Consequences

We have all sinned. The very core principle of Christian teaching is that everyone of us has sinned and therefore rightly deserves to die separated from God. Everyone of us from the thief to the murderer to the good moral person who has never broken the law, we all stand together having fallen short of God's glory.

Christ's sacrifice on the cross paid that death penalty for us. It was a gift promised from the beginning of time, meant to reconcile a Creator with His creation out of love. The moment we sin against God, that we make the decision to lie, to engage in sex outside of marriage, to steal, we die spiritually.

But we want to argue with scripture. We want to assign a scale of ranking to sin. We want to claim the thief is a better person than the murderer. Or claim that the patient and loving, yet unbelieving grandparent is a better person than the murdering pedophile in the eyes of God. And while humanly speaking we may consider this reasonable, spiritually speaking all of us are in the same boat.

And God can change a person's heart from that of an addict to that of a faithful believer by coming into their life and changing them from the inside. But here's the deal. Our sin has consequences. Both spiritually with being separated from God and His blessings at the moment of your death. God blesses us with breath, quenches us when we thirst, gives us hope. But in Hell, there is no hope, no escape if enough prayers are said and candles lit.

The spiritual body you were meant to have that never ages, is never in pain, and in which all diseases have been healed, the body we all get in Heaven is trapped eternally in Hell because you rejected God's gift of salvation. The body we receive that was meant as a gift, an eternal body free of disease and defect becomes a curse as it regenerates continually while being tortured in absence from God.

Those consequences are spiritual and eternal but we also have temporary consequences. The sins of murder or thievery have legal consequences that we ourselves must pay. God can deliver us from temporary consequences, but many times, He does not.

King David was a frustratingly loyal Israelite who stubbornly refused to take Saul's place as King. Every decision he made was done in prayer as David consulted the Urim and Thummim for answers. And God continued to bless him.
But his decision to rape Bathsheba and murder her husband, Uriah to cover up a murder led to the entirety of King David's life taking a turn for the worse. The temporary consequences of David's sin led to the deaths of four of his sons and the fracturing of the nation of Israel.

David didn't escape the temporary consequences of his sin. David ended his life as “the man after God's own heart”. But he lost 4 sons, endured a difficult life of fleeing pursuers, and watching his own loved ones descend into hating and killing each other.

We cannot pay the eternal consequences of our sin. And we cannot escape the temporary consequences of our sin. Sometimes we must finish serving the prison sentence, leave the relationship or change our lives to answer for those consequences. And sometimes those ‘temporary’ consequences last until the end of our lives.

Moses’ sin prevented him from entering the Promised Land during his earthly lifetime. David's sins cost him four sons and caused great trouble for his reign. Sometimes our ‘temporary’ consequences only end when our lives do. But that's still temporary. And we should strive for and chase the eternal, not the temporary.