Sin and Righteousness -- I John 3: 4-19

The second half of John’s letter focuses on what it means to live as children of the light. The people who live by the light of God do what He does. Those who are not God’s people do not do what he does.  The first group John calls ‘righteous” and the second group he calls “sinners.”

It all seems very simple when we put it in those terms. Good people are righteous and bad people are sinners. But according to the Bible, and according to our own common sense it’s not that simple. Jesus said no one is good but God. The apostle Paul, quoting Psalms 14, says “there is none righteous, no not one.” Is anyone completely unrighteous?  Neither can we say that anyone is a total sinner. Even the worst sinner is capable at times of doing something good. There is a mixture of good and bad in all of us. 

Even so, John is right. His words are divinely inspired just like the rest of the Bible. John isn’t really dividing up the world into good people and bad ones. He is really saying something different. He’s giving us the key to tell good from evil.

People have always pondered what is good and bad. Plato, Aristotle, and the other Greeks all wrote about it. All religions define good and evil, and they have all come to different conclusions.

During most of the last two thousand years, most of our thinking has seen good and bad as whether or not we follow a list of rules for living. These rules given by God or inferred by nature are a list of “do’s” and “don’ts” such as the Ten Commandments in Judaism and Christianity. Behavior makes us good or bad. 

My grandmother had such a list. She once said, “I thank God I never sinned.” Then she thought about it and said, “Well, I did dip snuff!”  She had a list of sinful things that she had learned from childhood. This list included smoking, drinking, cussing, lying, killing, playing hooky from Church, and getting mad in public. Everyone’s grandmother had such a list. If you did them, then you’d go to hell. If you didn’t do them, then you’d go to heaven. This righteousness by obedience making is called “legalism.”  Sin is a violation of divine law. Even a small infraction of divine law is enough to send you to hell. Sin (as John says) is lawlessness. 

On the surface, this seems to be what John is saying, too. Sin is lawlessness. When we break the law, then we suffer the consequences. No one born of God is going to sin.

Today most of our world no longer sees sin as a list of “do’s” and “don’ts.” Instead they believe that good or bad is determined by the situation. This was the idea of Joseph Fletcher, who wrote the book Situation Ethics. Fletcher taught that no behavior was really bad or good in itself, but whatever was the most loving thing to do at the moment was good.  Love defines good or bad behavior. He gives a lot of extreme examples to prove this. If we lie to prevent a murderer from finding his victim, then was it bad to lie to the murderer?  If we shoot a murderer who might kill dozens of people, then does that make the killing good? If the only way a woman could feed her family was to become a prostitute, then is she really sinning?  If we lie, cheat, or steal to accomplish a good end, are those really sins? According to Fletcher, every commandment or rule can and should be broken if love demands it.

Again, you could use John in this passage to support that idea. John says that one is righteous when we love our brothers. Any act committed out of love may be called legal and ethical.

This is the way our society defines good and bad. Anything is good as long as you can make a case that it was the loving thing to do. People aren’t good or bad, just loving or not loving. This has created a huge blurring of the difference between good and bad. On television it’s hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys any more. It’s gone so far that whenever we watch some drama on television, we know that whoever appears to be a good guy at the beginning of the show will wind up being the villain at the end. So who’s right—is being “good” all about the law, or is it all about love? Is it okay for Robin Hood to steal from the rich so he can give to the poor? Is it okay for Batman to beat people up, if he only beats up the “bad guys”?

So who’s right—are the legalists right, or are the situationalists?  Is Grandma right or is television right?

This isn’t a small question, but one that is fundamental to our society and our very existence.  Should our president obey the law of the land, or should he ignore laws which are not in the interest of the greater good?  If a politician cheats in an election, is he really sinning if his opponent is “evil”?  If so, who’s to say what constitutes an evil opponent?

The Bible does not support either the legalists or the situationalists. John as a Jew supports the morality of the Old Testament law. We need a list of rules that we should or should not do. Some things like lying, cheating, stealing, killing, and adultery are fundamentally wrong. All those things your grandmother said are right and wrong are still true. 

The problem with the situationalist way of thinking is that we are not smart enough to know what the loving thing to do is. Our feelings are sinful and misleading. Suppose a woman is bored with life and marriage. She blames her husband for it, whether he’s guilty or not. He doesn’t give her “enough” attention. (Remember she’s the one who defines what “enough” is) Then along comes a man who is interesting and fascinating, who says to her that her husband doesn’t deserve her, but that he really needs and wants her. She rationalizes that her husband doesn’t need her, but that this man does. Soon she is in an adulterous relationship and she is telling herself that it’s okay, since the new man needs her more than the old one ever did. Her feelings have convinced her that this is love, so she feels ethically bound to commit the sin of adultery.

Or imagine a man who feels that his children are deprived. By “deprived’ he means that they can’t afford all the things his neighbor has like flat screen giant televisions, computer games, etc. He tells himself his children “deserves” these things as much as his neighbor does. So he steals from his neighbor, telling himself that it is out of “love” for his children. 

You may be saying that these people are lying to themselves, and you’d be right. But that’s the problem with situational ethics, because it gives us permission and incentive to lie to ourselves as much as we want. There is no distinction between lies and truth. “Love” is whatever we want it to be.

Righteousness to John is defined by God, not by us. Righteousness is not a law or a situation. It’s a direction. It’s a who, and not a what. We are either going towards God, following His direction, or we are going away from Him, following our own.    

Your grandmother was right. There really is a list of good and a bad actions. But we live in a fallen world, and sometimes we must choose the lesser of the two wrongs. That doesn’t make the wrong right.  Wrongs are bad for us, and good deeds will still be good. If we keep doing bad things, then it will kill us. But if we are born of God, then we will continue to become both more loving, and in line with God’s law. 

Sin is like a toxic substance in our food. If we keep eating poison it will eventually kill us. But it may not be possible to avoid all sin. But the person who follows God’s commands purifies himself or herself from sin. The person tries to stay away from as much of it as possible. They are on a quest to remove every toxic thought, idea, action, or feeling from his or her body and become pure. We can’t avoid all sin, but we can try. We are not satisfied with the lesser of two evils. But will seek to avoid toxic sins altogether. There are some things that are wrong and harmful to us in our relationship with God, others, and ourselves, even if they appear to be unavoidable at the time.

Violence is an absolute evil. There are no “good” acts of violence, even if some acts are sometimes necessary. General Sherman was right when he said, “War is pure hell.”  I have known men who have been haunted their whole lives over things they have done in a “good” war. It nearly destroyed their souls, as they destroyed the lives of others. These men would be the first to tell you that violence is bad, and only a fool would ever resort to violence and think it is a good thing. Lying may be necessary in extreme cases, but it is still destructive. When we engage in evil behavior, it still leaves a mark.

The question for us is this==when we have done evil things what can we do to erase that mark? What can wash away the effects of our bad choices and behavior? John tells us in verse 5, “You know that he appeared to take away sins, and in him there is no sin.” Jesus came to wash away our sins.

We cannot live a righteous life. But there is someone who can erase the sin in our lives. Jesus died so we can be cleansed from all sin. The sins we did willfully for selfish and self-seeking reasons, those we did in deception which seemed at the moment the right thing to do, those we did ignorantly when we just didn’t know right from wrong, and even those we do out of seeming necessity when we weren’t sure we had any other choice. To all of them, Jesus says, “I forgive you. Go and sin no more.”  Instead of worrying about the sins of our past, Jesus want us to focus on following him in the future. Will you accept His forgiveness of the past and follow Him, or will you continue to go your own willful way, ignoring Him?

That is the choice we all must make.