientist and people latch on to evolution though it’s a discredited theory because at least in their mind it explains where we came from, it’s not scientific but it explains something to them and it gives them satisfaction so they can escape from the conviction that comes to know when we know that we are created by God who is number two the Lord of our lives, so creation, the Creator and the lordship of God, these things are resisted with saying, “we don’t believe that God created us, He’s not our boss, we’re masters of our own destiny,”  And therefore this is essentially our active rebellion against God.

We must understand that sin is therefore primarily against God even though sin hurts other people, it is primarily God whom we offend.  This truth comes out in the story of David and Bathsheba, you know that David sinned against Bathsheba, he committed adultery with her, he sinned against Uriah because this was Uriah’s wife.  He sent Uriah and others with him to the front line of battle in order that they might be killed so he’d cover up his sin.  And in consequence also the baby that was born died so David sinned against Bathsheba, Uriah and he became a murderer and an adulterer sinning against these people.  He sinned against the nation of Israel because the whole of the nation suffered as a result of this.  O yes, that sin definitely had real horizontal effects but when the conviction of the Holy Ghost came upon him and we read about it in Psalm fifty-one and verse four, when that conviction came upon him he said, “against You Lord and You only have I sinned and done this evil in Your sight that You may be found just when You speak and blameless when You judge.”

So sin is primarily against God.  Now the Bible develops this understanding of sin as essentially effecting God by showing us that it is universal to all humanity, it effects all creation that God created.  It’s both internal and external and in fact the external actions of sin really come as a result of the internal operation of sin.  Sin dwells on the inside and because sin dwells on the inside, it effects what you do on the outside.  Understand this; it’s essential for your recognition of the Bible’s teaching of salvation by grace that you don’t become a sinner because you sin.  You sin because you are a sinner.  Put it another way, let’s use an illustration, a dog barks because it is a dog, the dog is not a dog because it barks, understand that.  I could bark but that doesn’t make me a dog, alright!  So what we’re talking about here is sin gripping the inner nature.  That inner nature that God created to be beautiful and wonderful, no wonder it affects God, He sees His beautiful creation disappear.

Salvation by grace, that’s what we’ve been talking about, I certainly have been blessed as I’ve given this teaching today and I pray that God will continue to bless you as you grow in the knowledge of His grace and so until next time, God bless you.

Recommended reading

Dye, Colin. Salvation by Grace
Kensington Temple, 2008