Soulbook: Will the Soul Be Punished for Sin? @Enwrightened

This is the twenty-third excerpt from Soulbook. Order Soulbook from Enwrightened Publications or Amazon.

Soulbook: Will the Soul Be Punished for Sin?

What if we were not punished for sin? Would the world be a better place or a worse place? Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov (1880), had one of his characters (Ivan) say that in the absence of God, everything is allowed. But, is that what we see in the world? Is sin punishable and how does the Soul relate and react to this punishment? Some people look at sin in the same way they see the eastern concept of karma. Karma basically goes by the adage of “what goes around, comes around.” In other words, if you wrong someone or commit a crime and are not caught or punished for it immediately, you will eventually suffer for it because karma is going to get you! But, is this an accurate picture of punishment? Is there basically just some great equalizer that ensures that people receive justice or is there something more?

The first question you have to get past before discovering if sin is punishable is: Does sin exist? French existential philosopher, Jean Paul Sartre, wrote: “Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself…. Nor, on the other hand, if God does not exist, are we provided with any values or commands that could legitimize our behavior.” If God does not exist, then neither does sin. Bertrand Russell wrote: “We feel that the man who brings widespread happiness at the expense of misery to himself is a better man than the man who brings unhappiness to others and happiness to himself. I do not know of any rational ground for this view, or, perhaps, for the somewhat more rational view that whatever the majority desires (called utilitarian hedonism) is preferable to what the minority desires. These are truly ethical problems, but I do not know of any way in which they can be solved, except by politics or war. All that I can find to say on this subject is that an ethical opinion can only be defended by an ethical axiom, but, if the axiom is not accepted, there is no way of reaching a rational conclusion.” There must be objective morality in order to call something “right” or “wrong”. In his book, Does God Exist?, A.E. Taylor wrote: “But it is an undeniable fact that men do not merely love and procreate, they also hold that there is a difference between right and wrong; there are things which they ought to do and other things which they ought not to do. Different groups of men, living under different conditions and in different ages, may disagree widely on the question whether a certain thing belongs to the first or the second of these classes. They may draw the line between right and wrong in a different place, but at least they all agree that there is such a line to be drawn.” Basically, everyone agrees that some things (murder, rape, child abuse) are objectively, morally wrong. Even the Gentiles, who had no written law, understood this. Paul wrote, in Romans 2:14-15: “For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves: which show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts meanwhile accusing or else excusing one another.” The natural order of our world and universe makes right and wrong obvious. There is no rational world in which sin/evil does not exist. As a result, one must conclude that sin will affect the soul adversely. But, what is this affect and how does it relate to the soul?

All of the answers to sin and punishment really culminate in Who makes the rules. Because of Who He is as Creator and because of what He has done by saving the souls of all people who accept the free gift of grace, God has the right to establish the moral/ethical laws that people are to follow, and to establish the punishment for any violation of those laws that might occur. Punishment for disobedience of this moral code, however, can take one of three forms—preventative, remedial, or retributive. Preventative punishment is a penalty to keep others from breaking God’s law (e.g., soldiers who refused to obey a lawful order from a superior officer being court-martialed). Preventative punishment was evident in the deaths of Ananias and Sapphira after they lied about their donation to the church (Acts 5; note verse 11: “And great fear came upon the whole church, and upon all who heard these things”). Remedial punishment is
intended as a penalty to incite improvement in the person being punished (e.g., a school child being forced to accomplish remedial work or summer school in order to be promoted to the next grade). Remedial punishment can be seen in passages like Hebrews 12:6-7, where the writer told the church: “For whom the Lord loves He punishes, and scourges every son whom He receives. It is for chastening that you endure; God deals with you as with sons; for what son is there whom his father does not punish?” Retributive punishment is a penalty that is deserved (e.g., a person being jailed for stealing or otherwise breaking the law). Paul, in referring to Leviticus 19:18 and Deuteronomy 32:35, reminded the first-century Christians who were undergoing severe persecution: “‘Vengeance is mine; I will repay,’ says the Lord” (Romans 12:19). The soul will receive punishment if the sin remains. Again, sin can only be removed by washing with Christ and can never be scrubbed away, wished away, prayed away, or burned away. The soul will notice preventative punishment from the experiences of others and will not wish to experience the same guilt and suffering. Our souls will occasionally go through remedial suffering while on Earth. This type of punishment, as most punishment, is an expression of God’s love for us. Parents use remedial and preventative punishment often to correct their children. This ensures that their children learn from their mistakes and grow up to be law abiding citizens. Of course, retributive punishment can be momentary on Earth or eternal. As souls of God, we must take this type of punishment very seriously.

