Sin Is a Search for God

Every once in a while, a truth I've been meditating on crystallizes into a sentence. Here's the latest: "No one's sin comes from nowhere." Or, as a friend put it recently: "All sin is birthed from a legitimate need that takes a wrong turn."

I once saw this truth illustrated in the life of someone who tore a community apart with exaggerated and even false accusations against people in positions of authority. Initially, I was angry. I knew a little about this person's backstory, though. Years ago, a member of their family was brutally assaulted by a person in a position of authority. The family member lost vision in one eye, which in turn caused them to lose an athletic scholarship to the university they were attending. Of course, knowing this background didn't excuse the person's sin of slander, but it did put it into context. I could understand how someone who had been wronged by authority figures could become motivated by a distorted sense of justice to do harm to authority figures in return. There's nothing wrong with a desire for justice, but this person had allowed bitterness to corrupt it into something else.

The point, again, is that no one's sin comes from nowhere.

Even the original sin in the Garden of Eden illustrates this truth: Adam and Eve wanted to grow into Godlikeness, and God had indeed intended for them to be like him. He had created them in his own image and given them the possibility of freely choosing good over evil by forbidding them to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If they had chosen to do what was right, they would have become more like God because God freely chooses to do good all the time. 

Instead, they chose to believe the Serpent's lie. The Serpent told them that God was holding out on them. God knew, the Serpent said, that if they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they would be like God and God didn't want them to be all that they could be. If they ate the fruit, however, they could bypass God and become like God apart from God's help. Instead of becoming like God through faith and obedience, they tried to become like God by usurping and disobeying him. 

Their sin didn't come from nowhere. "Becoming like God" was a legitimate desire. Disobeying God was the worst way of trying to fulfill that desire. In fact, it didn't fulfill them at all. It cut them off from God. 

In the fullness of time, however, the Son of God became a man. Through his obedience to the Father unto death, even death on a cross, he showed what it actually looked like for a human being to become like God. God honored his obedience by raising him from the dead, giving him the name that is above every name and offering eternal life to all who believe in him. As Athanasius, a 4th-century Christian, put it, "The Son of God became man so that men could become sons of God." 

G.K. Chesterton once said, "Every man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God." How would it change us if we recognized that a person's sin is always in some way an expression of their deepest need? Without excusing the sin, how can we point them to how Christ perfectly meets that need?