6 Transgression
If every moment is sacred and if you are amazed and in awe most of the time when you find yourself breathing and not crazy, then you are in a state of constant thankfulness, worship and humility.
BERNICE JOHNSON REAGON5
He was just nine months old, but he knew good and well what he was doing. He had begun to walk, opening the doors to a whole new world of danger. I had toddled him over to the electric wall socket and lectured him on its risk. I told him never to touch it and never to put anything into it. I had no idea if we were communicating or not.
The next day, I heard the pitter-patter of his feet coming down the hallway as I read the paper. He peeked around the corner to see if I was looking, made a beeline for the electric outlet, and, just before he reached out to touch it, glanced back at me again. That look back was a hermeneutical moment. It told me that this little boy knew not only that he was doing something he shouldn’t do but that it was against me. He was acting in violation of what his loving father had warned him about. In that moment, he was willing to break relationship with me in order to experience something that, out of love for him, I had forbidden. This little moment revealed not just a moral struggle but something deeply personal as well.
Remembering that moment with my toddler son reminded me of another moment, dramatically different on the surface but very similar at the core. It was an awesome, mind-blowing, heart-quaking, fear-inducing transitional moment. There had never been a situation like this before. It was designed for one very special group of people, so that they would never be the same again. When you read the account of this moment, you sense that the words cannot even capture its thunderous majesty. God chose one man to stand closer to him than any man had since the disaster in the garden of Eden. And this man was to receive from the hand of God what God had never given before. Surrounded by God’s glory, he received God’s law, written on tablets of stone.
Although the Mosaic law set conditions for the people to continue enjoying God’s blessing, it wasn’t primarily given as an achievement test, a list of things that this special group of people had to do to gain acceptance and relationship with God. No, God had already chosen them. He had already placed his love on them. He had already redeemed them from captivity. He had already promised them a land and a future. The law he had given was not a test to gain his love; rather, it was a concrete expression of his love. God was gracing the people whom he had taken as his own with his law. That they were chosen to receive it depicted the special nature of their relationship with him—a relationship that other nations did not enjoy.
So this meant that when they disobeyed, they did something profoundly more significant than break abstract moral regulations. Disobedience was personal. Breaking law was breaking relationship. Turning their backs on God’s moral code was turning their backs on God. Rebellion was more than transgressing legal boundaries; it was disloyalty to God.
The same is true for us. We have by grace become a people for God’s own possession. God has welcomed us into eternal communion with him, which we could never have achieved by our own righteousness. On our very best moral day, we fall dramatically below God’s holy standard. We are his only because of lavish mercy and incalculable love. To disobey, then, is spiritual adultery, giving the affection that belongs to God to something or someone else. Transgressing God’s boundaries or breaking his law is first about breaking relationship with him.
“What does the law have to do with a book on the awe of God?” you may be asking at this point. Well, I am more and more persuaded as I read Scripture that transgression is not first a law problem; rather, an awe problem produces a law problem. When awe of anything but God kidnaps and controls your heart, you simply will not stay inside God’s boundaries. But when a deep, reverential fear of God has captivated your heart, you will willingly and joyfully live inside the fences he has set for you. When the glory of some created thing rules your heart, you will live not for the glory of your Redeemer but for that thing. When love for a certain thing is a more dominant motivator than love for God, you will turn your back on God, and as you do, you will step over his boundaries.
The seedbed for a life of obedience is awe. When awe of something other than God replaces awe of God, disobedience will replace obedience. A life of submission to God’s will, plan, commands, and purposes flows out of the worship of the One who has given those commands. Obedience is not the impersonal following of a set of arbitrary and abstract laws. Obedience is being in such awe of God that you are blown away by his wisdom, power, love, and grace, which makes you willing to do whatever he says is right and best. Obedience is deeply more than begrudging duty. It is a response of joyful willingness ignited by, stimulated by, and continued by a heart that has been captured by God’s glory, goodness, and grace.
Thus, you cannot threaten, manipulate, or guilt a person into obedience. Only grace can produce this joyful submission in me. Only grace can open my blind eyes to the awesome glory of God. Only grace can free my heart from all the replacement awes that have kidnapped me. Only grace can give me back my awe of God. Only grace can transform me from a worshiper of self to a worshiper of God. Only grace can motivate me to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord until I have exited my little government of one and given myself to the work of something vastly bigger than me. The law cannot motivate me to keep the law.