God’s love is eternal and His judgments are just. Charles H. Spurgeon once said: “When men talk of a little hell, it is because they think they have only a little sin, and they believe in a little Savior. But when you get a great sense of sin, you want a great Savior, and feel that if you do not have Him, you will fall into a great destruction, and suffer a great punishment at the hands of the great God.” God’s love and justice are both infinite. Paul stated in Romans 5:10: “But God commends His own love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, being now justified by His blood, shall we be saved from the wrath of God through Him. For if, while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, being reconciled, shall we be saved by His life.” This is an expression of awesome, infinite, and almost incomprehensible love. It’s a love we may never fully understand until we see Him face to face. A great look into this love is seen on the cross, when Jesus said: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). God could not look upon His son due to sin. Jesus’ own soul was obscured by our sin and He took this burden for us. Christ suffered the wrath of God so that mankind would not have to endure that wrath. In the Garden of Gethsemane, as Peter drew his sword to defend his Lord, Jesus turned to him and asked: “The cup which the Father hath given me, shall I not drink it?” (John 18:11). The cup Jesus took for us will be poured out on our souls, obscuring us and separating us from God if we do not obey the Gospel. Ultimately, the soul who dies in sin suffers what we see in Hebrews 10:28-29: “Anyone who has set aside the law of Moses dies without mercy on the evidence of two or three witnesses. How much worse punishment, do you think, will be deserved by the one who has spurned the Son of God, and has profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has outraged the Spirit of grace?” I don’t know about you, but outraging the Spirit of grace sounds like a really bad idea. Why would someone want to do that and reject Jesus? What does the soul that does this look like, and how would it survive?

There is such a thing as evil, and sin obscures the soul from God. Like a window that is dirty, we cannot see God and He will not look upon us when we are in sin. There is a division there that causes us to be out of right standing with Him. It’s a division that only has one Cure. God makes the rules as Creator. Our image/soul is guided by these laws. Without the moral law by which we abide, the world and even the universe could not continue. Nothing would make sense. As there is law and order in us, there is law and order that God has established throughout His whole creation that makes right, right and wrong, wrong. His love and justice are infinite. Our souls are eternal in the context of His love. If we lose the connection between ourselves and God by living outside of Jesus, we are simply allowing ourselves to be disconnected from the Power that gives our souls life. Without this sustainment, we will lose our souls to eternal death. In the context of God’s love and Who He is, the word “punishment” really is not the word we should look for, since it indicates that God wants to make us hurt. God doesn’t want anyone to be punished or to hurt, especially eternally. But, God lets us have the choice to place ourselves in that position. It is an amazing expression of love, but it leaves us with a choice. God loves us and desires to be near us. We separate ourselves from Him by our sin. Jesus’ sacrifice makes our souls whole. If we make the choice to be near to God, we can be; and He will not let anything or anyone take that away. If we make the other choice, we must accept the consequences.

Soulbook: How Does Sin Relate to the Soul? @Enwrightened

This is the twenty-second excerpt from Soulbook. Order Soulbook from Enwrightened Publications or Amazon.

Soulbook: How Does Sin Relate to the Soul?

