Sin, Grace, Forgiveness, and Love

Are we happy plastic people under shiny plastic steeples
With walls around our weakness and smiles that hide our pain?
But if the invitation's open to every heart that has been broken,
Maybe then we'd close the curtain on our stained-glass masquerade.

— Casting Crowns, Stained Glass Masquerade

Wake up, Christians!

How many times have I heard the phrase, "There but by the grace of God go I" referring to the depravity of the human heart? You hear about murders, rapes, robberies, and the list goes on ... and you think soberly to yourself, "only the grace of God has preserved me from such wickedness." WHAT ARROGANCE! That thought comes from the heart of the Pharisee in the temple, thanking God that he is so much more righteous than "that tax collector over there". Thank you, God, that my slacking off at work isn't as evil as the Bank of America robbery! Thank you, God, that my lust isn't as wicked as John Doe's adultery! Thank you, God, that my unbridled temper is less sinful than the latest drive-by shooting!

The harshest words Jesus ever spoke were not to "sinners" or unbelievers — they were to the religious leaders of his day, to the Wesleys and Luthers and Sprouls and Grahams and Spurgeons — the men that all the world revered for their righteousness. He did not revile their good works or their godliness. He reviled their arrogance and hypocrisy — the arrogance and hypocrisy that I see in so many Christians today. As you read this, you who "asked Jesus into your heart" at the age of five or six, you who grew up in a Christian family, you who would not dare to steal cookies from the cookie jar, you who teach Sunday School and attend every prayer meeting and travel on mission trips twice a year, you who have been praised openly and secretly for your godly life ... do you not realize that your wickedness is every bit as damning as Esau's and Judas's and Hitler's and Cain's? Can you not see that YOUR blasphemy, YOUR malice, YOUR lust, YOUR greed, YOUR hatred, YOUR envy, and YOUR rebellion against the God of the universe is what put His Son on the cross? Who cares what John Sinner says or does? If you only knew your own heart, you'd be on your knees imploring God for forgiveness and begging John Sinner not to hate you for the evil in your heart.

I have seen in many people's lives — including my own — a fear to be open, a fear to admit brokenness, a fear to acknowledge that (guess what) CHRISTIANS ARE NOT PERFECT! Where does the fear come from? It's the fear of being rejected by those who are somehow "more godly", the fear of being despised for sharing the radical depravity of the human race, the fear of becoming a victim to Christian arrogance. And I am sorry to say that I have also seen the justification for that fear; I have seen Christians who more quickly judge behavior than character, who will judge the heart by the actions instead of the actions by the heart — Christians who would (in analogy) scold someone for attempting suicide rather than offer their own shirt as a tourniquet.

We need Christians who are strong enough to admit their weaknesses, Christians who are willing to expose their flaws, Christians who can say, "The LORD is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?" The church is desperate for believers who put aside their arrogance, take up their cross, and follow CHRIST instead of their own filthy rags of self-righteousness. Christians who know they're broken need friends who know their own brokenness. Then only are we safe to acknowledge our brokenness and so seek healing together.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer says so excellently in his essay on Confession and Communion,

According to Jesus’ promise every Christian believer can hear the confession of another. But will the other understand us? Might not another believer be so far beyond us in the Christian life that she or he would only turn away from us without understanding our personal sins? Whoever lives beneath the cross of Jesus, and has discerned in the cross of Jesus the utter ungodliness of all people and of their own hearts, will find there is no sin that can ever be unfamiliar. Whoever has once been appalled by the horror of their own sin, which nailed Jesus to the cross, will no longer be appalled by even the most serious sin of another Christian; rather they know the human heart from the cross of Jesus.

Genesis 6:1-4

When man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive. And they took as their wives any they chose. Then the Lord said, “My Spirit shall not abide in [or "contend with"] man forever, for he is flesh: his days shall be 120 years.” The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown.
— Genesis 6:1-4, ESV

The Hebrew phrase rendered here "Sons of God" (ben-'elohiym) is also used in Deuteronomy to refer to Israel and in Job and Psalms to refer to angels. Gesenius's lexicon points out that in the Hebrew language, ben (the son[s] of) can refer not only to physical generation, but also to an association with something (e.g. "sons of wickedness", "son of suffering"). Thus, this passage could be referring to the godly line of Seth's descendants (as laid out immediately before in Genesis 5), or it could be referring to angels (presumably fallen angels). The "daughters of man" are, obviously, human women. Interestingly enough, the word translated man here is the exact same word as is transliterated "Adam". So it is not beyond the realm of possibility that the contrast between the "sons of God" and the "daughters of man" is a contrast between those who followed God and those who, like Adam, rebelled against Him.

