Welcome to the MHB Podcast. This is Michael Baun. And welcome to my sixteenth episode. Tonight we are going to discuss what constitutes belief. We are also going to talk about the meaning of sin. But before we get into that, I have a little bit of housekeeping I want to go over with you. I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to host this podcast with SoundCloud. You can find a link in the description. If you’re listening to this on iTunes, Stitcher, or TuneIn then you already know that this podcast has been listed in the three largest directories. It’s also listed in Google Play Music, Spotify, and iHeartRadio. If you discovered this podcast through YouTube, now you know that you can access it anywhere at anytime, via those directories.
I also want to talk about WordPress. Initially, I was going to use WordPress as a supplement to this podcast. Through trial and error I’ve decided that WordPress will serve best as a place to post the transcripts of these episodes. The danger of supplementary material is that it may cause my thoughts and ideas to be divided into multiple domains – for example: I might say something on the podcast and then branch off new ideas on WordPress. I believe that’s a sub-optimal way of doing things because my goal is to bring you a polished and high quality podcast. Therefore, anything that is of value should be found in these episodes and writing new articles for WordPress would be to risk redundancy. From now on, WordPress will be the place you can go to see the transcripts of these podcast episodes – which is valuable because you can use the search function to find any idea that you want to hear again. I also want to add that I will be including actual videos on the YouTube channel in the future. Currently, I’m in the process of deciding which material I want filmed and putting together the set and the recording equipment.
Now that you are updated, let’s get on to our discussion. Let me start this conversation by making some very bold statements:
If a person’s characteristics include love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control – then no matter what they say they believe, they in fact belong to Christ and are a Christian. If in the face of tragedy and suffering a person chooses to exemplify these characteristics, then it does not matter what they say they believe – they in fact belong to Christ. If a person’s behavior is motivated by love (as defined by the aforementioned characteristics), then that person has achieved Christian perfection. This is true regardless of sin that is brought on by circumstances beyond the person’s control – so long as those sins do not compromise the person’s motivation of love. All people who fit that description are saved and go to heaven – even if they say they don’t believe in God. Hell is a place for people whose conscience has become so warped by malevolence and evil that they willingly refuse to be in heaven with God – they prefer to be in hell separated from God.
Now, I have just opened a great many doors through which heresy could easily sneak in, but I don’t think anything I said is heretical. I can make a pretty strong case for this from Scripture and from the writings of Christian thinkers who are far greater than myself. That’s just what we are going to do in tonight’s episode.
First, let’s talk about what it means to be saved by grace through faith in Christ. In other words, to know you are going to heaven. One of the best passages of Scripture to address this is found in the Gospel of John 3:16-18:
For God loved the world so much that he gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life. God sent his Son into the world not to judge the world, but to save the world through him.
“There is no judgment against anyone who believes in him. But anyone who does not believe in him has already been judged for not believing in God’s one and only Son. And the judgment is based on this fact: God’s light came into the world, but people loved the darkness more than the light, for their actions were evil. All who do evil hate the light and refuse to go near it for fear their sins will be exposed. But those who do what is right come to the light so others can see that they are doing what God wants.”
It is clear here, as it is through the rest of Scripture, that the only way to the Father is through the Son. One must believe in Christ in order to go to heaven when they die. All of that is simple enough, but where things get murky is when you try to define belief. What does it mean to believe in something? My position is that your belief is reflected in your mode of being in the world. Do you live as if life is important and meaningful? Do you live as if the love you give and the love you receive is real? Because if you do, you probably belong to God. Even if you say you don’t.
Consider Galatians 5:19-22:
When you follow the desires of your sinful nature, the results are very clear: sexual immorality, impurity, lustful pleasures, idolatry, sorcery, hostility, quarreling, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambition, dissension, division, envy, drunkenness, wild parties, and other sins like these. Let me tell you again, as I have before, that anyone living that sort of life will not inherit the Kingdom of God.
But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against these things!
In these verses Paul is saying that sinful behavior is a manifestation of sinful motivation. I think it’s important to note that these behaviors are exactly the kind of behaviors that also have real world consequences. Most people do not want to be caught in an affair. Most people do not want to overdose at a party. Most people do not want to hurt someone else in a drunk driving accident. Now, listen to the characteristics that Paul uses to describe someone who belongs to God: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. These are called the fruit of the Spirit. I hold that anyone who lives out these characteristics is a child of God.