We are all made in the “in the image of God” (Genesis 1:26-27). Mankind was not created in the physical image of God, of course, because God, as a Spirit Being, has no physical image (John 4:24; Luke 24:39; Matthew 16:17). Rather, mankind was fashioned in the spiritual, rational, emotional, and volitional image of God (Ephesians 4:24; John 5:39-40; 7:17; Joshua 24:15; Isaiah 7:15). But, we all have sinned, starting with Adam and Eve. So, what does sin do to the soul or our “image”? After all, we bear God’s image in our souls and our souls, as well as our physical selves, have been affected by sin in some manner, but how? There are several ways our souls are sickened and poisoned by sin. Most of these are self-inflicted, but there are others, as well. Sin is, unfortunately, ubiquitous in the world today and has been since the fall of man.
By sin and through sin, we have been divided from God. Behold, Jehovah’s hand is not shortened that it cannot save; neither his ear heavy that it cannot hear: but your iniquities have separated between you and your God, and your sins have hid his face from you, so that he will not hear (Isaiah 59:1-2). The apostle John wrote: “Every one that does sin also commits lawlessness; and sin is lawlessness” (1 John 3:4). Thus, sin is defined as the act of transgressing God’s law. In fact, Paul indicates that “where there is no law, neither is there transgression” (Romans 4:15). Had there been no law, there would have been no sin. But God had instituted divine law. And mankind freely chose to transgress that law. Paul reaffirmed the Old Testament concept of the universality of sin when he stated that “all have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). Ezekiel lamented: “The soul that sins shall die” (18:20a). Once again, the New Testament writers reaffirmed this concept. Paul wrote: “Therefore, as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin; and so death passed unto all men, for that all sinned” (Romans 5:12). He then added that “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). Years later, James would write: “But each man is tempted, when he is drawn away by his own lust, and enticed. Then the lust, when it hath conceived, bears sin: and the sin, when it is full-grown, brings forth death” (James 1:15-16). As a result of mankind’s sin, the curse of death came on the human race. As we talked about previously, you can think of sin as a cancer. When people get cancer, what does it do to them? It separates their body’s ability to heal and maintain life from that life source. Sin is the same way, except it creates a separation between us and God, who provides life to our Souls. When our souls are sick with sin, they lack the connection of life and do not get what they need for life. We lack nourishment. We lack water. We lack air. As these soul-supporting resources are cut off from us, we begin to die and rot inside. The food of God’s Word, water of life, and air of God’s breath all become a memory and may even become detestable to the one who rejects them. Coming back to these assets may be harder than we think.

Yes, sin is a sickness. It has brought death and sickness and pain and sorrow from the beginning. Disease and death were introduced into this world as a direct consequence of man’s sin (Genesis 2:17; Romans 5:12). As a result, we have physical death and sickness. When Adam and Eve were created, God made them spiritually and physically perfect. They had no sin, no sickness, and would not have died. Through the introduction of the knowledge of good and evil, all of the suffering we see today were brought into the world. This is a direct consequence of sin. Fortunately, there is a cure.

Many features of the Earth’s surface that allow for such tragedies as earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, violent thunderstorms, etc., can be traced directly to the Great Flood of Noah’s day (which came as the result of man’s sin; Genesis 6:5). So, not only are we sick, but the Earth and even the universe as a whole is sick. Not only do we see people dying and suffering as a result of storms and seismic activity, we can see animal populations catching and spreading diseases. Bird flu, mad cow disease, and swine flu are just a few examples of the continual entropy all around us. In addition to what we see here on Earth, there is an obvious breakdown in the universe at large. Stars explode, planets are bombarded by asteroids, comets, and other space debris, and the universe as a whole continues to expand ever more rapidly which indicates a running down and a running out of usable energy in the universe. All of this destruction and waste originated with sin.

The communication problems that man experiences, due to the multiplicity of human languages, are traceable to ambitious rebellion on the part of our ancestors (Genesis 11:1-9). Aside from the language differences that established communication issues early in human history, other societal problems are present today. Society is sick with sin, from our schools to our top levels of government. Daily, we see this sickness spread in the form of moral breakdown and hateful confrontation in every corner of our country and the world. Sin has reached into the hearts of mankind and has left its mark on his social consciousness. The “collective soul” of humanity has been poisoned such that we are surprised to see kindness and love in our society. Of course, a great deal of the reason for this lack of goodness stems from selfishness, which is one of the most pervasive types of sin seen in the world since the first sin. But, as souls who are connected to God, we can have an influence on society through love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, and self-control. The cure is here! Let’s be it!

In his book, Created in God’s Image, Anthony Hoekema addressed the chasm between God and man when he wrote: “Sin is always related to God and His will. Many people consider what Christians call sin mere imperfection—the kind of imperfection that is a normal aspect of human nature. “Nobody’s perfect,” “everybody makes mistakes,” “you’re only human,” and similar statements express this kind of thinking. Over against this we must insist that, according to Scripture, sin is always a transgression of the law of God…. Sin is therefore fundamentally opposition to God, rebellion against God, which roots in hatred to God…. [T]hough fallen man still bears the image of God, he now functions wrongly as an image-bearer of God. This, in fact, makes sin all the more heinous. Sin is a perverse way of using God-given and God-reflecting powers.” Our image is sick. As God’s image-bearers, we have to take seriously what our image says to the world, and to God most of all. Our souls are supposed to be free of blemishes and like God. However, we scar our images, our souls, with sin and sometimes don’t even have a second thought. Is this what it means to be an image bearer of God? The great advantage is that
we can be made pure and perfect again through Jesus. Then, we can bear that image again and take that image to the world. C.S. Lewis, expressed this fact well when he said: “[I]ndeed the only way in which I can make real to myself what theology teaches about the heinousness of sin is to remember that every sin is the distortion of an energy breathed into us…. We poison the wine as He decants it into us; murder a melody He would play with us as the instrument. We caricature the self-portrait He would paint. Hence all sin, whatever else it is, is sacrilege.” Sin has the deceptive “quality” of making us believe that some of it is alright, maybe even good for us. But, if we examine it more closely, we realize that sin is a malady that is made to look like a catharsis. It’s so easy to fall for it.

