Chapter Three: The Sinfulness of Our Sin

Having received Charnock’s book as a gift, and because I knew that God had said, “You shall be holy because I am holy,” I turned immediately to Charnock’s chapter on the holiness of God. I began reading, and after only a few pages, I suddenly found myself on my knees before God because I was so overwhelmed by a sense of my own sinfulness before this holy God I was reading about. I got up and began reading again and soon found myself again on my knees before God.

I think of that experience some fifty years ago every time I read Isaiah 6:1-8. If just reading about God’s holiness in a book written by a mere man had such an impact on me, I cannot imagine the overwhelming impact an actual God-given vision to Isaiah of God’s holiness must have had on him. That’s why I say that my own experience surely was no more than a nano experience of what Isaiah experienced.

Yet here he cried out in desperation, “Woe is me, for I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips” (Isaiah 6:5). Isaiah is the prophet of woe. In chapter 5, he pronounced woe six times. Now he pronounced it on himself. The word unclean he used is the same word lepers were required to use as they would cry out “unclean, unclean” (Leviticus 13:45).

Isaiah’s vision occurred in the year that King Uzziah died. Uzziah had started his reign as a good king (see 2 Chronicles 26:4-5). But when he grew strong, he sinned against God by burning incense on the altar of incense in the temple, a function reserved for only the priests who were consecrated to burn incense. As a result, God struck him with leprosy and he was a leper to the day of his death, living isolated in a separate house and excluded from the temple.

Isaiah then, seeing this vision of God in the year of Uzziah’s death, would have been keenly aware of the religious significance of leprosy for the people of Israel. So in crying out, “I am a man of unclean lips,” he was essentially calling himself a moral leper. How could this be? How could a man who was presumably righteous before God call himself a moral leper? Because he had seen a vision of the infinite holiness of God and, by comparison, saw himself as a man of unclean lips. It would be this same comparison that would cause him to later write those memorable words “We have all become like one who is unclean [the same word as in Isaiah 6:5], and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment” (Isaiah 64:6).

For us today, this is where spiritual transformation really begins — when we begin to see that even our best deeds on our best days are like a polluted garment before an infinitely holy God.

Why “unclean lips”? Why not an unclean heart? Some say it was because he could not join the seraphim in their song of praise to God because they are sinless and he is sinful. That may be true, but I think there is still another reason. Most commentators on Isaiah consider Isaiah 6 God’s initial call to Isaiah to the prophetic office. In this reasoning, Isaiah, in chapters 1–5, gave us a picture of the sinful environment into which he was called to be a prophet before he described his call. Note that in Isaiah 1:4 and again in 5:24, the people are described as those who have despised the Holy One of Israel or despised the Word of the Holy One of Israel.

So Isaiah’s vision of God and the subsequent call (see 6:8-13) is actually his call to the office of prophet. And what is the primary instrument of a prophet? It is his lips, and Isaiah needs to be made painfully aware that he is not fit to be a prophet. He could be likened to a surgeon preparing to do a delicate surgery only to discover that his instruments are not just unclean but filthy. Isaiah has been made acutely and painfully aware of his sinfulness centering on his unclean lips, not because he is a wicked person but because he has seen his sin in the light of the holiness of God.

A prominent politician committed adultery with one of his staff members. When confronted, he said, “I made a serious error of judgment. I recognized my mistake.” Another prominent person, a father who describes himself as “pro-choice” on the subject of abortion, said, “If one of my daughters made a mistake, I wouldn’t want her to be saddled with a baby.”

So in our broader culture, people no longer sin; they make mistakes. What about our Christian environment? In our case, sin is not denied. Instead it is often redefined to refer to the more flagrant sins of society. We tend to ignore our own sins of pride, selfishness, gossip, and the like. So, effectively, no one sins anymore. The reason is that we have lost sight of the biblical meaning of sin.

The Greek word for sin means “missing the mark,” or a miscalculation, but that definition fails to convey to us today the seriousness of our sin. How, then, can we begin to understand how God views our sin?

Four words from Scripture, one from the New Testament and three from the Old Testament, have helped me confront the seriousness of my sin, even the more subtle sins of the heart.