If you say something like this in an American church you would get push back in the form of people saying that all roads do not lead to God. This criticism is true, but remember, my claim is not that all behaviors lead to God either. Life is hard. Not only are you called to live out the fruit of the Spirit today, but you have to do it tomorrow; and next week; and next month; and ten years from now. Not only do you have to do it yourself, but you have to do it while existing in communities of other people. So if you use the fruit of the Spirit as constraints on possible ways of behaving, and then you factor in that you have to live this way across time and while interacting with other people – you end up with a fairly specific path by which to go through life. I would also say that when individuals conduct themselves in this way the society they compose becomes one that flourishes across time.
Okay, so it isn’t what you say you believe or what you think you believe – it’s actually how you live that matters. If that’s true, why do so many in the church leverage the fear of going to hell to motivate their evangelism? Why impress upon people the urgency of becoming a Christian in case they die before responding to the Gospel? I think it’s because this type of evangelism was appropriate for reprobate societies. A reprobate society is one that has largely abandoned morality and normalized evil. The west is not a reprobate society – although it’s heading in that direction. Virtually all of western value has direct lineage to the Gospel. Monogamy, the value of human life, the pursuit of understanding using reason, the rule of law, the sovereignty of the individual, etc. Will the west continue to hold these values? I don’t know. I would say this is where the motivation of evangelism should be when it comes to the west. We must prevent distorted worldviews from becoming normalized. But telling nonbelievers who live out the fruit of the Spirit that they are going to hell is a misunderstanding of the Gospel. Now, given that, there are very real reasons to fear God.
Proverbs 9:10 tells us in no uncertain terms:
Fear of the LORD is the foundation of wisdom. Knowledge of the Holy One results in good judgment.
But notice how this verse says fear of the LORD results in wisdom. It doesn’t say fear of the LORD is the way to salvation. And listen to what John the Evangelist says in 1 John 4:16-18:
We know how much God loves us, and we have put our trust in his love. God is love, and all who live in love live in God, and God lives in them. And as we live in God, our love grows more perfect. So we will not be afraid on the day of judgment, but we can face him with confidence because we live like Jesus here in this world.
Such love has no fear, because perfect love expels all fear. If we are afraid, it is for fear of punishment, and this shows that we have not fully experienced perfect love. We love each other because he loved us first.
John could not be more clear that God loves us, he doesn’t seek to destroy us for sinning or for being imperfect. He wants to forgive us and take us in. We are the only ones who can stop him from doing that. By our own free will. We should fear God in the sense that we should have faith that his guidance for living is the truth. That it’s the right way. We should not fear God in the sense that he will condemn good people who have not been superficially converted. Telling people this puts us on the throne of judgment and self-righteousness and in my estimation that makes us more Pharisee than Christian.
It’s because the west is still so permeated with Christian thinking that the evangelists have adopted this idea that good people won’t go to heaven if they say they don’t believe in God. The fact is, in order to even be what the west defines as a good person you must live out the fruit of the Spirit. Because the west’s definition of a good person is still consistent with the fruit of the Spirit. If you want further evidence of this, take a look at a true reprobate society. There have been ancient societies where burning children alive was just another Tuesday. Societies where women were for babies and boys were for sexual fun. These are the groups of people who embodied their sinful nature and who needed to reform what they perceived as normal in order to belong to God.
When sharing the Gospel in the west, maybe a better strategy is to appeal to the human capacity for good that many people are already familiar with. If a nonbeliever demonstrates genuine love in his or her life then the most important task is to show them where that love originated.
Consider Romans 13:10:
Love does no wrong to others, so love fulfills the requirements of God’s law.
To live a life full of love is what it means to live a life in right relationship with God. If someone who is not a professing Christian is full of the fruit of the Spirit and you tell them they are going to hell, you construct a giant barrier between them and the Gospel. This is dangerous because someone who lives out the fruit of the Spirit but who doesn’t believe in God is on unstable footing. Their position is risky because they do not actually understand where their love and decency comes from. They just assume they were born that way or taught to be that way. This becomes a problem when the person faces rejection or tragedy.
Suffering has a way of shifting people away from goodness and towards malevolence. Especially if they think their suffering is unfair. Have you ever heard the saying “hurt people go on to hurt people?” It is in these moments of suffering that it is absolutely crucial that they understand Who their goodness comes from. It’s in these moments that the evangelist needs to help them be aware that the love they have experienced is a result of their yet undiscovered relationship with God. Because if the person determines that life is unfair and life deserves revenge – well then the adversary has them in his grip and they are dangerously close to living out evil and choosing separation from God.
