❌ The Worst Thing You’ll Ever Hear: The Bad News of The Bible ⬇️

11 Nov

Most of us like to think that we’re good people. “I’m a good guy/gal, right?” Sure, some people like to say they are “bad boys” or “bad girls”, but even when we say that, we don’t really think we’re bad. Sure, we slip up. Sure, we’ve done bad things. But overall, we’re pretty good.

Unfortunately, the Bible has some bad news for us. News that we’d probably prefer to ignore.

1. We’re all sinners ❌

First up, we’re all sinners. In Romans 3:23, we read:

For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

We’ve all sinned. This means that we’re all sinners. And we don’t just read this in Romans 3:23. It’s all throughout the Bible (e.g., Psalm 14:2-3, 51:5, Ecclesiastes 7:20, Isaiah 53:6, Isaiah 64:6, Jeremiah 17:9, Romans 3:10-12, Romans 3:23, Romans 5:12, Galatians 3:22, James 2:10, 1 John 1:8).

What do you call someone who lies? A liar. What do you call someone who cheats? A cheater. What do you call someone who steals? A thief (not a stealer). What do you call someone who sins? A sinner.

We commit “sins”. Therefore, we’re sinners. And we all do it. It’s a universal problem.

We fall short of God’s standards in lots of ways, e.g.,

🧠 What we think
🎤 What we say
🤘What we do
😬 What we fail to do

Take Adam and Eve, for example.

🧠 They think they know better than God (after all, they decide to eat the fruit).
🎤 They say things that are not true (e.g., Eve makes up stuff about touching the fruit in Genesis 3:3).
🤘They do something stupid, eating the fruit.
😬 And they fail to live God’s way, trusting his word.

We do the same.

Sin: A moral wrongdoing, an offence against God’s law, missing the mark, or falling short.
Iniquity: Gross injustice or wicked behaviour; often implies a deliberate intention to act wrongly.
Transgression: The act of violating a law or command; crossing a moral or social boundary.
Trespass: An infringement or violation of a law, command, or duty.
Evil: Immorality, wickedness, and depravity.
Wickedness: The quality of being morally wrong or evil.
Unrighteousness: The state of being not right, just, or within the moral law, often contrary to God's standards.Description text goes here

But these “sins”—the bad things we think, say and do, and the good things we fail to do—are all symptoms of a disease.

If someone has heart disease, they face all kinds of symptoms: short breath, chest tightness, persisting cough, swelling in the ankles, that kind of stuff.

Our “sins” are symptoms of a disease in our hearts, too. That disease is called “sin”.

2. Rejecting the Creator ❌

What is sin? Some people define it as “pride” or “unbelief” or “autonomy”. I generally define “sin” as rejecting the Creator, which I think captures these other definitions.

The Bible says that God created all things (Genesis 1:1). And, he created humanity:

🪞In his image

In Genesis 1:26-27, we read:

26 Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” 27 So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

God made humanity in his image, to be like him. How were they to be like him? For one, they were made …

👑 To rule the world

In verse 26 we see that being created in God’s image means ruling over all of the living creatures God made. We see the same thing in verse 28:

28 God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

The word “God” literally means “ruler”. Now he has created humans to rule the world, under his rule.

He also creates us in his image …

❤️ To love him

God is a relational God. This is hinted at in verse 26 when God says, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness”. What’s the deal with these first-person plural pronouns? My best guess is that this is a conversation taking place within the Trinity. The Bible teaches that the one God exists as three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit (see Matthew 28:19). Within that Trinity, there’s heaps of love going on (see John 17:24). God is a relational God. Being in God’s image also means being relational. Being relational means loving others. God creates us to love him, and others. Check out what Jesus says about love:

28 One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?” 29 “The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ 31 The second is this: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”

Loving God is the most important commandment ever given to humans. The second most important commandment is to love other humans.

And God also created us …

➡️ To bring him glory

In Isaiah 43:6-7, we read of God’s plan to bring back his people from exile. It says:

6 I will say to the north, ‘Give them up!’ and to the south, ‘Do not hold them back.’ Bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the ends of the earth— 7 everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made.”

Those whom God is rescuing, he created for his glory. In other words, he created his people to be big arrows pointing to his overwhelming brilliance, his awesomeness, and his majesty.

So, humanity was created in God’s image, to rule the world, to love him, and to bring him glory.

↩️ The opposite

But check out what we read in Romans 1:22–25:

22 Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles. 24 Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. 25 They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshipped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.

In other words, we do the complete opposite of what we were created to do. We reject God. How?

🪞Image: Instead of being his image, we make our own images—images that look like humans, pigeons, sheep lizards—and we worship them.

👑 Rule: Instead of ruling his world, we worship the things we were supposed to rule.