Lawlessness (see 1 John 3:4). John said that sin is lawlessness — that is, a complete disregard for the law of God. Suppose that over the course of years of driving, you receive two tickets for speeding. No one would consider you a lawless person. But suppose you consistently receive speeding tickets until you lose your driver’s license and then continue to drive, even without a license, and you continue to violate the speed-limit laws? Then you could be described as lawless because you have demonstrated a complete disregard for the traffic laws of the state.

Probably not one of us could identify with a person who consistently and deliberately violates the ordinary traffic laws of the state, yet we all consistently and deliberately violate the moral law of God. We consistently display our pride and selfishness; our impatience, anger, and resentment; and our sinful use of the tongue. We consistently fail to display the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control (see Galatians 5:22-23). And in that sense, we are all guilty of lawlessness.

Transgression (see Leviticus 16:21 and many other Old Testament references). The word transgression means rebellion against authority, in this case God’s authority. This is where it is helpful to see the holiness of God as speaking of His transcendent majesty, His supreme and authoritative rule. When we sin we rebel against that authority. Sin is a willful rebellion against the supreme authority of the universe, a deliberate flouting of His moral law.

Despising (see 2 Samuel 12:9-10). Despise is the word the prophet Nathan used when he confronted King David about his sins of adultery with Bathsheba and then having her husband, Uriah, killed in battle. David despised God’s law, deliberately breaking the commandments forbidding adultery and murder.

But more than that, God, speaking through Nathan the prophet, said, “You have despised me” (2 Samuel 12:10). To despise God’s law is to despise Him, as His law is not only an expression of His will but also a reflection of His own moral character. To despise God’s law is to effectively say, “I don’t care what You say. I will do as I please. I will gossip about or slander someone despite the fact You have said that I am to ‘speak evil of no one’ [Titus 3:2].” More than that, it is also to say in effect, “God, in my continued sinfulness, I don’t want to be like You.” We do not consciously say this to God, but, to use an old saying, our actions speak louder than our words.

Defiance (see Numbers 15:30). That passage speaks of the person “who does anything with a high hand.” A high hand is an expression of defiance — willful rebellion, a deliberate challenge to authority (in our case, a deliberate challenge of God’s authority). This might seem like an overstatement because we don’t see ourselves as deliberately defying God, but that is actually what we do through our sin.

These four words — lawlessness, rebellion, despise, and defiance — have a certain amount of overlap, but taken together in a cumulative fashion, they help us understand to some degree the seriousness of our sin, even those subtle or “respectable” sins that we so easily tolerate in our lives. We may not be guilty of the more flagrant sins of society around us, but neither was Isaiah. Yet when confronted with the infinite holiness of God, he pronounced himself morally unclean — a moral leper, if you please — and we are no better than Isaiah.

The author of Hebrews wrote of “sin which clings so closely” (12:1). The King James Version of the Bible renders it “the sin which doth so easily beset us.” As a result, for years people have referred to their “besetting sins” — that is, sins to which they are particularly vulnerable. While it is true that most of us have some persistent sins we struggle with (such as anger, gossip, or lust), that does not seem to be what the writer has in mind. Rather, as New Testament scholar F. F. Bruce wrote, “Our author is not referring so much to some specific sin, but sin itself.”

What I want us to see, however, is that the author wrote of sin that clings so closely. Sin clings to us as tightly as plastic wrap clings to glass. It is not that we walk through life generally unscathed by sin, but occasionally it reaches out and grabs us — no, it clings to us all the time. And why is this so? It is because we still have the flesh, the sin nature, residing in us. It clings to us because it still resides in us. Even though we have been given a renewed heart (see Ezekiel 36:26-27), the sin nature still resides within us and taints every aspect of our being.

Some of us have been Christians for years and have more or less sought to live a life of obedience. Because of that, we may have lost sight of the fact that we are still practicing sinners desperately in need of God’s mercy every day. The fact is, our best works are stained with impure (that is, mixed) motives and imperfect performance. We never achieve loving God with all our hearts and our neighbor as ourselves. As Augustine is quoted as saying, “Our best works are but ‘splendid vices’ in the sense they are less than the perfection God requires.”