What is the cure for this awful sickness? How do we as individuals and as humanity move past sin to righteousness? There are several facts that show how sin behaves and how a cure must behave in order to destroy it. Interestingly, Angels have sinned, but have no recourse. Angels sinned (2 Peter 2:4; Jude 6), and yet “not to angels does He give help, but He gives help to the seed of Abraham” (Hebrews 2:16). So, why do we have salvation, and what is the effect of that reunification? The answer lies in a history replete with amazing vestiges of love and forgiveness and patience from a God who never gave up on His Creation.

God already had the answer: “before the foundation of the world” (Ephesians 1:4; 1 Peter 1:20). God has had a plan since Eve and Adam ate the fruit. He made that evident when He spoke to Eve regarding the children she, and ultimately another women, would bear: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel” (Genesis 3:15). The fact that Satan and sin were on the road to ultimate destruction was already in God’s mind. He knew, as He always does, what it would take to make mankind understand the depth and breadth, and height of His awesome love. He began right at the entrance of sin and continued until He established it for our vulnerable souls.

He sent Noah to preach, but ultimately destroyed the world with the flood (Gen 6-8). If you look at how God reached out to the sinful people of Noah’s time, God’s love and patience cannot be overstated. Not only did He send Noah to preach to the entirety of humanity for over 100 years, He provided a way for His creation to have a type of salvation through a baptism in the vessel of the ark. This ark was carried through a flood of sin and deposited safely, allowing souls to live and thrive and continue the plan He had for all of humanity.

Then God sent Abraham to bring His nation up and provided the promise of salvation through his seed. God used Abraham as a means for building a nation of people who would ultimately bring about the end of sin and death. God even had Abraham go to the point of sacrificing his only son of promise. The seed of Abraham today is everyone who has received that promise. All of us have that promise today, just as we did when it was first made.

After that, God sent Moses and gave the written law. Basically, this law-system had three purposes. First, its intent was to define sin and sharpen Israel’s awareness of it. To use Paul’s expression in the New Testament, the Law made “sin exceeding sinful” (Romans 7:7,13). Second, the law was designed to show man that he could not save himself via his own effort, or as a result of his own merit. The Law demanded perfect obedience, and since no one could keep it perfectly, each stood condemned (Galatians 3:10-11). Thus, the Law underscored the need for a Savior—Someone Who could do for us what we were unable to do for ourselves. Third, in harmony with that need, the Old Testament pointed the way toward the coming of the Messiah. He was to be Immanuel—“God with us” (Matthew 1:23). God left no stone unturned in preparing the world for the coming of the One Who was to save mankind.

God has had a plan for humanity from the start. He still has a plan today and will use it to our souls’ ultimate salvation. When we are in sin, we are separated from God by that obstacle of sin. The sin itself places the barrier there, and only by the cleansing of that sin can we be together with Him again. I was told a story once of a man and his wife who were on a road trip and were travelling through the mountains with their fourteen-month old baby in the back seat. During the trip, the baby had contracted a stomach bug and had diarrhea as a result. The baby was wearing a one-piece outfit that extended over her whole body, covering to her ankles and wrists. During one particularly disgusting ejection of waste, she expelled so much that it was literally oozing from her wrists and ankles. When the father went to check on the baby due to the obvious smell, the first thing the baby did was to put her arms out to her daddy in a gesture that basically communicated her desire for him to lift her up and give her a hug. The father did not give her a hug, as you might imagine. Instead, he carefully removed her outer garment, cleaned her thoroughly, and then held her close. All the while, the filth made Him not be able to be near her and have the closeness she desired. While this is not a perfect analogy for sin, it does communicate the distance placed between us and our Father when we sin. Sin is disgusting to God. It makes us sick and it makes Him sick; so sick that He would “spew us out of His mouth.” But, ultimately Jesus cleans that sin off of us and makes it where He can hold us close and we can have that relationship we need so much.