Published by Christians, and non Christians, hear a lot about sin. What exactly is it? What constitutes a sin and does it really matter if we sin? What is the unforgivable sin? These are some of the questions which we will explore in this article.
We will begin at the beginning, with the book of Genesis. On the sixth day, God created man (and of course, woman) and he placed them in a beautiful setting, The Garden of Eden. The man was called Adam and the woman was called Eve. Eve was made from the rib of Adam, which is why we often hear the saying, that a man and his wife are, “one flesh.”
What happened next was a part of human nature. I will digress for a moment by telling you a true story which puts this aspect of human nature into perspective. The story is set in the days when men sailed in ships which relied on the wind to blow the sails and take them where they needed to go. The voyages would take a long time and the men would often fall ill with scurvy, an illness which would be contracted because the men were malnourished. In particular, they had no fresh vegetables.
On one such ship, the officers decided to help the men, by carrying, on the deck, a barrel of pickled cabbage. They instructed the men to eat this cabbage regularly, but the men refused to eat it because they did not like the taste. The officers racked their brains as to what to do, in order to get the men to eat from the barrel. Then they had an idea. They stuck a label on the barrel saying, “FOR OFFICERS ONLY.” That did the trick. All of the sailors sneaked onto the deck at night, to sample the “forbidden food.”
Human nature decrees, that where there is a rule, humans are itching to break it. So it was with Adam and Eve. They had the run of the garden and could eat from any tree there, EXCEPT the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil (Gen2:16-17)
Whether you think of this tree as, literally a tree, or whether you see it as a metaphor for something else, like sexual intercourse, it doesn’t really matter. They were told not to break the rule, and yet they did. Encouraged by Satan, the woman and the man learned things they should not have known. Yet, of all the stories in the bible, I think we tend to identify most with this story, because we have all broken a rule at some point in our lives, and we have broken it, because it was there to break!
Sin, therefore, is another name for rule-breaking, but it is rule-breaking of a certain kind. Even in the bible there are times when a rule needs to be broken. Consider the case of that memorable Biblical trio, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, who refused to bow to the king’s golden image, and were sentenced to die in the fiery furnace. They were saved from the flames, because they were in the right. However when God makes the rules, we are meant to keep them.
The first chapter of the book of Jonah tells the story of a very famous breaker of God’s rules, and what God did to him to make him obey. The wages of sin is death, but, like Jonah, we do have the chance to be rescued from that death. If we accept Jesus Christ as our savior, and accept the miracles that he performed when he was on Earth as a man, we will not die, but will have eternal life in the spirit.
The unforgivable sin is the sin which occurs when we do not trust, or believe in, The Holy Spirit. Jesus used the power of The Holy Spirit to perform his miracles. Remember that he was half man-half God. The part of him that is divine IS The Holy Spirit which is still with us today. The apostles were engulfed by The Holy Spirit at Pentecost (Acts, Chapter 2) and we were promised that The Holy Spirit would be poured on all people (v17-21). It is The Holy Spirit which saves us, and gives each of us our gifts which we must use to glorify God. We each have a calling which we must adhere to. To reject this spirit and our calling is to reject the divine side of Jesus’ nature and also his father’s nature, if this continues, we can never find salvation.
We are all born into sin, because Adam and Eve sinned, but since Jesus walked the Earth, died, rose again, ascended into Heaven and sent his divine self back to Earth, we can all be saved. There is definitive historical proof that Jesus walked the Earth, also historical proof that he was crucified. There is also proof that he rose from the dead, because no one has ever found his body, and there is evidence that his body was not stolen.
All of the gospels mention the fact that the grave clothes were folded so no one ran in and stole Jesus’ remains, because they would not have stopped to fold up his clothes, especially with the guards around the tomb.
With all of this evidence proving that the story is true, and nothing to disprove it, I urge you to accept |Jesus into your life before it is too late. Once your life on Earth is over, it is too late to be saved, so please let Jesus’ Holy Spirit into your heart, while there is still time.
