A Good Book on a Bad Subject
What is sin, and why must we take it seriously? Today, Stephen Nichols highlights Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be by Cornelius Plantinga Jr., a book that explores the biblical view of sin and our deep need for God’s redeeming grace.
Welcome back to another episode of 5 Minutes in Church History. We are still in the month of August, so we are talking about good reads to finish off this summer and this week we are talking about a good book on a bad subject. It is the bad subject. It is the subject of sin. And the good book was published in 1995, right at the end of the 20th century. It was written by Cornelius Plantinga, Jr. And titled Not the Way It's Supposed to Be, subtitled, A Breviary of Sin. And the preface to the book, Dr. Plantinga writes in this book, “I'm trying to retrieve an old awareness that has slipped and changed in recent decades. The awareness of sin used to be our shadow. Christians hated sin, feared it, fled from it, grieved over it. Some of our grandparents agonized over their sins, but the shadow has dimmed.”
He goes on to define sin as the violation or the vandalization or even the scandalization of shalom. Now that word shalom is from the Hebrew. It means peace. But Dr. Plantinga helps us see that this is more than just a truce during a time of war or some sort of momentary sense of being at rest. It is how things were supposed to be. It is that original Adamic condition where Adam and Eve had perfect relationship with God, perfect relationship with each other, and even a perfect relationship to creation. And what happened? Well, sin entered into that and fractured all of it, fractured our relationship to God, to each other, and to this world. It violated shalom. In fact, Dr. Plantinga reminds us that “Sin has its first and final” he says, “God-ward force.” He goes on to write, “Let us say that a sin is any act, any thought, desire, emotion, word, or deed, in particular absence that displeases God and deserves blame.” He adds that even our disposition to commit sin is itself sin. And then he writes, “Sin is a culpable and personal affront to a personal God.” And we all remember that famous quote from R.C. Sproul, right? “Sin is cosmic treason.”
Well, after he defines sin in this opening chapter, he moves through all of the doctrines of sin, talking about the origin of evil and how we understand that, talking about original sin and the doctrine of original sin. He even talks about issues like addiction and how do we relate addiction to sin. So, it moves into all sorts of areas. And he roams across Scripture. He roams across church history, and he also brings in some very vivid illustrations. At one point, he's talking about the law as our school master. And he's making the point that sometimes when you make a law known, it actually incites in us the desire to break it. And so, he says, “It's like a hunter who shoots out every single letter of a no hunting sign.”
He has a way of driving home the reality, as he opened the book in the preface, of the shadow of sin, even despite our culture's desire to push it down. Well, as he gets through the end of the book, he wants to remind us that while we're talking about sin, we also need to talk about a Savior. But we only understand our Savior and we only understand grace when we have this full vision of this bad subject. So, on the very last page, page 199, he writes, “Creation is stronger than sin, and grace, stronger still. Creation and grace are anvils that have worn out a lot of our hammers. God wants Shalom, and God will pay any price to get it back. Human sin is stubborn but not as stubborn as the grace of God and not half so persistent, not half so ready to suffer to win its way.” And we know that price that God paid to restore shalom, we know that it was the price of his only begotten son. Well, that's a good book on a bad subject. And I'm Steve Nichols and thanks for joining us for 5 Minutes in Church History.
