By Trevin Wax, TGC.
One of the vexing challenges in our day is helping people understand the biblical vision of sin and why God responds so vehemently against iniquity. The Bible doesn’t shy away from visceral descriptions of God rejecting evil in stark, unsparing terms. Take the image of the land of the Canaanites “vomiting” out its inhabitants due to their immorality and idolatry—a dramatic metaphor if ever there was one.
The holy God’s rejection of evil is as decisive as the human body’s rejection of poison by vomiting. Vomiting is probably the body’s most violent of all reactions. . . . God cannot tolerate or “digest” sin and hypocrisy. They cause him not distaste merely, but disgust. They are so repulsive to him that he must rid himself of them. He must spit or vomit them out.
God hates sin. Full stop. It’s an abomination to him. It disgusts him. It angers him.
But why?
In evangelism and discipleship, we often move quickly from “we’re sinners” to “the wages of sin is death” to “we need a Savior.” That progression makes sense, but in my experience, even among believers, we don’t always feel the weight of God’s revulsion toward sin or understand why he hates it so much that a penalty of death and hell would fit. Perhaps this is because we live in a world that has reduced God’s benevolence to tolerance, assuming he’ll be overly accommodating toward all our offenses. The biblical image of a majestic God vomiting at sin is far removed from the sentimental deity our culture often imagines.
Naturally, some Christians attempt to make sin’s seriousness clearer by simply repeating, in effect, Sin is bad, bad, bad. But we need to go deeper. Why is sin so bad? Why does God respond with such intolerance?