Transcript
Sin and Salvation
First Baptist Richmond, September 27, 2026
Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Luke 15:1-10
Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.”
“Are you saved?”
That’s what the street corner evangelist wants to know. Are you saved? And what he means is, “Are you going to heaven when you die?”
Today I want to talk to you about sin and salvation, and while I certainly want you to go to heaven when you die I want to talk about more than that, because those words are bigger than that.
The word sin for instance: it’s used in the Old Testament hundreds of times, long before God’s people had any concept of heaven or hell. The most common Hebrew word for sin is chatah, which means “to miss the mark.” That’s a very generous definition. It’s not like you weren’t aiming for the target; it’s just that you missed. It’s a little different from the other two words for sin. One is avah, which means “to act wrongly,” and the other is pasha, which means “to rebel.”
But all of these words are in the Old Testament in a very matter of fact way. The first time someone sinned it was a shock, certainly (you may remember that story from the first few chapters of Genesis), but after that everyone, even God, seemed to understand that this is just what humans do—they sin. And so what was needed was some way of dealing with sin.
I was looking at Leviticus chapter 5 and was amazed by how practical it was, like something out of a first aid manual. The author writes: “When any of you sin (chatah) you shall confess the sin that you have committed, and you shall bring to the Lord a female from the flock, a sheep or a goat, as a purification offering. But if you cannot afford a sheep, you shall bring to the Lord two turtledoves or two pigeons. And if you can’t afford that, bring one tenth of an ephah of choice flour. And the priest shall make atonement on your behalf for your sin…and you shall be forgiven.”
For centuries, this was the way the people of God dealt with sin. They would take an offering and go to the temple. They would confess their sin, the priest would make atonement, and they would go home again, forgiven. There’s even a provision in the law for people who break a commandment without realizing it! But for those who were paying attention it was pretty straightforward. All 613 commandments were right there in the Bible.
And what was the goal of all this? Right relationship with God, the one who made you, and loved you, and wanted you for his own. When you found out that you had broken one of his commandments, whether it was by accident or on purpose, you felt the guilt of your sin, you wanted to relieve yourself of that burden, you wanted to make things right with God so that you could be on good terms again. So, you went out to the sheepfold and got a lamb. I feel sorry for the lamb, but in those days that’s what people had; it was something of value. And they seemed to understand that sin should cost you something.
When my wife was teaching kindergarten she called this an “apology of action.” That’s when it wasn’t enough for one child to say to another, “I’m sorry.” “No,” Mrs. Somerville would say, patiently, “you colored on her page. I need you to think about what you can do to make things right.” And the next day the child might bring a whole
new coloring book, and give it to the one she had wronged. And then they would hug and start coloring together.
It seems simple enough, but it acknowledges a terrible truth: sin separates. It separates us from God and it separates us from others. The illustration I use is the boy sitting at the kitchen table, doing his math homework, while his mother makes cookies. He doesn’t enjoy math, but he enjoys being with his mom, and the smell of cookies in the oven is like heaven on earth. But when they cool his mother puts them in the cookie jar and says, “Now, I need to run to the store and get a few things for supper. Don’t take any of those cookies; they’re for dessert.”
But as soon as she’s gone he drags his chair over to the counter, reaches up on the shelf, and takes down the cookie jar. He takes one out and rearranges the others so you can’t even tell it’s missing. He gobbles it down, wipes the crumbs from his mouth, and when his mom comes home she can’t tell that anything has changed. But he can. He knows he has disobeyed. Being in the same room with his mother begins to feel more and more uncomfortable, and so he excuses himself, goes up to his own room, and finishes his homework, alone and miserable.
That’s where I usually end the story, but I see now that it could have had a different ending. The boy could have stayed in his room until he couldn’t stand it any more—the sin, the separation! He could have come downstairs and confessed to his mother, “I’m sorry, I couldn’t help myself!” And she might have stood there for a minute with her hands on her hips, but finally said, “Well then, you can do the dishes after supper!” And he would have hated that, but he would have loved being back in the same room with his mother.
Can you see how the goal of all of this is right relationship, and how sin has this sinister way of separating us from the ones we love, and from the God who loves us? I
sometimes say that if the most important thing in the world is to love God and love others, then sin is anything that keeps us from doing that. And there are plenty of things that keep us from doing that, probably more than 613.
Now imagine that you are one of those first disciples, following Jesus, and imagine you’ve grown up as a faithful first century Jew, where this is how you deal with sin—you take a sacrifice to the temple. And then imagine that you go to Jerusalem with Jesus believing that he is God’s anointed one, the Messiah, that you enter the city with a huge crowd shouting “Hosanna to the King!” and that within a matter of days Jesus has been condemned and crucified as a criminal.
For three days you might sit in an upper room in a state of shock, wondering what it means that the Messiah has been crucified, but on the third day you might stand in the presence of the Living Lord and begin to wonder what it means that the crucified Messiah has been raised from the dead.
Take a look at the Gospels sometime, and at those early letters of Paul. These are people who are trying to figure out the death and resurrection of Jesus, and they come up with a number of different explanations. In Acts 10 Peter explains it by saying, “They (meaning the religious and political authorities of Jerusalem) put Jesus to death by hanging him on a tree, but God raised him on the third day” (vss. 39-40). In 2 Corinthians 5 Paul looks at it a little differently, writing, “In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them.” Other writers began to dig back into the Old Testament, seeing parallels between what happened to Jesus and what happened to that suffering servant in the Book of Isaiah: “He was wounded for our transgressions, and by his stripes we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5).
