Inter-Varsity Press

Contents
Preface

Part 1: Cross-examined
1. In the dock
2. ‘You can’t believe that, can you?’

Part 2: Hard to accept, but hard to hide
3. United nations
4. Fatal addiction
5. Divine justice

Part 3: Messiah: God’s gift
6. Messiah: the promise
7. Messiah: the execution
8. Messiah: the blood
9. Messiah: the triumph

Part 4: Raised to life: so live it!
10. A life made possible
11. A cross-shaped life

Please re-read Genesis 3

The principal character in a powerful short story by Fay Weldon sits alone in a freezing church building on Good Friday. Lost in thought, she contemplates her life as an unhappily married art critic who has the power and influence to make or destroy careers. Uppermost in her mind is her brief affair with an artist she has profiled. Tragically, the affair led to the artist’s wife committing suicide. The critic claims to feel no remorse for this. Reading the story, however, you cannot help but feel that she is suppressing it. Remorse would imply wrongdoing and that is the last thing she will admit. This is confirmed by her words near the start of the story. As she recounts her thoughts, she asks herself two significant questions: ‘Everyone I meet believes they’re good, does the best he or she can in the circumstances. But if everyone’s good why is the world in such a state? And why should I not suffer from the same common delusion, that of my own goodness?’

Thus, with that second question, she acknowledges that her claim to goodness is a ‘delusion’. That is highly significant. She has deliberately persisted in her delusion, no doubt because that enables her to live with what has happened. Nevertheless, she seems to accept that it is still a delusion.

The Bible verifies what she acknowledges. John, in one of his letters, says, ‘If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us’ (1 John 1:8). It is of course no surprise that people do delude themselves, since admitting personal sin is galling and the incentives for not doing so are great. A delusion makes life seem more comfortable. Perhaps this explains why the Bible often describes not so much the roots of sin as its effects on our lives. It forces those who attempt to persist in their delusion to ask, ‘In the light of these instantly recognizable realities, can I suppress the truth any longer?’

It promised so much . . .

The great American lawyer Oliver Wendell Holmes once remarked, ‘Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.’ This was never truer than in the Garden of Eden, for, as we have seen, it was a blatant lie that lured the man and the woman into eating the fruit. The serpent alleged, ‘You will not surely die’ (Genesis 3:4). The enlightening prospect of becoming ‘like God’ was made all the more alluring by the promise of life without death. The serpent had no way of delivering the goods, however. His promise was built on quicksand. God had categorically stated that death would be the result of rejecting his authority. Not surprisingly, the consequences of believing the serpent’s lie are both immense and horrendous. This truly was a fall from a great height.

The attraction of hard drugs makes a startling parallel here. When the actor John Belushi died of a cocaine and heroin overdose in 1983, one journalist described cocaine’s seductive powers like this: ‘It can do you no harm and it can drive you insane; it can give you status in society and it can wreck your career; it can make you the life of the party, and it can turn you into a loner; it can be an elixir for high living and a potion for death.’

Indulging in drugs may seem harmless enough to begin with. It may even provide an entirely positive experience. But it is ultimately a deception. Reality soon kicks in, and it is sordid and lethal. Sin is like this; it seems so appealing and so liberating, but this appeal is based on a lie. The consequences are disastrous.

We are guilty

In Bernhard Schlink’s novel The Reader, Hanna spends much of her adult life in prison as a convicted war criminal. She had committed a terrible atrocity as a Nazi prison guard, and there is no question as to her guilt; she is all too aware of it herself. The years of prison life have forced her to revisit her past many times. Here, we find her talking to her former lover, a man born after the war who is himself trying to come to terms with his whole nation’s past:

I always had the feeling that no one understood me anyway, that no one knew who I was and what made me do this or that. And you know, when no one understands you, then no one can call you to account. Not even the court could call me to account. But the dead can. They understand. They don’t even have to have been there, but if they were, they understand even better. Here in prison they were with me a lot. They came every night, whether I wanted them or not.

She is a woman tormented by her guilt. She has faced a dark reality, namely that we are most accountable to those we have harmed or abused. In her case, the offended parties all died in the burning church that she and the other guards had deliberately left locked. Her victims return to haunt her dreams, for they are the ones who can hold her accountable.