❤️ Love: We love the created things more than the creator, and, in the process, we fail to love each other as we degrade our bodies.

➡️ Glory. Instead of bringing God glory, we exchange his glory (his majestic awesomeness) for images of pigeons and lizards.

Instead of being the image of God, ruling his world, and bringing him glory, we make our own images, out of things in the world, and worship them. We swap out the creator with created things. We get “good” things and make them “God.”

Most 21st-century Australians don’t find themselves worshipping birds and animals and reptiles. But we do find ourselves worshipping things in creation, whether other people, or things like success, family, school, sport, music, entertainment, technology, phones etc. These good things become our “god” things, the things that are most important to us.

And thus, we find ourselves in the presence of sin, under the power of sin, and, then, we find ourselves experiencing something of the penalty of sin.

Or, in other words, sin leads to consequences.

3. This leads to suffering, death and judgment ⬇️

The most obvious consequences of the disease of “sin” are the symptoms, the presence of “sins”.

But it gets even worse. Sin leads to suffering, death and judgment.

We’ve all sinned, rejecting our creator, and this leads to suffering, death and judgment.

Ever wondered why there is suffering in the world? It’s because of sin. From the small stuff to the big stuff.

Sin leads to suffering 😢

Sin leads to suffering. We see this quite clearly in Genesis 3:16-19:

16 To the woman he said, “I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labour you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.” 17 To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’ “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. 18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. 19 By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.”

For the woman, rejection of God leads to pain in childbearing and a messed up relationship with her husband.

For the man, rejection of God ruins the natural environment and brings on painful, gruelling work.

Sin leads to death 🪦

Sin also leads to death. We see this in the passage above: “for dust you are and to dust you will return”.

This point is made particularly clear in Romans 6:23: “For the wages of sin is death”.

The wages—or consequences—of sin is death. Sin leads to death, both spiritually and physically. Ephesians 2:1 and Colossians 2:13 talk about how people, though physically alive, are “dead” because of their sins. This spiritual death means being “alienated from God” (Colossians 1:21), “separated from Christ” (Ephesians 2:12) and “separated from the life of God” (Ephesians 4:18).

And, of course, sin leads to the more physical death. Physical life continues for a time, but then we physically die.

Is it fair? Sometimes, people question whether this is fair of God. How can the God of life allow people to die? But when you think about it, who are we to complain? God created us to live. When we reject the God who gives life, we are saying that we don’t want to be in a relationship with him. We don’t want the life that God gives us. In his mercy, he allows us to continue on living physically for a time, like he did with Adam and Eve when they were banished from the garden. But a day came for them when they got what they asked for. They wanted “not-life” and they got “not-life”. To use the language or Romans 1:24, God “gave them over” to what they wanted. God does the same thing with us.

When we sin, we choose “not life”. God gives us what we ask for. We receive “not-life”, aka death.

At first, the death is just spiritual. But a day is coming when we will die physically too. As a phone disconnected from its life source (the charger) will die if not reconnected to its life source, so will we.

Sin leads to judgment 🔥

Sin leads to death, and death ultimately leads to our judgment. As we read in Hebrews 9:27, “People are destined to die once, and after that to face judgment”.

Often when we sin, the consequences are often immediate. But a day is coming, following death, when we will stand before the throne of God and face judgment. In 2 Corinthians 5:10, we read that “we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each of us may receive what is due us for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad.”

This is a terrifying reality. In fact, Jesus tells us that those who have rejected him “will go away to eternal punishment” (Matthew 25:46). Elsewhere in the Bible, this place is called “hell” (e.g., Matthew 5:22, 29, 30, 10:28, 18:9, 23:15, 23:33, Mark 9:43, 45, 47, Luke 23:5, James 3:6, 2 Peter 2:4) In rejecting the God who gave us life, this is what we’ve chosen and this is what we deserve.

So, in summary, we’re all sinners who have rejected the creator, leading to suffering, death and judgment. This is the bad news of the Bible.

But the story doesn’t have to finish here

Thankfully, the story doesn’t end here. Over the next five weeks, we will discover the good news of the gospel which we read of in the four Gospel accounts, and in the rest of the New Testament.

The story doesn’t have to end with sin. In Romans 3:23, we read that we’ve all sinned, but in the next verse, we discover that we are “justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.”

The story doesn’t have to end with suffering. In Genesis 3, Just before we hear of the suffering that sin brings, we read of a Serpent crusher who will come to defeat sin.

The story doesn’t have to end with death. In Romans 6:23, we read that “the wages of sin is death”, but the verse adds that “the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

The story doesn’t have to end with judgment. While Hebrews 9:27 tells us that death leads to judgment, the next verse tells us that “Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many; and he will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for him.”