I want you to realize that in those first few centuries of Christianity there were a number of different explanations for why Jesus died on the cross, and in the centuries
that followed there were a number of different explanations for how his death and resurrection serve to make us right with God. These are called “atonement theories,” and there are at least four of them: the Ransom Theory, the Satisfaction Theory, the Moral Influence Theory, and the one that is probably most familiar to us, the Penal Substitutionary theory, which theologian Shirley Guthrie once explained by telling a story. He said:
A boy went to a revival meeting where the preacher held up a dirty glass. “See this glass?” he said. “That’s you. Filthy. Stained with sin, inside and outside.” He picked up a hammer. “This hammer is the righteousness of God. It is the instrument of God’s wrath against sinners. God’s justice can be satisfied only by punishing and destroying people whose lives are filled with vileness and corruption.” The preacher put the glass on the pulpit and slowly, deliberately, drew back the hammer, took deadly aim, and with all his might let the blow fall. But a miracle happened! At the last moment he covered the glass with a pan. The hammer struck with a crash that echoed through the hushed church. He held up the untouched glass with one hand and the mangled pan with the other. “Jesus Christ died for your sins. He took the punishment that ought to have fallen on you. He satisfied the righteousness of God so that you might go free if you believe in him.”i
I don’t know if that sounds familiar to you. I don’t know if you’ve been to those kinds of revival meetings, but I have, and I have my own thoughts about that theory of atonement. I believe that during the Middle Ages, when most people didn’t have access to the Bible, their image of hell became more and more terrifying. They piled every frightening thing they could think of onto that side of the scale. Which means that the other side of the scale, human sin, had to get heavier and heavier just to balance things
out. Because if there’s any justice, the punishment must fit the crime, and if the punishment is everlasting torment in the flames of hell, then the crime must be horrific!
As a consequence the holiness of God, the judge, was intensified. You can almost see him holding up the scale with a frown on his face. Theologians began to talk about his righteous wrath, directed against human sins and the human sinners who commit them. And, as a consequence of that, the atoning death of Jesus was intensified. Theologians began to imagine that he must have died the most horrible death anyone has ever died, because that’s what it would take to forgive us of our filthy sins. This spiral continued downward, through the centuries—with hell becoming more frightening, our sins becoming more repugnant, God’s wrath becoming more violent, Jesus’ death becoming more ghastly—until you have a revival preacher standing in front of a crowd getting ready to smash a glass with a hammer, because that’s what we deserve, but instead mangling a pan, because Jesus was willing to be our substitute.
I call this “Virgin-in-the-Volcano” theology, and you may have heard me talk about it before. When my daughter Catherine did a semester abroad in Costa Rica she took a side trip to Nicaragua and visited an active volcano that her tour guide described as one of the “seven entrances to Hell.” In primitive times the people of that region thought that some angry god inhabited the volcano, and when it started to rumble they would throw virgins or young children into the volcano to appease that god. That’s unthinkable, isn’t it? We reject that as primitive, pagan superstition. And yet the theory of penal substitutionary atonement is precisely that: it suggests that our sinfulness so offended God’s holiness that he was on the verge of destroying us, and none of us was perfect enough or pure enough to appease his anger. But then came Jesus—the sinless Son of God—who was willing to offer himself as a sacrifice for our sins.
And apparently that was enough.
That kind of theology could make you fall in love with Jesus, the one who took the punishment you deserved. It could make you want to stand up and sing hymns about him, with tears streaming down your cheeks. “Alas, and did my Savior bleed, and did my sovereign die? Would he devote that sacred head for such a worm as I?” As I said, it could make you fall in love with Jesus, but it could also teach you to hate God, picturing him as the hammer who is willing to smash us to pieces, while Jesus is the pan willing to take the blow.
What happened to the goal of right relationship with God, the one who made you, and loves you, and wants you for his own? What happened to the parables Jesus used to tell, about a shepherd looking for his lost sheep, a woman looking for her lost coin, or a father running down the road to greet his prodigal son? God wants relationship with us, he wants things to be right between us. But we don’t seem to be able to trust his love. As a consequence, we’ve turned hell into a subterranean torture chamber, and turned sin into the crime that deserves such punishment, and turned God into a righteous judge whose holiness is offended by our sin, and turned Jesus into the only sacrifice pure enough and perfect enough to appease God’s anger. We have done that. It is not the biblical view. But it’s often that’s what we think of when we think of sin and salvation.
But let’s think of it another way. Let’s think of that boy sitting alone in his room, doing his math homework, miserable. Eventually, even he can’t stand it any more. He comes downstairs and says, “Mom? I ate a cookie.” And in this version of the story she still makes him do the dishes after supper, but as he’s finishing up she brings him a cookie on a plate and gives him a hug.
Because she loves him.
Because she always has.
At its root, the word salvation means to heal or make whole. Maybe what we need most is for our relationship with God to be healed and made whole, and maybe that’s why Jesus came in the first place: to show us the beating heart of God, and to show us that it beats with love. So, let me ask the street corner evangelist’s question again: “Are you saved?” And then let me add:
Do you want to be?
–Jim Somerville, 2026