To summarize this position on belief: when your culture constrains the definition of good and evil to the Bible’s teachings, then people who are evil, regardless of what they say they believe, do not belong to Christ. People who are good, regardless of what they say they believe, belong to Christ. Being good or evil depends entirely on the motivations of the heart, and that is something that we humans have virtually zero access to understanding about another individual. But God has full access to the motivations of each person’s heart, and so his judgment is perfect. When it comes to determining who is a Christian and who isn’t, we should follow John’s advice in his third epistle, verse 11:
Dear friend, don’t let this bad example influence you. Follow only what is good. Remember that those who do good prove that they are God’s children, and those who do evil prove that they do not know God.
So, it is best in the context of evangelism to steer clear of the temptation to leverage the fear of hell when sharing the Gospel. Reality is that salvation is God’s gift and so the process belongs to him – not us. Evangelism should focus on showing good people where the fruit of the Spirit comes from so they can retain it through faith during times of suffering. And preventing societies from becoming reprobate by normalizing evil and normalizing distorted worldviews.
Now that we’ve discussed what it means to believe in God, let’s take a look at what it means to sin. The word sin comes from the Greek word hamartia which is an archery term for missing the mark. In this sense, to do something sinful is to miss the mark which God calls you to aim at. It means that the sin is disordered. Recognizing that the sin is disordered is absolutely essential because if you don’t then you end up on a slippery slope where all actions could eventually be normalized.
This is the problem with the postmodernists, they believe that there is an infinite number of ways you can go through life and therefore every opinion is valid. While there is an infinite number of interpretations of the world and how to go through life, there is only a select few number of ways that allow you to do so effectively across time and with other people. For example, any lifestyle that leads to self-destruction or the destruction of others could be cast aside and an invalid interpretation of life.
Sin comes into play because God has given us instructions on how best to go through life as individuals and societies. Some of these instructions seem unnecessary or obsolete, but that is because we do not have a complete grasp on the instruction or the ripple effect that happens in the world as a result of disobeying the instruction – or sinning.
The world is complicated. Your perception is incredibly unreliable. For example, did you know that gravity distorts the flow of time? The earth is about 2.5 years younger at its core than it is on the surface. How is that possible? I don’t know, you don’t know, but our math calculations know. You and I can’t perceive that because we are bound to imperfect machines of perception. Perception is so easily fooled that magicians can make you see things that aren’t even there.
Since human beings are so fallible and so easily tricked, and since reality is so complex and so difficult to perceive accurately, what are we supposed to do? The answer is love. We are supposed to love. God gave us the wonderful capacity to love and love allows us to produce human flourishing in a world where such a thing seems impossibly hard.
Peter iterates the importance of love in 1 Peter 4:8:
Most important of all, continue to show deep love for each other, for love covers a multitude of sins.
You see, most people understand love. The understanding of love might even be universal among everyone. Evil people may simply be choosing to ignore their capacity to love. Or maybe they are afraid of using it. Maybe the power that comes from victim hood feels more secure than the vulnerability that is associated with love. Societies like the west are not only familiar with love but they also understand the benefits of structuring laws around it. Value for human life. Value for the family. Value of living and speaking the truth. All of these can be accomplished by a commitment to love.
Dr. John Oswalt is a professor of Old Testament at Asbury Theological Seminary and he describes what it looks like when someone is committed to love:
It is our reaction toward one another which Paul believes can be absolutely above reproach. We do not have to be motivated by selfish concerns as we deal with one another. We can manifest that “perfect love” which Jesus commanded and which John made one of the evidences of being a Christian…God’s goal for us, and his purpose in revealing himself to us, is that we should be like him in a holy character which is as much like his as could possibly be expected given our human limitations.
Notice how Dr. Oswalt says we should be like him in a holy character which is as much like his as could possibly be expected given our human limitations. This idea of human limitation is important. For example, we are called to love God with all of our mind. Does this mean that someone whose mind is developmentally disabled is not capable of Christian perfection while someone with a PhD in divinity is? Definitely not. Our imperfections and infirmities are a consequence of Adam’s sin which ushered in the fall of man. I find it unlikely that God does not take these infirmities into account when evaluating a person. I really like the way C.S. Lewis deals with this problem when he says:
Imagine three men who go to war. One has the ordinary natural fear of danger that any man has and he subdues it by moral effort and becomes a brave man. Let us suppose that the other two have, as a result of things in their sub-consciousness, exaggerated, irrational fears, which no amount of moral effort can do anything about. Now suppose that a psychoanalyst comes along and cures these two: that is, he puts them both back in the position of the first man. Well it is just then that the psychoanalytical problem is over and the moral problem begins. Because, now that they are cured, these two men might take quite different lines. The first might say, “Thank goodness I’ve got rid of all those doodahs. Now at last I can do what I always wanted to do-my duty to the cause of freedom.” But the other might say, “Well, I’m very glad that I now feel moderately cool under fire, but, of course, that doesn’t alter the fact that I’m still jolly well determined to look after Number One and let the other chap do the dangerous job whenever I can. Indeed one of the good things about feeling less frightened is that I can now look after myself much more efficiently and can be much cleverer at hiding the fact from the others.” Now this difference is a purely moral one and psychoanalysis cannot do anything about it. However much you improve the man’s raw material, you have still got something else: the real, free choice of the man, on the material presented to him, either to put his own advantage first or to put it last. And this free choice is the only thing that morality is concerned with.