So, in our disobedience, we don’t first have a law problem; we have an awe problem. Awe of God will produce willing submission to his will, and a lack of awe of God will lead me to step over his boundaries. I want to examine this theme by unpacking three familiar portions of Scripture.
The Awe Exchange in the Garden
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.
And they heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden. But the LORD God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?” And he said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.” He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” The man said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.” Then the LORD God said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.” (Gen. 3:1–13)
Although we examined this passage earlier, I want to remind us again of just how shocking it was for Adam and Eve to disobey God and why they did. You have to examine the words carefully here to get the full import of the nature of Adam and Eve’s disobedience. Let me set the stage by helping you consider the miraculous, awe-inspiring scene that they enjoyed daily in the garden. The passage tells us that after Adam and Eve had disobeyed God and were hiding from him, they heard the sound of him “walking in the garden in the cool of the day” (v. 8). What? Let your imagination take in the amazing reality that these words portray. In condescending mercy, God, who from all eternity had existed as a spirit, took on some kind of seeable and hearable physical form so as to have regular, loving community with the people that he had made. God didn’t require Adam and Eve to reach up to him; he came down to them, incarnating himself in some way to make himself physically relatable to them.
This is the Lord of lords, the eternal sovereign One, the Creator of all that exists, inviting human beings into fellowship with him and doing miraculous things to make their fellowship possible. How could anything more awe-inspiring occur in Adam and Eve’s lives? How could they experience anything more glorious than this? How could they not be blown away by their day-to-day fellowship with God? How could this not leave them in wonder and amazement? The moment you begin to understand the miraculously close communion that Adam and Eve enjoyed by God’s grace, you begin to understand that their disobedience was more than a technical breaking of abstract regulations; their disobedience was fundamentally personal.
Now what is the Serpent trying to sell to Eve? He is trying to convince her of the constructive power of disobedience. This is what temptation always does. It tells you that if you step over God’s boundaries, good stuff will be built into your life. The Serpent is arguing for the constructive power of what is actually destructive because he is working to create an awe shift in Eve. He is trying to get her imagination to run wild, to consider what it would be like not to have to live in a subservient relationship to God anymore. He’s doing this so that her heart would be motivated more by the glory of the vision that he is holding out to her than by her awe of the glory of God and her special position as the object of his love. When awe of what could be replaces awe of God, Eve steps over God’s fences and eats what is forbidden. Eve doesn’t first have a law problem; she has an awe problem that produces a law problem.
But there is something else to observe that reinforces what we have already said. The passage notes that Eve saw that the tree was “to be desired to make one wise” (v. 6). Now let this sink in: “to be desired to make one wise.” Eve was enjoying close, personal, loving, daily communion with the One who is Wisdom. She was in fellowship with the most awesome source of wisdom that ever existed or ever would exist. She didn’t need wisdom. The garden wasn’t a place of wisdom famine. So what then was Eve seeking? What kind of wisdom vision captured her awe? The Serpent was selling Eve autonomous wisdom, that is, wisdom that would no longer depend on God as its source. Instead of awe of God producing in her a submission to his wise will, awe of independent wisdom caused her to rebel against God’s will.
In the garden that day, a great and destructive exchange took place—not first an exchange of obedience for disobedience but awe of God for awe of self. It was a look-what-you-could-be form of temptation that aggrandized Eve and made God seem small. Once awe of God is lost, the loss of a heart to obey isn’t far off.
Spiritual Adultery
I made my vow to you and entered into a covenant with you, declares the Lord GOD, and you became mine. Then I bathed you with water and washed off your blood from you and anointed you with oil. I clothed you also with embroidered cloth and shod you with fine leather. I wrapped you in fine linen and covered you with silk. And I adorned you with ornaments and put bracelets on your wrists and a chain on your neck. And I put a ring on your nose and earrings in your ears and a beautiful crown on your head. Thus you were adorned with gold and silver, and your clothing was of fine linen and silk and embroidered cloth. You ate fine flour and honey and oil. You grew exceedingly beautiful and advanced to royalty. And your renown went forth among the nations because of your beauty, for it was perfect through the splendor that I had bestowed on you, declares the Lord GOD.
But you trusted in your beauty and played the whore because of your renown and lavished your whorings on any passerby; your beauty became his. You took some of your garments and made for yourself colorful shrines, and on them played the whore. The like has never been, nor ever shall be. You also took your beautiful jewels of my gold and of my silver, which I had given you, and made for yourself images of men, and with them played the whore. And you took your embroidered garments to cover them, and set my oil and my incense before them. . . .
