By Jason, M.Ed., M.A.R., Headmaster
“All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23, NIV)
“The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9, NIV)
"No one is good—not even one. No one has real understanding; no one is seeking God.” (Romans 3:10-11, NLT)
One time, I took a light bulb out of its box, screwed it into my lamp, turned it on and—nothing. No light! I unscrewed the light bulb and looked at it. It looked ok to me, until I looked a little closer. Inside the light bulb, something was broken. From the outside, from a distance, it looked fine, but something broken on the inside made it useless. The only thing I could do with that light bulb was trash it.
That light bulb is like a lot of us—from the outside, from a distance, everything looks fine. But on the inside, something is broken, and we just don’t work the way we’re supposed to.
My problem with my light bulb reminded me of another time I had a problem with something that just didn’t work right. I was 12 years old and my parents had gotten me a voice-controlled toy robot for Christmas. I wanted this robot for months, and I was thrilled when I opened it on Christmas morning. But when I took the robot out of its box and tried using the remote control microphone to make it go where I wanted it to, it didn’t work. I said “Left” and it went right. I said “Stop” and it went faster. I was so mad. I felt like I had been lied to, like I had been robbed! My present was useless to me because it did not do what it was supposed to do—it did not follow my commands.
We are not robots, but we were created by God to do His will—to respond to His commands. When we fail to do what God tells us to do, or when we do the opposite of what God tells us to do, we become useless.
God created us to be like Him and to spread His goodness over all the earth. Yet the Bible tells us that we don’t act like God and we don’t spread His goodness. In fact, we have all rejected God and have turned away from acting like God. It doesn’t matter how good we appear on the outside or from a distance. God sees us up close and inside. He knows how broken we really are.
The Bible calls the broken human condition sin. What is sin? We sometimes hear religious people use this word to describe really bad things like pornography and murder, but what is sin, really? Well, the word “sin” actually means “miss,” as in “missing the target.” It’s an archery term, used when someone shoots an arrow at a target and misses completely. Whenever we fail to be like God, we sin and “fall short of his glory,” as Romans 3:23 says. We miss the target of being like God, being what we were created to be.
We sin in all sorts of ways—in what we do, in what we say and in what we think. When we are mean to someone else or when we ignore God’s word, when we disobey our parents or when we cheat or lie, we are sinning. We are falling short of what God has made us to be. That’s bad news, but the really bad news is that our sin has a penalty: death.
Without Jesus, every human being, including you and me, is under God’s death penalty for sin. Our brokenness leaves us useless to God and under His punishment. But Jesus comes to give us hope and save us from our sinful condition. But we’ll talk more about that tomorrow.