The video above will remind you that God takes sin seriously, and may serve to deliver you from temptation today.
Their view of sin was that it was a convenient way to get what they wanted (Acts 5:1-11). And I think a lot of us view sin that way.
That’s why we tell the little lies.
That’s why we cheat.
That’s why we do so many of the things that we do because we view sin as a convenient way to get what we want.
The problem with that is that God views sin differently, the Bible teaches.
God sees sin for what it really is—incredibly destructive to humanity, to those whom he loves. God sees sin for what it really is—as incredibly destructive. Therefore, God hates sin because of the way sin destroys our lives.
And in his sovereignty and in his wisdom, he knows and he sees something that we almost never see, and that is the end game of our sin.
The end game of our little flirtations with that guy at work. The end game of our web of dishonesty. The end game of our refusals to forgive. He sees the end game of our drunkenness and our efforts to numb. He sees the end game of our love of money.
God hates sin because of what it does to us.
He knows what it does to us—we whom he loves dearly.
He also hates sin because it is an affront to his person, and his character, and his glory. That’s another sermon.
And God has always lovingly wanted to rattle his people so that they would begin to see sin the way that he sees it.
He wants to, for us in love, unmask sin so that we aren’t so easily deceived by it, and placated by it, and we don’t see it as a convenient ends to a mean.
He wants us to see sin for what it really is. God has always done that. God killing these people here is nothing new (Acts 5:1-11).
I know we think there’s the Old Testament God and the New Testament God but that’s malarkey.
God has always wanted his people to be rattled through some pretty stark means to see sin for what it is (Exodus 20:18-20).
The intended result from God of this text in Acts (Acts 5:1-11) is that God’s people would learn to be afraid to sin.
It’s not a surprise that the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23). I mean, in the garden [of Eden], God said to Adam and Eve, “Here’s all these trees, you could eat from any one of them. But I’m telling you not to eat from that one, and the day you eat of it, you shall surely die” (Genesis 2:16-17 paraphrase).
And Romans reverberates that in the sixth chapter and the 23rd verse where it says, “The wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23 NIV).
God takes sin very seriously—unlike us.
This is stark, frightening sort of language. The intended result, as it says in the last phrase there, is that God’s people would be afraid to sin because God has trained them to know that sin will destroy their marriage, their parenting, their families, their communities, their sexuality, their wellbeing.
So in his love, he tries—through stark means—to rattle us into seeing sin soberly.