And after all your wickedness (woe, woe to you! declares the Lord GOD), you built yourself a vaulted chamber and made yourself a lofty place in every square. At the head of every street you built your lofty place and made your beauty an abomination, offering yourself to any passerby and multiplying your whoring. You also played the whore with the Egyptians, your lustful neighbors, multiplying your whoring, to provoke me to anger. Behold, therefore, I stretched out my hand against you and diminished your allotted portion and delivered you to the greed of your enemies, the daughters of the Philistines, who were ashamed of your lewd behavior. You played the whore also with the Assyrians, because you were not satisfied; yes, you played the whore with them, and still you were not satisfied. You multiplied your whoring also with the trading land of Chaldea, and even with this you were not satisfied. . . .
Men give gifts to all prostitutes, but you gave your gifts to all your lovers, bribing them to come to you from every side with your whorings. So you were different from other women in your whorings. No one solicited you to play the whore, and you gave payment, while no payment was given to you; therefore you were different. (Ezek. 16:8b–18, 23–29, 33–34)
The language is shocking, but the charge is even more shocking. You cannot read Ezekiel 16 and then think that breaking God’s law is some impersonal offense against abstract regulations. Ezekiel 16 makes it very clear that God doesn’t see your disobedience that way at all. To the Lord, it is fundamentally personal. His outrage here is not first about law but about relationship.
The word picture depicts a marriage where not only has the bride dishonored her marriage vows, but she has also been soliciting lovers on the street. And not only has she been soliciting lovers on the street, she hasn’t asked them to pay her. Rather, in a kind of reverse prostitution, she has paid them to be her lovers. The bride here (the people of Israel) was so anxious to find love anywhere, she went out on the street and paid for it.
It really is true that disobedience is always first about breaking covenantal relationship with God before it is about breaking God’s law. Disloyalty to one’s relationship with God always leads to disobedience of some kind. But there is more. True love is a state of awe. You are enthralled with the other person, enthralled with what he or she has brought into your life and enthralled that he or she would choose to live with a person like you.
Perhaps you remember, if you are married, the days before your wedding, when you were in a bit of awe that you were going to get married. Perhaps you remember the first few days of your marriage when you would wake up and the awe of being married would hit you again. And perhaps you can relate to that sad, progressive loss of awe and gratitude that often follows. Increasingly you take your spouse for granted. Increasingly you forget the blessing of your relationship. Increasingly you are bored with the repeated cycle of the mundane that settles into every marriage. At this point your eyes and your heart begin to wander. At this point you fantasize about what it would be like to be single or to be with someone else. In the crowd of humanity that you see every day, potential replacement mates catch your attention, make you wonder, and cause you to hunger for something other than what you have.
When you come to that place and adultery has captured your mind and may soon control your body, you don’t have a law problem; you have a marital awe problem. Gratitude and celebration have been replaced by dissatisfaction and complaint. You are about to step over your marital boundaries because you’ve lost your awe.
So it is with every act of disobedience. It is a breaking of a marital covenant with God that was achieved, signed, sealed, and paid for by his grace. You’ve lost your awe, and because you have, you are capable of doing what you thought you’d never do. Your heart is capable of wandering because awe of God no longer holds it captive. You’re still shopping for awe because that quest is hardwired into you, but you’re looking for it horizontally and not vertically. Almost any lover will do at almost any cost. You’re going to break God’s laws all over the place, not because you’re looking for laws to break but because you’re an awe amnesiac searching for an awe fix in things that won’t ever satisfy and climbing over God’s fences to get what you think will give that sense of awe back to you again.
How the Ten Commandments Work
And God spoke all these words, saying,
“I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.
“You shall have no other gods before me.
“You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.
“You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain, for the LORD will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain.
“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
“Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the LORD your God is giving you.
“You shall not murder.
“You shall not commit adultery.
“You shall not steal.
“You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor’s.” (Ex. 20:1–17)
There is no escaping the essential order of God’s commands. The first four commands have to do with one thing and one thing alone: the worship of God. They represent an uncompromising call to live in a real, committed, day-to-day, heart-gripping, life-shaping awe of God. Why? Because only when awe of God rules my heart will I set everything else in my life in its rightful place. Joyful, perseverant obedience only ever grows in the soil of worship. You see, because worship is not just something I occasionally do but the foundation of who I am and because I worship my way through every moment of every day, if my heart is not given over to the worship of God, it will give itself to the worship of something else. Whatever has captured the awe of my heart will also set the agenda for the things that I desire, think, choose, say, and do. The moral life of every human being is driven and shaped by awe, either awe of God or awe of something in God’s creation.
