Every Sin is Against God

Every sin is ultimately committed against God Himself.

We tend to measure our sins by their visible effects on other people. We feel the weight of a lie when it damages someone who trusted us. We feel the weight of a harsh word when it wounds someone we love. We feel the weight of theft, betrayal, and cruelty when we can see the harm written across the face of the person we harmed. But this way of measuring sin, while it captures something real, misses the deepest reality of what sin actually is. Sin does harm people. It harms them genuinely and sometimes irreparably. But the harm done to people is not the deepest dimension of what sin is. The deepest dimension is that every sin, regardless of who else it touches, is ultimately committed against God Himself.

The Bible is full of people who understood this when they came to their senses about their sin. Pharaoh said it in a moment of pressure: "I have sinned against the Lord your God and against you" (Exodus 10:16). Achan said it after his theft was uncovered, "Truly I have sinned against the Lord, the God of Israel" (Joshua 7:20). The people of Israel said it in their repentance, "We have sinned against You, for indeed we have forsaken our God" (Judges 10:10). In each case the recognition went past the human dimension of the sin to the divine dimension underneath it. The sin had affected people, but the sinner eventually saw that the offense reached higher than the people it had touched. It reached all the way to God.

Joseph saw the situation with remarkable clarity in the moment of his greatest temptation. When Potiphar's wife pressed him day after day to lie with her, his refusal was grounded not primarily in loyalty to Potiphar but in his relationship to God. There is no one greater in this house than I, and he has withheld nothing from me except you, his wife. How then could I do this great evil and sin against God?" Genesis 39:9. Notice where Joseph placed the offense. Not against Potiphar, though Potiphar would certainly have been wronged. Against God. The adultery would have been a betrayal of his master, but the deeper betrayal would have been against the God whose law forbade it, and it was the offense against God that Joseph could not bring himself to commit even when no human being would have known.

David understood the same thing after his sin with Bathsheba, and his understanding came only after the Lord sent the prophet Nathan to confront him. David had committed adultery with another man's wife and then arranged the death of her husband to cover the consequences. 2 Samuel 11. He had sinned grievously against Bathsheba, against Uriah, against his own household, and against the nation he was supposed to be leading in righteousness. And yet when the weight of his sin finally broke him, the cry that came out of him reached past all the human victims to the One who stood above them all. "Against You You only I have sinned and done what is evil in Your sight." Psalm 51:4. Against You only. David was not denying that he had wronged people. He was recognizing that beneath every human dimension of his sin lay the deeper reality that the law he had violated was God's law, and the offense he had committed was finally an offense against the God who gave it.

There is an illustration that helps us understand why this is true. When a man commits a crime, the person he has harmed is not the one who brings him to justice. If a man breaks into his neighbor's house and steals from him, the neighbor does not have the authority to convict and punish him. The neighbor has been wronged, genuinely and personally, but the prosecution is not the neighbor's to carry out. The crime was a violation of the law, and the state that established the law is the authority that holds the criminal accountable. The neighbor defers to the higher authority because the higher authority is the one whose law was actually broken. The personal injury to the neighbor is real, but the legal offense is against the law and against the authority that stands behind it.

Every moral law works the same way, and every moral law begins with God. He is the lawgiver. He is the standard. He is the authority whose nature defines what is right and what is wrong. When we sin against another person, we have certainly wronged that person, but the deeper offense is against God, whose law we have broken. He is the one whose authority has been defied. He is the one whose standard has been violated. He is the one to whom we will finally have to give an account, regardless of whether the human beings we have harmed ever pursue any accountability with us at all. "There is only one Lawgiver and Judge, the One who is able to save and to destroy" (James 4:12). One Lawgiver. One judge. The human dimensions of our sins are real, but the final reckoning is with the One who gave the law in the first place.

