God Does Not Wink at Sin

Too often, people assume that God can only be good if He gives us whatever we want and ignores our bad behavior. Today, R.C. Sproul reminds us that God’s judgment against sin is an exercise of His righteous character.

What is it that makes us think that the only way God can be good is if He gives us everything that we want and never says no to our behavior and never exercises judgment or wrath? When we look at the Scriptures, the manifestation of God’s wrath, the manifestation of God’s judgment, are always seen in the context of the character of God, which character is good. It is because He is good that He is wrathful. It is because He is good that He exercises judgment. Because being good, He loves goodness and He hates evil. But we aren’t good in the way that God is good, and because He is not like we are, winking at our sin, we attribute to Him in a slanderous way a deficiency of goodness in His own character.

I remember when I was in Europe studying, doing my doctoral work over there and grappling every day with the subtleties and nuances of the Dutch language. It was difficult enough learning the words of this strange vocabulary with their strange sounding vowels and all the rest. But as anyone knows who’s tried to master another language, one of the most difficult aspects of learning a foreign language is learning the idioms, the little expressions or sayings that people have in other languages. And I was reading a book, a theology book, and it had to do with the problem of sin. And as I was reading this in the Dutch, the text read something like this, that when God looks at sin, it is not that He [speaking in foreign language]. That is, He doesn’t look at sin through His fingers.

And I said, “What?” I was trying to make sense out of that expression “God doesn’t look at sin through His fingers,” and I just couldn’t get it. And I couldn’t find a dictionary that would explain that particular idiom to me. And one of the things I did for my own pleasure, and also to increase my understanding of the language, was in the evening I would read Perry Mason mystery stories in Dutch. And the reason for that was that they were written in simple structures, short statements of dialogue, heavy in dialogue. And I could pick up different idioms and get new vocabulary because every Perry Mason mystery follows a different venue. In one case, it’s an actress that’s murdered, and so you learn all the vocabulary from the stage. And another one would be a sea captain, and you get all the nautical lingo, and so on. And so I enjoyed that little exercise of trying to learn the language. And on one occasion, I think it was Perry Mason or somebody drove his car and was in a hurry to get into the courtroom, and he pulled into a no parking zone. And here came a policeman who was going to write him out a ticket. And then he recognized that it was Perry Mason’s car, and he wanted to cut him a break. And so he said, “Oh, don’t worry about it, Mr. Mason. I’ll look at it through my fingers.”

And then I got the image of the policeman taking his hand and putting it in front of his eyes and just kind of looked at it through the fingers, that is, he was blocking his own view of evil. And I said, “Aha! This is what the Bible means when it says, ‘God does not wink at sin.’ ” He may be long-suffering with respect to His tolerance of it. In fact, Paul tells the Athenians that are gathered in Mars Hill, “These former days of ignorance has God overlooked.” That’s the expression we use in English, “to overlook.” We look over the top of it. We don’t stare at it directly. We look at it through the fingers. But now, Paul says, “God commands all men everywhere to repent because he has appointed a day in which he will judge the world.”

And so, it’s difficult for us to think of a being who is so righteous and so good and so holy, that as Habakkuk the prophet exclaimed, “He is too holy to even look at evil.” And so we cannot expect a good God to play loose with our sin. It is because He’s good that He judges iniquity. It is because He’s good that He will not negotiate His own righteousness.