But there is something more to be said. The fourth commandment is particularly interesting for our discussion. The command to reserve the Sabbath “to the LORD your God” is itself a gift of grace. Not only are the Ten Commandments rooted in the awe of God, but also built into the commands is a regular, God-ordained recharge of your awe. God knows how quickly we become awe amnesiacs. God knows that life in this fallen world is a day-to-day war of awe. God knows how easily we replace our awe of the Creator with awe of something in his creation. God knows that awe of God constantly wars with awe of self. As the Creator, who hardwired every aspect of our personhood, he knows that our obedience is fueled by worshipful awe. So he commanded one day in every seven to be reserved for rest from our labors and for personal and corporate reflection on him.
You could argue that every element of the gathered worship of God’s people is intended to give people their awe back again. We need a moment to refocus on the grandeur of God’s glory and grace. We need to see his awesome wisdom and power again. We need to dwell on his patience and faithfulness again. We need to be stunned by the perfection of his holiness and the righteousness of his judgment again. We need to be encouraged by the awesome truth of his constant presence again. We need to be reminded to rest in his amazing sovereignty again. And we need to be blown away by the reality that, by grace, he is all these things for us. He has unleashed his awesome glory on us! You see, awe doesn’t just remind you of who God is; it redefines for you who you are as his creature and his blood-bought child.
Sadly, not a day passes without us becoming transgressors in some way. We willfully step over God’s wise and holy boundaries again and again. We know the law. Theologically, we know it is wise and for our good. We don’t transgress because we are ignorant. Think with me. If you’re angry and you’re up in someone’s face, so close that he can feel your breath, saying mean things that you shouldn’t say, you’re not doing that because you’re ignorant of the fact that it is wrong. No, you’re doing it because at that moment you don’t give a rip what is wrong. At that moment, you are lord sovereign in your life, setting your own rules. You want something, and nothing is going to stop you from getting it. You don’t have a law problem; you have an awe problem that causes you to have a law problem. God is not in your thoughts at that moment, let alone ruling your heart. This is the real struggle for all of us in the family rooms, kitchens, bedrooms, apartments, malls, offices, and automobiles of everyday life. Between the “already” and the “not yet,” our problem is awe amnesia issuing forth in awe replacement.
So we need constant reminders of God’s awesome glory. Thankfully, God has embedded those reminders in his creation. The problem is that we so easily become blind. We look but don’t see, and because we don’t see, we don’t worship, and because we don’t worship, we fail to obey. So, in beautiful grace, God has carved out a day for us to stop, look, listen, consider, and worship once again. He invites us to remember the awe that brought us to conviction, living faith, gospel hope, and heart and life transformation. He welcomes us to come together into his presence again and again and again because he knows just how fickle our wandering hearts can be. He knows that we will never live as he has ordained if we do not stand in awe of who he is.
So where does this leave us? It leaves us with no hope, no plea, no help but the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ. If our disobedience was just a law problem, then perhaps the law could rescue us. But since our lawlessness lives at a profoundly deeper heart level—our propensity to live for ourselves, to write our own rules, and to step over God’s boundaries—the law will never fix our transgressions. And let me add that human effort will never fix human immorality. Since I am my biggest problem and since the greatest danger to me is me and since I am never able to escape from myself, I have no capacity whatsoever to fix what is broken. I need help. I need a Redeemer.
The apostle Paul says it this way in Romans 8:3: “For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh.” Both elements are here: the powerlessness of the law and the weakness of the flesh (sinful nature). I am too weak in every way to help myself, and the law does not have the power to rescue me. The law is able to expose my sin and guide me as to how God wants me to live, but it has no power whatsoever to rescue me from my sin.
Once you admit that you don’t just have a behavior-oriented moral problem but, more fundamentally, a heart-located awe problem, you will see that you need more than a system of reform; you need a Redeemer. We must not reduce Christianity to a system of theology and rules. Theology and rules will never redeem you. They were never given by God to be an end in themselves. They are a means to an end. Their purpose is to cause you to see the depth of your need and the sufficiency of Christ’s work so that you might run to him in the desperation of faith, placing your hope in his grace and having your heart filled with awe of him.
Transgression is an awe problem before it is a law problem, and for that we need a Redeemer. Thankfully, the Redeemer has come, and his work for you is complete. Turn to him, and you will find the grace you need to see the reality of your awe problem and the hope that only comes through Christ.