Sin's Tell-Tale Heart and Forgiveness in Christ

Dealing With the Seemingly Sisyphean Task of the Law's Demands

Good Morning,

Much of the Christian life is dealing with the conviction of the Holy Spirt and understanding the blessing it is to know that God loves you enough to move you to repentance. The struggle is one of the ways we can testify that the Lord seeks our good. That may seem backwards, but notice how the saintest of saints in the Bible all speak to the way that they feel their sin. It is part of why they so sweetly talk of the power and strength of the free gift of grace. When we are being honest about our transgressions of the law and our desire to no longer fall in those ways, when we are repenting from what we have done and looking unto the finished work of Christ there is a true comfort which God has promised to lay on us. A lot of people are carrying around the burden of sin without knowing where to put it. They drag it from day to day, never finding peace, and wailing for relief into the darkness of nothingness.

There is a famous story in mythology where a fellow is pushing a rock up a hill only to come near to the top and see the rock fall back down, and there he starts again. This fellow named Sisyphus is a good example from secular literature that wisely describes what most people’s fight with the weight of sin looks like. They are trying to toss their anguish into the bottom of the pit but cannot get it there for a couple of reasons. First, they love their sin more than they hate the pain. They are willing to put up with the consequence to remain in the temporal fun of the sin. Second, they don’t really believe those consequences will happen to them. They spend a lot of their time gaslighting their own souls, shifting blame to whoever is easiest and/or nearby. For today’s prayer and worship help we are going to talk some more about the nature of the sting of sin and how it is we can rightly rid ourselves of the negative aspects of conviction, and see it as part of the blessings of God’s gift and grant of faith and our place in His covenant kingdom. Hope is freely available for all sinners in Christ.

There are a couple places we can go to find biblical examples which model a type of Sisyphean hopelessness in our battle against the breaking of God’s commandments. The place all of our minds likely go is Solomon’s description of his own treadmill life in the book of Ecclesiastes. You have probably heard me say that Ecclesiastes is in some ways the most real to our own experience in that the devil is often asking us to always look on the dark side of life. For the purpose of today’s lesson Ecclesiastes 1:5-8 is a good place to start in thinking through this:

The sun also rises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it arose. The wind goes toward the south, and turns around to the north; the wind whirls about continually, and comes again on its circuit. All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full; to the place from which the rivers come, there they return again. All things are full of labor; man cannot express it. The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.

The above may sound like a riddle and/or may just be outright confusing. Consider though how it expresses the never-ending battle with sin. To use a more modern metaphor it would be like seeking to win a marathon by running 26.2 miles on a treadmill. You aren’t actually reaching the goal, and you haven’t actually gone anywhere, yet you are exhausted. No closer to the finish line than if you had just not done anything. Ideally that is what the devil desires for you. To both do that which is ineffectual and destroys your yearning to fight, and cause you to just give up and learn to enjoy the sin. There is much that we can learn from negative cases and there is no better one than thinking about how Judas handled the realization of his evil doings against our Lord. Destruction of self is never an answer, nor does it work.

Rather than get into his well-known story there is another example from literature that I think is as well geared towards thinking about the danger of ignoring the Holy Spirit’s leanings and that is Edgar Allan Poe’s A Tell-Tale Heart. In that story a man thinks he has found a way to commit the perfect murder. Yet as the tale is told he begins to hear what he thinks is the dead man’s heart beating under the floorboards. As the sound grows he becomes more and more mad and eventually breaks down and confesses his crime to the authorities. That’s exactly what the devil does with our condemnation, and his goal is for us to not confess to God, but to do everything we can to hide the beating heart in such a way that eventually we are deaf to it, or at least we think we are. The truth is often far different as the Bible speaks clearly on.

In closing, in 1 John 3:2 the apostle says, “For if our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and knows all things.” Whereas Poe’s antagonist had no means to deal with the body in the ground the good news of the gospel is that 1 John 1:9 notes, “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” The word is is, as they say, doing a lot of work there. Remember what name God gives to Moses in Exodus? Ex. 3:14 notes, “ And God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” And He said, “Thus you shall say to the children of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’” Is is who God Is. His promise is sure and true for it represents the reality of the now. You don’t need to wait to receive the assurance of the forgiveness offered in Christ. That is your hope. It is good for us now to testify to the reason we believe it:

Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.” – Matt. 11:28-30

Last word:

https://gentlereformation.com/2022/07/09/all-things-forgiveness/

Blessings in Christ,

Rev. Benjamin Glaser

Pastor, Bethany ARP Church