How Would a fish describe water
Ok, this is purely hypothetical, since I’ve grown up with fishing in the lakes of Minnesota and now Michigan and none of the fish actually talk. The question gets at how hard it is to describe an environment you are swimming in accurately, when it is all you know.
Let’s talk about sin for humans. Since the great fall in Genesis 3, humans are swimming in it. Sin. Falling short of the glory and goodness of God. Transgressing the boundaries; disobeying the commandments. We know sin personally like a fish knows water experientially. But to continue the question, would a fish be better able to define and describe water than a human? On the fish’s side, it is something they know and live in daily, intimately. But the human can describe water as different from dry land, from air, and the contrast of knowing life beyond the water can explain H2O in ways the fish never could imagine. Plus, a fish brain is considerably smaller than a human’s.
By analogy, I am making the case that I am more like a fish when it comes to describing and defining what sin is, but God is more like the human in our comparison. His thoughts are way higher than ours, and since God does not swim in sin nor gets pushed by waves and currents of sin all around heaven, the ability of God to describe and define sin goes way beyond ours. What is right and wrong is defined by the purity, righteousness, holiness and love of God’s own eternal nature far more than my sin-impacted reason, experience, rituals or traditions.
So, let’s get practical. Our human (humanism) redefinitions of what sin is or isn’t don’t really hold water…sorry, couldn’t resist the metaphor. We need the corrective vision of eternal, holy Scripture that comes from God to give us laser eye surgery or new glasses to see clearly. We need special revelation from God’s Word, not general revelation from our experience with creation, our patterns of centuries in history, or our best reasoning as humans.
Does the Bible see worldliness as sin, when we often don’t? Yes, “Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common?” (2 Cor. 6:14). “You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world is hatred toward God?” (James 4:4) Many verses in First John describe worldliness as sin in detail.
Does the Bible also see sins of omission as possible? Yes, and these are harder to detect the damage from them, since people sort of rightly claim, “I didn’t do anything”. And that’s the problem, God says. “Anyone, then, who knows the good he ought to do and doesn’t do it, sins.” James 4:17. Oh, the piles of damage from sins of omission may even exceed sins of commission in some of our churches, communities and homes, but these are sins we can often hide in plain sight.
Back to the fish to close this out with Jesus. Did you picture that fish in clean pure water? What if it is cloudy from pollution and filled with toxic chemicals? Will the fish thrive there? No, it’s very life is in peril. Reproduction is highly unlikely. Misery is increasing.
So here are six steps from Scripture that are part of God’s sin management system, to get the dangerous pollution out of our environment so we can thrive again.
1 John 1:9 “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.” We have a part in this, to confess to Jesus what he defines as sin in Scripture alone, not what we do or don’t call sin with our water-logged fish brain. This step alone should take out 90% of the pollution we are swimming in personally.
James 5:16. “Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for one another so you may be healed. The prayers of a righteous person are powerful and effective.” If we are not getting victory over some sin challenging our life with pollution, confess it also to another person and pray together for healing on that. This could take care of another 8% of the remaining sin in our environment.
Galatians 6:1. “Brothers, if someone is caught in a sin, you who are spiritual should restore him gently.” Hopefully now we are just talking about 2% of the sin left clinging to us, if we are being proactive in steps 1 and 2, so then others have to come to us for an intervention, a rescue, to get us out of the pollution that remains. The idea is that persons identifying strongly with the purity, love and holiness of heaven (those who are of the spiritual realm/identity in Christ alone) can come and cleanse remaining worldliness in another, when that person is not taking appropriate action themselves but instead spreading pollution.
Matthew 18:15. “If your brother sins against you, go and show him his fault, just between the two of you. If he listens to you, you have won your brother over.” Jesus takes up the purity of his church here in this passage, and urges three more steps when the sin of another is against you. Let’s be sure we are using biblical definitions of sin here, not just personal preferences, stereotypes or victimhood “triggering” to claim you are being sinned against.
Matthew 18:16. “But if he will not listen, take one or two others along, so that ‘every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.’” This escalation involves others to increase the persuasion for the sinner to separate from the sin by repentance and confession openly.
Matthew 18:17 “If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church, and if he refuses to listen to even the church, treat him as you would a pagan or a tax collector.” The restoration of the sinner and the reconciliation of relationship is in view all the way as a primary goal, but an ultimate goal is the purity of the church as well (clean water for future generations to swim in). Removing the sinner from the pool they are in, from among the other schools of fish, can be necessary to deal with the seriousness of sin as deadly pollution.