Conditional Instructions Part Three
In the secular world the phrase “it’s a sin” usually expresses the speakers personal opinion about one thing or another, for example: “it’s a sin how you eat your food” or “it’s a sin the way he reads the paper”. This mode of thinking carries over into the religious world also. The word “sin” should only be used to express God’s judgement. God is quite specific in his word regarding what he defines as sin. We need to use the word with the same specificity. One error often committed in this regard is what I have lately been referring to as: “the associative rule”. Let me illustrate the associative rule with an example used in a previous post. Gambling, nowhere in the Bible is gambling declared a sin. In this culture today gambling is often connected with and may lead to many things that the Bible indeed does declare as sin. Therefore due to this association many feel compelled to also label gambling a sin. This is not the way the apostle Paul would handle such an argument. He would certainly be careful to express the conditional elements and nuance to the recommendation to keep yourself from the thing without expanding on God’s reasoning by declaring the thing itself sin.
Why is this a problem? This sort of associative reasoning changes with the times so you have an ever changing list of “sins”. disputes arise when the listener has in his or her mind a different context or set of conditions than what the speaker has. This causes disputes and divisions and leads to often tedious arguments that are not shedding any light on God’s thinking, which is what we actually should be focused on. Also an argument sometimes goes on like this: one states gambling is a sin because it often leads to sexual immorality (which clearly is a sin). Then another one does not agree that gambling is a sin, then the first one accuses the second of arguing in favor of sexual immorality. This sort of thread of reasoning is often employed and causes nothing but division and results in the obscuring of God’s clear instruction. Now some instructors are able to successfully navigate these pitfalls but the environment is created where the less experienced or less knowledgeable teacher often stumbles.
Finally, let me play the unity card here. Jesus prayed to the father as recorded in the Gospel of John, chapter seventeen that we be one just as he and the father are one. The apostle Paul echoed these instructions when he appealed to the church in Corinth against divisions in that church. We can only have unity if we follow the example of Jesus in only doing and saying what the father has shown us. Even after many, many years of attempting to get some traction with this issue of conditional instructions in various religious settings I am unable to see the correctness of those who strongly disagree with this line of reasoning. This either indicates that I am exceedingly stubborn or stupid (a possibility I am willing to accept) or that the text does not support the widely held method of declaring all sorts of things sin. If we are serious about following God’s instructions we will do our very best to correctly sort these matters out according to the truth and have unity. This is my goal.