Of course, hermeneutically speaking, it is equally possible that this passage refers to the seduction of human women by (fallen) angels. However, this interpretation is doomed to dismal failure theologically, on three key points.

1. Angels do not marry.

Jesus tells us (Matthew 22:30, Mark 12:25) that after the resurrection, people "neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like the angels in heaven." This strongly implies that angels neither marry nor are given in marriage. The objection may be raised that, perhaps, these antediluvian fallen angels procreated with, but did not ceremonially wed the "daughters of men" (after all, the word here translated "wives" literally means "women" — the Hebrew phrase laqach 'ishshah usually means "to take a woman to be a wife", but is also used to describe Shechem's extramarital relations with Dinah [Genesis 34:2]). However, the mere idea of angelic procreation with humans is problematic in itself, as will soon be pointed out.

2. Angels do not have physical bodies.

We see, multiple times in Scripture, that angels appear or disappear at will (Exodus 3:2; Judges 6:12, 13:3; Luke 1:11, 2:9, 13, 22:43), can sometimes seen by some people but not others (Numbers 22:22-31, II Kings 6:17), and, most tellingly, do not interact physically with the physical world. Jesus' strongest assurance to His disciples that He was flesh and blood, not spirit, was eating (Luke 24:36-43). But nowhere in the Bible are we told of angels eating (earthly) food. In fact, we are given two distinct accounts of food being offered to an angel and the angel refusing to eat it (Judges 6:19-21, 13:15-20).
Someone might bring up Genesis 18-19 in an attempt to contradict this statement. However, I contend that the two men commonly referred to as "angels" may not have been angels at all, but rather prophets. The Hebrew word mal'ak literally means "messenger" and is used in Haggai 1:13 and Malachi 3:1 to refer to prophets. Furthermore, in Genesis 19, the words mal'ak and 'enowshe (which is a generic word referring to human men) are used interchangeably to refer to these mysterious figures.

3. Semidemonic Nephilim raise a number of insoluble problems.

The exact definition of the Hebrew word nĕphiyl is uncertain and can be understood a number of ways; in fact, Gesenius notes that a variation of the word in Chaldean refers to the constellation of Orion. (Gesenius goes on to note that he prefers the interpretation, "fallers, rebels, apostates". However, his wording indicates that this is merely his personal preference and that the actual definition of the word is uncertain.) We see this word used only one other time in Scripture: in Numbers 13:33, when the Israelite spies describe the inhabitants of Caanan; here it is used to emphasize the size and strength of their enemies.

One understanding of the Nephilim, as explained to me by a friend, proposes that the Nephilim were half-human, half-demon hybrids, and could not be allowed to exist (hence the flood). Somehow they repopulated after the flood, giving rise to the Israelites' requirement to leave nothing living of the peoples they drove out of Caanan — no men, no women, no children, not even animals. But aside from the lack of ground for this interpretation of the word and the failure of Scripture to support a semidemonic origin for any species, this explanation contains a further problem: The Israelites were ordered to eliminate every living creature in the Promised Land ... but they failed. (Judges 1 contains a long list of their failures, and Joshua 9:24-27 indicates another. Note also that Rahab, a prostitute and an inhabitant of Jericho which was utterly obliterated for centuries, was not only spared with her family, but also became one of Jesus' ancestors.) Now it is conceivable that God ordained for Israel to spare only the few people who were not part demon, but holding to this understanding of the text requires an unwieldy stretch of the imagination. Is it not more likely that the Bible means exactly what it says — that God had Israel obliterate their forerunners because of their forerunners' wickedness and to demonstrate to the rest of the world that HE IS A GOD BEFORE WHOM NO EVIL CAN STAND?