5:14 AM
@Joshua Good article. Thanks for the link. It does miss a major statement on sin, however:
> Jesus said to them, "If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, 'We see,' your sin remains." (John 9:41)
Jesus is here saying that if someone is not aware that something is wrong (or right), that is, if a person is "blind," that person does not sin if s/he violates the law against (or for) that thing. But those who are aware of the law and violate it anyway do sin. So a person's awareness of what is good or evil is a key factor in what is sinful for that person.
This doesn't mean we can just remain ignorant and blissful. The Israelites, for example, were commanded to rigorously teach the law to their children so that they would know the law. But if a person through no fault of his or her own is not aware of the law, or has actively been taught a different law by religious or civil authorities, then there is no sin in breaking the law that is not known, even if breaking it might be evil in an objective sense.
@Joshua It might be tough to find a passage in the Bible in which God explicitly commands or condones lying. But it's not hard to find stories in which people who engaged in lies and deceptions were not punished for it, but were blessed by God. Reading the explicit commandments is important. But it's also important to read the stories, which provide human embodiments of principles conveyed in the Bible.
The most obvious case of a lying, deceptive manipulator who was not punished by God but was instead blessed is Jacob, whose very name, literally "heel-grabber," means "a deceiver, a supplanter." And there is story after story of Jacob deceiving, manipulating, and telling bald-faced lies to get ahead.
Not the least of those stories is his carrying out his mother Rebekah's scheme to steal his brother Esau's blessing, which he did with a coolness and panache all his own, flat out lying to his father in a way that went even beyond his mother's instructions. And yet, it was shortly after he was forced to flee his brother's wrath that he had the famous encounter at Bethel in which God blessed him and said that the lineage and covenant would go through him.
I suppose you could say that Jacob was "punished" in that he never saw his beloved mother again (she died before he returned to the Holy Land). And of course, he did have to live away from his homeland and family for over twenty years. But no matter what he set his hand to, he succeeded. And he did a pretty good job of hoodwinking his father-in-law and enriching himself in the process as well.
Yet God continued to bless Jacob, giving him not just great wealth, but twelve sons, which, in Old Testament terms, is the ultimate blessing.
It's a little hard to argue that the God of the Bible is utterly opposed to lying when he continued to bless Jacob, whose success in this world was greatly based on engaging in lies and trickery in order to accomplish his goals.
"Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful."
--- Box, George E. P.; Norman R. Draper (1987). Empirical Model-Building and Response Surfaces, p. 424, Wiley. ISBN 0471810339.
What exactly is the meaning of the above phrase?
The Upper Room
The Upper Room