How God Deals with Sins

How God Deals with Sins
“Among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.”  (Ephesians 2:3)

Let us consider how God deals with any individual manifestation of sin.  We take for our example twins who are brought up in the same environment.  The best example would be brothers born of the same father and mother, and born at the same time.  We will conceive them to be equally endowed with intelligence and health, so that outwardly they are completely equal.

But one of them has come to see himself in God’s sight as a guilty and lost sinner – he has turned away from any hope of salvation through himself, he has come to put his faith in Christ alone.  The other brother has never received the Lord Jesus Christ as his Savior, and he still stands in the sight of God a lost sinner.

Now we will suppose, for the sake of our argument, that a great temptation has come to the Christian brother.  He succumbs to it.  At the same time, the unsaved brother is guilty of committing exactly the same sin.  What is the difference in the sight of God between these two acts of sin, precisely alike, committed by two men with similar backgrounds, their only difference being the presence of saving faith in the life of one and not the other?

We boldly say that there is a vast difference between God’s view of the two acts.  Further, we say that the treatment of the two sins by God is entirely different.  Let us first take the act of sin as committed by the unsaved man.  Let it be what you will – it has not changed his status before God in the slightest detail.  But until the moment that regeneration comes, he is a lost soul.  If he dies in his sins, the Word of Christ stands formally to attest it, “Where I am going, you cannot come.” (John 8:21).  The brother who is now a believer was once like the unsaved brother.   But the moment of regeneration has come – sin is dealt with once for all, and forever.  The poisonous nature of the corruption is put to the account of Christ who bears the stroke of its judgment and who frees us from its penalty forever.  That is why we can say, “By Christ, everyone who believes is freed from everything from which you could not be freed by the law of Moses” (Acts 13:39).