The bad psychological material is not a sin but a disease. It does not need to be repented of, but to be cured. And by the way, that is very important. Human beings judge one another by their external actions. God judges them by their moral choices. When a neurotic who has a pathological horror of cats forces himself to pick up a cat for some good reason, it is quite possible that in God’s eyes he has shown more courage than a healthy man may have shown in winning the V.C. When a man who has been perverted from his youth and taught that cruelty is the right thing, does some tiny little kindness, or refrains from some cruelty he might have committed, and thereby, perhaps, risks being sneered at by his companions, he may, in God’s eyes, be doing more than you and I would do if we gave up life itself for a friend.
It is as well to put this the other way round. Some of us who seem quite nice people may, in fact, have made so little use of a good heredity and a good upbringing that we are really worse than those whom we regard as fiends. Can we be quite certain how we should have behaved if we had been saddled with the psychological outfit, and then with the bad upbringing, and then with the power, say, of Himmler? That is why Christians are told not to judge.
None of this is to say that the infirmity of some people justifies their actions as not sinful. A sin is a sin no matter who commits it. But actions and people are not the same thing. An action is judged, a person is forgiven. The problem we see in the west is that the push for tolerance is about tolerance of actions – not tolerance of people. Tolerance of people is to love your neighbor as yourself. Tolerance of actions is to have a rally downtown in an effort to normalize your behavior.
A better use of time would be to understand that God loves you despite your flawed flesh. Obedience to God means to set your heart right with him to the degree that you’re able, given your insufficiency. This is what it means to be in Christian perfection, this is what it means to have a perfect heart before God. As Dr. Oswalt explains:
It is possible to be perfect – whole, complete, undivided – in our devotion to him, and if our obedience is always unintentionally limited by matters beyond our control, such as ignorance or imperception, it is nevertheless possible for a person to give an obedience which is perfect, that is, flawless, utterly without blame.
Dr. Oswalt is underlining the importance of having your heart properly oriented towards God. It is about your ability to love and your choice to do so. Not about your performance in avoiding sins. Again this is not to justify sin, it is to understand just exactly who we are in relation to God. We are not sins. We are sinners. A sin is not forgiven, it is disordered and it misses the mark, but a sinner is forgiven. In the same way, we should not cast off people in our lives simply because they struggle with sin. Detaching from a person only becomes necessary when the toxicity associated with their behavior begins to impact your own.
If you love God, you will do your best to keep his commands. But your best is predicated on the extent to which your flesh is corrupted. This is not the same for every individual, some have it far worse than others. This is why each of us are responsible for our own relationship with God and why it should be our top priority. You and God are the only ones who know what you are truly capable of – both good and bad. You know the degree to which you could be Christlike. Other people do not know that about you. But God does.
Consequently, God knows when your heart is perfect before him. Sin makes it harder to love God, but being a sinner doesn’t disqualify you from loving him. Dr. Oswalt puts it this way:
An inescapable component of such a perfect heart is obedience. It could not be otherwise. But God does not want obedience. He wants obedience which is the natural outflow of a heart totally given over to him. If that obedience is not all that it might be in other circumstances, or in other persons, he is willing to work with that fact. What he does not want is obedience which is offered in place of the perfect heart. Such obedience then becomes a means of attempted self-justification, a fruitless enterprise.
This is why I say that loving God is not about avoidance of sin. Loving God is about loving God. Sin gets in the way of your ability to love God when you begin to see your sin as normal. If you observe something that is disordered and perceive it to be true or normal, you distort your ability to understand reality. You can begin to live a lie and lose your ability to distinguish the lie from the truth. Then you are lost unless you return to Christ, who classifies himself as the truth, and reset your bearings.
