“Since they didn’t bother to acknowledge God, God quit bothering them and let them run loose. And then all hell broke loose: rampant evil, grabbing and grasping, vicious backstabbing. They made life hell on earth with their envy, wanton killing, bickering, and cheating. Look at them: mean-spirited, venomous, fork-tongued God-bashers. Bullies, swaggerers, insufferable windbags! They keep inventing new ways of wrecking lives. They ditch their parents when they get in the way. Stupid, slimy, cruel, cold-blooded. And it’s not as if they don’t know better. They know perfectly well they’re spitting in God’s face. And they don’t care—worse, they hand out prizes to those who do the worst things best!” Romans 1:28-32, The Message
That doesn’t sound like very good news at all. Sin is frightening in the way it can run out of control. But there may be some good news to be found: Listen to Eugene Peterson:
“Sin isn’t a skeleton in the closet that we surround with restrictions to keep it in its place. It’s a defective relationship with God. If we aren’t convinced of the nature of that defect in our lives it’s unlikely we will accept the remedy for that defect.
The failure to treat God as God, to honor him and thank him, Paul calls Sin, with a capital S, from which all lowercase sins ultimately proceed. If we, having read Paul’s gospel, were to still think that sin is sensuality or vice or crudeness or any of the bad things we do, we would have missed his point completely. Paul wants us to understand that all those things are derivative. Sin, he asserts, is that original rebellion against God, that basic act of leaving him, that foundational failure to treat him as the Almighty.
This disaffection from God, called Sin, is humanity’s despair. But when Paul writes of it, it’s anything but despair, for by tracing our sins to their source, he prepares us for the solution. That solution has nothing to do with self-help and everything to do with a Savior.”