As the one we have all offended, God is similarly in a position to hold us to account. This is how Paul puts it. He has explained that both Jews (who have the privilege of possessing God’s revealed moral standard or law) and Gentiles (who do not) are equally sinful, as we saw in the previous chapter. Now he concludes this whole section in Romans with a summary of humanity’s predicament: ‘Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God. Therefore no-one will be declared righteous in his sight by observing the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of sin’ (Romans 3:19-20).

Paul leads those of us who would put God in the dock into God’s celestial courtroom. When those who know the perfect standard of God’s law are measured up against it, even they are left speechless. They know they have not been ‘righteous’, in a right relationship with God. The law is not some external code to which God is bound, but an expression of his very character and nature. When confronted by that, there is ‘consciousness of sin’, an awareness both of how far they fall short of God’s perfection and how much they have offended him. The law could never make anyone righteous - its standard is simply too high. So if those who have the law are unable to be righteous, what hope is there for those that do not have the law? They are unable to keep their own standards, let alone God’s. All humanity therefore stands guilty as charged. ‘Every mouth is silenced’, not because they have exploited the right to remain silent, but because they have nothing to say - there is no defence to bring.

God is uniquely in a position to bring these charges against us. As our Creator, he alone can legitimately hold us all accountable. As our rightful Lord, he alone is the one we have all offended. He is the one we have sought to usurp. He is the one we have tried to evade. Who can deny that this guilt is genuine?

Some commentators today are claiming that we should avoid the idea of guilt altogether. They say it is no longer relevant, because our society is not what is called a ‘guilt culture’. Is that necessarily the case, however? A sense of guilt may not of course be the first problem people want solving when we talk with them, but there is no denying that it is a genuine issue for many. A psychiatrist once remarked that if he could convince his patients that their sins were forgiven, 75 % of them would walk away the next day without need for further help. You don’t have to be suffering from mental illness to want forgiveness, however. In his intriguingly titled book The Sane Society, Erich Fromm wrote, ‘It is indeed amazing that in as fundamentally an irreligious culture as ours, the sense of guilt should be so widespread and deeprooted as it is.’ We all have skeletons in the cupboard. The truth is, however, that whether or not we feel guilty, we cannot hide the fact that we are guilty. Wisdom may dictate that we don’t use a sense of guilt as a ‘way in’ to talking about Christian truth, but we cannot do justice to God and the cross without it. We all stand before him helplessly guilty.

Oscar Wilde drives this home brilliantly in his play An Ideal Husband. One of the principal characters, Sir Robert Chiltern, is a promising Member of Parliament who, years before, had made some deeply compromising business deals. An old acquaintance tries to blackmail him, and during the course of their conversation, she remarks, ‘Even you are not rich enough, Sir Robert, to buy back your past. No man is.’ That is profoundly true. Even if each of us were able to turn a completely new leaf, and live a perfect life from this point on, we should never be able to eradicate our past. Who has nothing to regret? Who has nothing to be ashamed of? Above all, who can claim always to have lived for God? Certainly not this writer.

Unfortunately, the consequences of our sin do not stop there.

We are alienated

Adam and Eve’s instinctive reaction after eating the fruit was to run. That is a normal reaction to a sense of guilt, isn’t it? ‘Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden’ (Genesis 3:8).

This is the first indication of the seriousness of the disaster. They were running from the God to whom they owed everything: from their incredible environment to their very existence; from the provision of their relationship with each other to their awesome privileges and responsibilities in the Garden. Now they wanted to hide. Their former intimacy with God had degenerated into evasion tactics and skulking in the undergrowth. Shame had clearly driven them to this, but no doubt so had the gradual realization that their decision to try to become ‘like God’ must lead to conflict with him. There is a terrible poignancy about God’s questions: ‘Where are you? . . . Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree from which I commanded you not to eat?’ (Genesis 3:9,11 ). Of course, he knew full well what their answers would be, but the fact that he asked them at all serves to reveal his deep disappointment and sadness.

Their alienation from God did not stop there. It was made physical when God had to banish them from the Garden:
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