Everyone sins. Everyone. To be in right relationship with God is to recognize your sin as disordered and see that it is not optimal behavior. That’s what repentance means. The serious danger occurs when the rules are thrown out in the name of tolerance and there is no longer right and wrong. I think this is partially a result of Christians viewing some sins as more severe than others. And then the people they accuse of those sins form a tribe and begin to identify with the sin itself. This causes group identity centered around the victim hood associated with being prejudiced against by the people who consider some sins worse than others. The Bible addresses this problem in James 2:10-13:
For the person who keeps all of the laws except one is as guilty as a person who has broken all of God’s laws. For the same God who said, “You must not commit adultery,” also said, “You must not murder.” So if you murder someone but do not commit adultery, you have still broken the law.
So whatever you say or whatever you do, remember that you will be judged by the law that sets you free. There will be no mercy for those who have not shown mercy to others. But if you have been merciful, God will be merciful when he judges you.
Right here we see the equality of infraction against God’s law. So in my estimation we make a grave mistake when we determine that entire groups of people are worse than us because of their particular brand of sin. Remember, a sin is a sin and should never be normalized. The action should be judged. The person should be forgiven. We must work to see individuals as human beings and not as groups identified by their actions or their worldview. And yes – that even means seeing Christians as individual human beings and not as the group identity associated with being Christian.
This idea of everyone sinning is discussed by Paul in the book of Romans 3:23-26:
For everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God’s glorious standard. Yet God, with undeserved kindness, declares that we are righteous. He did this through Christ Jesus when he freed us from the penalty of our sins. For God presented Jesus as the sacrifice for sin. People are made right with God when they believe that Jesus sacrificed his life, shedding his blood. This sacrifice shows that God was being fair when he held back and did not punish those who sinned in times past, for he was looking ahead and including them in what he would do in this present time. God did this to demonstrate his righteousness, for he himself is fair and just, and he declares sinners to be right in his sight when they believe in Jesus.
When they believe in Jesus. In other words, when they trust that Jesus represents the truth they can compare their own behavior to God’s commands and see where they are missing the mark. This allows them to keep their aim fixed on God and prevents them from becoming lost in their own theories about reality. The most important idea here is that everyone needs Jesus Christ to maintain their sense of truth. John Wesley is one of the foremost thinkers of the Protestant Reformation and he describes the necessity for Christ in this way:
The best of men still need Christ in his priestly office, to atone for their omissions, their short-comings, (as some not improperly speak), their mistakes in judgment and practice, and their defects of various kinds. For these are all deviations from the perfect law, and consequently need atonement. Yet that they are not properly sins, we apprehend may appear from the words of St. Paul, “He that loveth, hath fulfilled the law; for love is the fulfilling of the law.” (Romans 13:10). Now, mistakes, and whatever infirmities necessarily flow from the corruptible state of the body, are noway contrary to love; nor therefore, in the Scripture sense, sin.
Wesley’s thoughts are in keeping with this idea that we are working with imperfect vessels in this life. So the best we can do is the best we can do – and Paul tells us our best is to make love our motivation for being. Loving God and loving your neighbor as yourself. Those are what Jesus referred to as the two greatest commandments.
So to close this discussion I want to summarize the two major ideas. I violated my own rules by laying out two ideas instead of just one, but I find these two concepts so closely related that it would be an injustice to not discuss them together.
The first idea is that if a person is characterized by the fruit of the Spirit (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control) then that person belongs to Christ – even if they think they don’t. As we’ve discussed, thinking something and believing it are two different domains. The hallmark of belief is how you conduct yourself in the world – not what you say you think.
The second idea is that a sin is a sin and is disordered. Sin misses the mark and should never be normalized by an individual or a society. However, a sin is an action and not a human being. An action should be judged, but a human being should be forgiven. Every person has a different lot in life, some far worse off than others. Your circumstances and your biological infirmities should never be an excuse to prevent you from properly orienting your heart to God. There is a difference of eternity between a person who aims up and a person who aims down. Aim is voluntary, infirmity is not. Your relationship with God is not built on your performance of avoiding sins. It’s built on you loving God and accepting that he loves you, despite your flaws. This brings us to the end of our discussion.
If you find this content valuable, feel free to share it and to use it in your own studies. If you’d like to support this podcast, you can do so at www.patreon.com/michaelhbaun. There is a link in the description. Your generosity goes a long way to promoting the growth of this enterprise and the cause of free speech. Thank you all for joining me this evening, and I will see you in the next episode.
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