This is a book about being transformed into the image of Jesus. It is a book about being holy as God is holy. It is a book about spiritual growth, if you please. But here is a basic truth: We will not grow unless we see our need to grow, we will not pursue holiness unless we see how much we are still unholy, and we will not see our unholiness unless we look at the holiness of God instead of what we perceive to be the unholiness of our neighbor. This is why we must face up to the sinfulness of our own sin. Our sins are not mere “mistakes”; no, they are acts of lawlessness, of rebellion, of despising God and His law. (And here, as I write this, I have to stop and confess to God the sinfulness of my own sin.)

The second reason for dwelling on the seriousness of sin is to cause us to realize our need of the gospel and our need of embracing it every day. It is against the dark backdrop of our sinfulness that the beauty of the gospel shines so brilliantly. Nothing prepares a person to understand and embrace the gospel so much as a personal awareness and conviction of one’s own sin. Nineteenth-century Scottish theologian James Buchanan wrote,

First, the gospel keeps us from discouragement as we see how continually and how far short we come in obedience. All who seek to seriously pursue holiness will invariably become aware of sins they never knew they had. And if we do not believe that our sins are forgiven through the death of Christ, we can easily despair of ever becoming more holy.

Second, the gospel keeps us from self-righteousness because the gospel is only for sinners. Embracing the gospel every day forces me to acknowledge I am still a sinner in need of the mercy of God. It keeps me from lapsing into a performance-based relationship with God because I know that my performance is never good enough.

Third, as we will see in chapter 6, the gospel is the great motivator for pursuing spiritual transformation. I will not develop this point now because I will do so extensively in that chapter.

However, repentance is not to be a one-time event in coming to Christ but rather a continual act based on a growing awareness of and conviction of sin in our daily lives. This type of a believer’s repentance is first of all attitudinal. It should be marked by contrition and a deep realization that our sin, however it may affect other people, is really against God. It is the attitude of David, who, in his own prayer of repentance, said, “Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight” (Psalm 51:4).

The continually repentant Christian will be poor in spirit and will mourn over his or her sin as being against an infinitely holy God (see Matthew 5:3-4). This person will find solace in the promise that God will not despise a broken and contrite heart (see Psalm 51:17). We hear a lot about the brokenness of people today, but we need to distinguish between our moral brokenness and circumstantial brokenness. Moral brokenness occurs as a result of deep conviction of our own sin, as David displayed in his penitential prayer in Psalm 51.

Circumstantial brokenness often occurs as the result of some other person’s (or persons’) sin against us. It might be the result of a dysfunctional family situation or childhood physical or sexual abuse or even the devastating actions of someone toward us as adults. It might be circumstances beyond our control, such as a major financial reversal or the death of a loved one. My perception of our present Christian culture is that most people, when they speak of their brokenness, have circumstantial brokenness in mind. Few seem to experience moral brokenness. Conviction of sins now and then, yes, but not the deep poverty of spirit and mourning over sin that Jesus referred to in Matthew 5:3-4 and David expressed in Psalm 51.

I don’t mean to belittle the seriousness of circumstantial brokenness and the deep pain it can cause. I also realize that circumstantial brokenness is one of the major instruments the Holy Spirit uses in transforming us into the image of Christ (see chapter 12). But our focus in this chapter is on our own sin — our own moral brokenness, not the sins of other people against us.

So repentance begins with an attitude of brokenness over our sin. But true repentance will be followed by an earnest desire and a sincere effort to put away the sin we are repenting of — to put on the Christlike virtues that we see missing in our lives. These efforts often seem to be characterized by failure as much as by success. But the frequent failures should bring us back to a broken and contrite heart that mourns over our sin. Brokenness, contrition, and repentance are all marks of a growing Christian, a person who is experiencing the work of the Spirit in being transformed gradually more into the image of God’s Son.

It may seem as if I am overly belaboring the sinfulness of our sin, but I am convinced that I have not painted the picture nearly as dark as it is to our infinitely holy God. Furthermore, we will not see our continual need of the gospel if we do not see our continual sinfulness. I believe that we do not truly appreciate the gospel until we become desperate for it. But the good news of the gospel is that Christ died to pay the penalty of our sins. All of them. The “big” sins and “little” sins, the sins we are painfully conscious of, and the sins we are not even aware of. As Horatio Spafford said so well in his wonderful hymn “It Is Well with My Soul,” “My sin not in part, but the whole, is nailed to the cross and I bare it no more, praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul.” That is the gospel, dear friend, and to that gospel we will turn in the next chapter.