Summary 

From the very beginning, sin has made the same deceptive promise that the serpent whispered to Eve: that we can be like God, determining our own truth and morality. This lie echoes through history, from ancient pharaohs claiming divinity to modern philosophies that elevate human reason above divine revelation. However, sin's actual result is the opposite of what it promises. Instead of making us godlike, it dehumanizes us and others.

Transcript

Lord.
God. We carry crosses around our necks.
We fold palm branches into crosses. We have them before us often.
And yet it is our desire, Lord, tonight to see it maybe more clearly, to have our gaze fixed more intensely, not just on a cross, but on you, the one who went to the cross for us.
God, would you do this tonight in us? Would your Holy Spirit move among us that we might wonder again, wonder afresh at the extent of your love and your grace for us?
Hear this prayer, Lord.
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight. Amen.
Many of you are probably familiar with the Dutch Christian Corrie Ten Boon. She survived the horrors of the concentration camp. She had been harboring the Jews. She said, there is no pit so deep that Christ is not deeper still.
I suggest to you tonight that sin makes us less human. Sin is a dehumanizing thing. Now, what it does is sin promises us sort of a God likeness.
What it does actually is it makes us sub human. He humanizes us. In 1943, just months before Corrie 10 boom would be arrested and forced into the Ravensburg concentration camp, so right in the middle of World War II, the great author C.S. lewis, whom I hope also you are familiar with, he gave a series of lectures at the University of Durham. Those lectures became one of his well known books called the Abolition of Man.
Abolition, the Doing Away with Man. His argument, which is much easier to make in the middle of war when your country is being bombed, is that the world was losing its sense of what it is to be human. Our technological advances were yet once again, as they continue to do, being used to destroy human life, to depersonalize others, to dehumanize. He begins the book largely talking, if you've read it, about a British textbook that was used in his day because he was arguing that the intellectual and the cultural movements of modernity were a significant part of the problem of this abolition of man. Humanization.
Modernity was dehumanizing, of course. What do we say of the origins of modernity? The father of modern. Modern modernity, philosophy is often called Descartes, of course, had the famous phrase, cogito ergo sum, I think, therefore I am. And of course, that was replacing St. Augustine's famous phrase crede ut and telegos believe in order that you might understand, that you might know.
Which is to say that modernity is sort of founded on this idea of the supremacy of humanity. You can move God aside.
We are enough.
Sin promises us to be like God. Can replace him, but it makes us less human, subhuman, dehumanizes. Think with me back to the garden. Our original parents and their first rejection of God. The serpent comes to them, right?
And he promises them to be like God, will not surely die, for God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God.
Sin promises us this sort of godlikeness, but makes us less human.
What are its effects? Right? Initially, its effects are hiding, hovering up. That's the most immediate thing. And then quickly, if you know the story, it's blame shifting.
But then, just as soon as they are out of the garden, what happens if children were filled with envy, rage, revenge and murder? Sin is dehumanizing. And then you may remember this a little bit. At the end of chapter four in Genesis, you have Lamech, Lamech, who takes two wives. And then he has this song where he says, if Cain's revenge was great, mine will be sevenfold.
It will be more complete. It'll be more dehumanizing. Rejection of God leads not to a God likeness, subhuman reality. And if we could go through more stories in the scriptures, I'll just give you a couple kind of quick ones. Think with me of the beginning of the next chapter or the next book in the Bible, the book of Exodus.
Ancient pharaohs were considered divine gods, replacements for the true God. And what do we find that Pharaoh does with this so called divine reality, godlike reality. He enslaves. We read. He murders babies.
He hardens the workload on others. He treats others as though they are subhuman. The godlike thing that is promised with sin, dehumanizes, enslaves, promotes violence, dehumanization. If we went a little bit farther along, one of the things that happens that once these Israelites are saved out from that, and they make the long journey, often rejecting God, and the journey gets longer and they're finally brought into the promised land. You know, having followed Moses and Joshua, they're then there in the promised land.
And the Book of Judges, one of the refrains, the refrain of the Book of Judges tells the story of them rejecting God and doing their own thing. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes. I am the arbiter.
But what you find, story after story, is the destabilization of the people, violence again and again, dehumanization again and again, as they lived into this dynamic that they're just going to do what is right in their own eyes.
Now sin promises God likeness. I can decide. I can do but it makes us subhuman. Think of the Ten Commandments with me. Historically, you may know this, the Ten Commandments are kind of broken down into two tables.
Oftentimes it's thought of as the table that is God word. And towards our fellow humans, you can think of, you know, you shall have no other gods. You shall not worship idols. You shall not take the Lord's name in vain. Honor the Sabbath, orient your time, as God has instructed and God has oriented his.
All these have to do with our relationship towards God, right? But then the commandments that flow from these have to do with our relationships with others.
Honor your father and mother, but also lying and stealing and adultery and not coveting and all of the rest flow out of this.
And what happens when you actually don't follow the first ones is that you don't follow the second ones, because rejection of God is dehumanization of others.