This is also why we know intuitively when we have sinned, even before anyone teaches us that it is wrong. We were created in God's image, and the moral law is woven into our very being. Genesis 1:27. Adam and Eve had received no written law when they ate from the forbidden tree, only a single spoken command, and yet the moment they sinned, they knew what they had done and hid themselves from the presence of the Lord. Genesis 3:8 to 10. The hiding was evidence of their knowing. They did not need a written code to tell them they had violated something. The violation registered in them immediately because the law they had broken was the law of the God in whose image they had been made, and the image itself carried the awareness of the offense. Paul describes this universal moral awareness in Romans 2:15, saying that the work of the law is written on the hearts of even those who never received the written law, their conscience bearing witness and their thoughts accusing or defending them.

When we sin, we are not merely breaking a rule. We are defacing the image we were created to bear. We were made to reflect the glory of God, crowned by Him with glory and honor, and set over the works of His hands as creatures designed to display His character to the watching creation. Hebrews 2:7. Sin is the marring of that design, the distortion of the very thing we were made to display. Every sin diminishes the reflection we were created to give, and the diminishing is an offense against the One whose glory we were made to mirror. This is why sin is never a small thing even when its visible effects seem minor. The smallest sin is a defacing of the image of God in a creature made to display His glory, and this defacing is an offense against the God whose glory has been obscured by it. The work of redemption restores what sin defaced, creating the new self in the likeness of God in righteousness and holiness and truth. Ephesians 4:24. What we were created to be in the beginning is what we are being remade into in Christ, and sin in the life of the believer works against the very restoration the gospel has begun.

This truth is what makes the universal reach of Romans 3:23 so weighty. "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." Fall short of the glory of God. The standard we have failed to meet is not a human standard. It is the glory of God Himself. Every sin, whether it harms another person or harms only ourselves or appears to harm no one at all, falls short of the glory of God and therefore stands as an offense against the God whose glory it has failed to reflect. There is no such thing as a sin that is only horizontal, only between us and another person, with no vertical dimension reaching up to God. The vertical dimension is always present because the law is always His and the glory we have fallen short of is always His.

The recognition of this changes how we approach our sin. We stop measuring it merely by its visible effects on others and begin to feel its weight as an offense against the holy God who made us and gave us His law. We stop excusing the sins that seem to harm no one because we understand that even those sins are against God. We stop comparing our sins to the worse sins of others because we understand that the comparison is irrelevant when every sin is finally measured against the same infinite standard, which is the glory of God Himself. And we run, as David ran, not to self-justification or to minimizing what we have done, but to the only place where the offense against God can be dealt with: the cross where the Son of God bore the offenses of His people against the Father whose law they had broken.

The cross is also where the gospel becomes more glorious than we usually allow it to be. If every sin is against God, then the forgiveness of sin requires that God Himself provide the satisfaction for the offense committed against Him. And He has done this. "He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him" (2 Corinthians 5:21). The God who was offended is the God who provided the offering that satisfied the offense. The sins we committed against Him were borne by His own Son, who absorbed in His own body the penalty our offenses against the Father deserved. The vertical dimension of sin, which makes every sin infinitely serious because it is against an infinite God, is the same vertical dimension that makes the gospel infinitely precious, for the infinite God has Himself provided the way for our infinite offenses to be forgiven through the work of His Son.

So let us learn to see our sin the way Scripture sees it. Not merely as harm done to people, though it is that. Not merely as the breaking of rules, though it is that. But as an offense against the holy God who made us, gave us His law, and will hold us accountable for every violation of it. And let us run from every sin to the only Savior who can cleanse us from the guilt of offenses committed against the very God who sent Him to bear them. The God we have sinned against is the God who has provided the way back to Himself, and the recognition of how deeply we have offended Him is the recognition that most powerfully drives us to the grace that has covered the offense through the blood of His Son.

Article by Jeremiah Knight/ The Reformation Resurgence

Image by Jeremiah Knight

He who has ears, let him hear. (Matthew 11:15)