A God who punishes sin

Geoff Thomas

Men say that pardoning sin is like a debt that is written off. ‘What’s this talk about punishing people? It is God’s right, surely, not to punish sin. Why can’t he just let people off?’ They remind us how students go off to college and exceed their budget, but loving parents will shrug and write it off. ‘There is no need to punish them,’ men say. ‘Waive the debt!’ So they claim that God does the same. I think that parents may do that for the early college debts, as a child is learning to cope looking after himself away from home for the first time, but what if persistently, by foolish spending on drink and clothes and telephone calls, he continually and defiantly runs up a huge debt? Won’t there come a time when his parents will say, ‘Son, you’re on your own. No more help from us.’ In other words your parents will finally allow the punishment come to you for your spendthrift ways. You have to pay the consequences of your folly.

So it is with the Holy One. Let me ask you whether you think of God as simply a creditor dealing with debtors? No, he is not. Sin is far more than a debt. Sin is rebellion and sin is also deceit; rebellion against a just and patient King, and deceit against a loving Father, and whenever there is a rebellion and deceit many people get hurt and some die.

1. Sin is the fierce rebellion of insignificant creatures against their Creator. Adam and Eve were shown such love, made in God’s image, given the whole world, forbidden just one little thing, to take the fruit from one tree as the focus of their submission, and that was just for a probationary period. Just one prohibition; just one boundary marker, and they defied it! The serpent appears with a familiar line of patter; ‘Break free from this nice but heavily-controlled mundanity. Come and taste the real life.’ That is what he said. How would you feel if a real snake of a man began to influence your children to take a course of action that resulted in their death? You’d been a great parent to your kids, but this snake secretly comes into their lives and soon he’s calling the shots; he’s selling them drugs and introducing them to pornography and crime and fast cars. ‘Come alive! Explore life!’ he’s saying. They are bought by what he says, and they die as a result. Would you be angry with that snake of a man for destroying your children and your relationship with them? Wouldn’t you want to punish him to prevent him from ever hurting other families - as he’d destroyed yours? You surely would. Punishment would be just.

One message stood out for me in a popular film called The Truman Show. The film is an imaginary story of a man called Truman Burbank who has spent his life unaware that since infancy he’d been living on a vast film set for twenty years, ignorant that all the details of every single day of his life were being filmed by 5000 cameras and were projected all over the world as a unique soap opera, watched by billions on every continent. Everyone else in this little town called ‘Seahaven’ was an actor; Truman is the only one who for years is naively unaware that his life is being lived in the midst of one immense cosmeticised soap. But slowly and surely he realises what is happening and carefully plots his escape. He battles through storms to the distant door of the film set and steps out into the real world, and at that moment, I have been told, at the end of the film, in cinemas all over the world, audiences applauded. Truman was escaping from bondage; he was exchanging the constraints of a managed world for freedom. He was becoming a true man.

We all agree that what Truman wanted was good because he was a man being manipulated by other men. The whole of the soap called ‘The Truman Show’ was a display of voyeurism, but the message I got from the film was an anti-Christian message. It said authority and control are the evil powers. Get free! The man in charge of the Truman Show was named Christof and he was the villain of the film because he was restricting and limiting Truman, keeping him from reality. He was a despicable man, but, hang on a moment, where are you yourselves living? This world of ours is not a soap. This is the real world and you are living the one life you will ever be given in God’s world. Poor Truman was being forced to live in some wretched controlled environment with all his actions monitored and goggled at by other sinners. Our world isn’t like that; it’s been made by God, full of beauty and freedom and every good and pleasing gift. Our Creator doesn’t take our joy away by curbing our liberty, when, for example, he warns us not to steal, or lie, or murder, or abuse women or children and so on. Those laws make our liberty sweet. Are you seeking to escape from this world and its laws given by our Maker? I want to tell you that on the other side of whatever exit door men tell you exists there is . . . nothing! There is death.

Freedom to do whatever you choose and so become autonomous man can be a terrible freedom. In a thousand different ways this past week I have exercised my freedom wrongly and destructively. I’ve got the freedom to be patient and supportive of my wife. Yesterday I might rather have exercised my freedom to have been impatient and critical, and then for hours I might bear the burden of a heart of guilt. My freedom is my worst enemy when I use it to defy God. Sin is rebellion against God. And God replies, ‘If you live without me you are going to die.’ The serpent gets its head crushed for pulling down God’s children. The Lord will destroy the devil.

2. Sin is also deceit; it is spreading a lie about the non-existence of God. Sin is a defamation of God’s great name. Sin says that the God of the Bible doesn’t exist. Let me us this illustration of Ben Cooper (Just Love: Why God Must Punish Sin, The Good Book Company, 2005, pp78ff). You go home but your key doesn’t open the front door. You discover that your locks have all been changed. You get in through your back window but you don’t recognise anything. What a nightmare! Every single personal piece of property or any reference to you has been removed from the house. Your name is no longer on your books; your albums of photographs are missing replaced by another family’s history; your documents are all gone; all your clothes are absent; the house has been painted from top to bottom and you have been expunged from everywhere. Nothing of yours remains. Magnets hold photographs of different people on the refrigerator. Are you angry? Of course, you are outraged. ‘How dare they do this?’ you ask. You discover thousands of lies have been told about you to your neighbours and reporters. Your existence has been well nigh wiped out.

That is what sin has done to the living God. Sin tells lies to our whole world - a world that actually lives and moves and has its being in God. Sin says that God doesn’t exist; every trace of him is removed from people’s homes and lives, from their schools, from Sundays, from entertainment and politics and the media. The living God who made all things has been banished from his own creation. How does the Creator and Sustainer of the world respond to man in rebellion against him and lying about him saying he doesn’t exist? Isn’t God indignant? Outraged? This lie keeps people from truth and reality, from abundant life; the knowledge of the blessed God, forgiveness of sins, entry into heaven. What wickedness - to take all that away from needy people. Surely you can understand why God punishes rebellion and slander. God is refuting each lie when he punishes sin. God is saying, ‘I am alive and I am all powerful, and these lies all come to nought.’ God will punish all that contradicts what he, the holy and loving God, is.