So again, sin promises us to be like God, but makes us sub human. And think about this, the first one that's oriented towards humans, Murder. What does murder do but make us believe that we are the ones that can decide when life can happen or not, when somebody can exist or not. The godlike action is dehumanizing. What does adultery do?
What does lust do? What does pornography do but make others objects, objects for our use? Sin dehumanizes. Sin dehumanizes. What does stealing do but make us the one who decides who has what possessions?
We can be like God, and yet it dehumanizes others. What does lying and deceit and coveting and all the rest do but make us believe that we can control the narrative? We can decide what others believe or not? The godlike reality that is dehumanizing. Again and again and again, again and again, we see this sin promises, this idea, you can be like God.
What it does is it makes us less than human, less than ourselves.
Is it any wonder that on the first.
The first Holy Week way back when, you know, there's a lot of events in the Gospels, of course, that take place that we've recounted some this week together. But in that week, some of the Pharisees get some of their crew to go up to Jesus and ask him about paying taxes to Caesar. And the very coin that they would have shown right, had both the visage of Caesar on it, but it also would have had written on it, Tiberius Caesar Augustus, son of the divine Augustus, to be claiming to be like God. And it's in that context where Caesar was the divine, where people would literally have to Offer incense to Caesar and bow down and say Caesar's Lord. Within that context, in the world of the divine Augustus, that the instrument of torture was created, the most dehumanizing instrument of torture came to be form of torture that hung you for the world to see as you died.
And the cross is where people hung, often naked, almost always publicly. Slowly, slowly dying cross is where Jesus would go after a crown of thorns would have was pressed upon him. So, no, it wasn't a real crown. They knew he was being mocked. They were treating him as less than worth, dignity, a subhuman.
You know that he was instructed to carry his cross out to the place of the skull where all the crowds were treating him as subhuman, less than dehumanized across is where he would be nailed to and raised up for all to mock him, to laugh at him, to scoff him. It was dehumanizing at its best.
If there's a death that epitomizes the dehumanizing effects of sin, the cross where man is enthroned as God, dehumanization runs rampant because sin promises us a godlike reality. It is actually a dehumanizing thing. It makes us sub human. But here's the wonder that in the providence, in the unbelievable thought of God, that is how Jesus dies for us, the most dehumanizing death. And that is what he went to for us.
That's where Jesus hangs. That's where Jesus dies.
Because Jesus does not just come among us as one of us, which we celebrate wonderfully at Christmas. He does not just come among us and die some kind of way, but he dies the most dehumanizing kind of way. He goes to the place that epitomizes the effects of sin in the world, that he might bear our sin in his body on the tree. He not only gives up the glory of heaven to walk among us, but to go to the place that epitomizes the effects of sin.
Our sin is where we decide that we must be our own gods. But it's God himself who comes among us and dies for us. The very death that shouts the effects of sin. You want to see the effects of sin? You look at how we dehumanize others, how we decide how we are God.
And one of the greatest pictures of this is a cross.
And yet Corrie 10 Boone says there is no pit so deep that Christ is not deeper still.
If you're. If you were to swim off the coast of Italy, just north of Portofino, in the bay of San Frutuoso. If I can say that right, and you were to dive down 56ft, you would find a bronze sculpture. That bronze sculpture was submerged in those waters on August 29th in 1954, ten years after Corrie ten Boom was arrested. And there, if you drove down there, you would see this large sculpture of Christ and his hands are reached up.
His hands are reached up like this. And I want you to think of this. Instead of this massive bronze sculpture, life size sculpture being installed in this great church or a great museum, it's their submarine right below the water, below the surface of the water. Which is to say it's even below the surface where we exist. In some ways it's almost subhuman.
It's below our dwelling.
And it's a lovely picture because that is exactly what Jesus does on the cross. He goes to the place where we are sort of subhuman, takes our sin upon himself, which dehumanizes others. And what he's doing there in our subhuman reality is lifting us up as his hands are outstretched. That is exactly what he is doing. He's going to the low place that even there he might lift us up out from our sin.
There is no pit so deep. There's no pit so deep that Christ is not deeper still.
And we see that wonderfully in the deeps off that seacoast. But we also see it more clearly and more wonderfully in what we celebrate tonight. That Jesus goes to a cross for you. He bears the dehumanizing effects of sin. He bears your sin upon himself on that tree.
Sin promises us a godlikeness, brothers and sisters. It makes you less human, subhuman. But it's where the cross, at the cross, this place of dehumanization where Christ's arms are outstretched, that he goes to do deep place. And he lifts us up.
Let me pray for us, Lord. I pray that we would hate our sin.
I pray that we would see how it wrecks ourselves and others.
I pray that we would see how it makes us less than what you intended for us.
That it dehumanizes not only those who we sin against, but we ourselves. And so, God, I pray that we would throw it at the cross where you took our sin upon yourself, God, that we would rest in this reality. That you, Christ, Lord Jesus, you died for us.
That though we rejected you in the garden long ago, that we rejected you right out of the garden, that we rejected you time and time and time again. Again.
You came for us. You died for us.
There is no depth that you would not go to. There is no shame that you would not bear. There is no sin to grave that you would not lift us up as your hands were outstretched on that cross, Just again the wonder of your death.
Amen.

Previous Page