“When Joshua heard the sound of the people as they shouted, he said to Moses, ‘There is a sound of war in the camp.’ But Moses replied, ‘It’s not the sound of a victory cry and not the sound of a cry of defeat; I hear the sound of singing.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Many years ago, I read a book that was more transformative in my thinking about sin than anything else I’ve ever read save the Scriptures themselves. It was called The Smell of Sin and the Fresh Air of Grace by Don Everts. The basic premise is that in order to understand grace more fully, we need to understand sin more truly. To this end, Everts, in beautifully poetic prose, starts the book with an exploration of the ways the culture around us (at the Enemy’s direction) falsely portrays sin. What we see here falls right in line with one of the descriptions he gives. Let’s talk about forbidden fun and the reality of sin.

As Moses and Joshua were coming down the mountain at God’s direction, they could hear the cacophony of sound long before they could see what was actually happening. Occasionally I’ll be listening to a song, but I’ll have the volume lower than I can really hear what key it’s in. When this happens, I’ll start singing along in the wrong key. A bit more volume reveals the truth. While I was perhaps singing the right words, since I wasn’t in the same key as the original, putting them side by side didn’t sound very good at all. From their position high on the mountain, the noise coming from camp sounded like many things to them. It sounded like a battle, it sounded like a celebration, it sounded like chaos. That last one was perhaps closest to the truth.

As they got a little bit lower and could better discern what their ears were picking up, it became clear that the sound was singing. The people were singing. What on earth could the people have been singing for? While it doesn’t happen very often, large groups of people do occasionally spontaneously break out into song together. There’s the beautiful story (though possibly mythical) from World War I of Allied and German lines taking up an impromptu ceasefire one Christmas Eve after, in a quiet moment when both sides were trying to have some semblance of home, they could each hear the other trench singing “Silent Night.” Something like this wasn’t the case with Israel. Their singing would have been from some kind of a celebration. Yet what were they celebrating?

As it turns out, they were celebrating chaos. They were celebrating idolatry. They were celebrating sin. A group of them had given themselves completely over to a chaotic worship of the calf idols Aaron had made for them, and they were out of control. We’ll talk more about that next week. We don’t know what their being out of control consisted of, but they had likely given themselves over to having a great time in some form or fashion, and had entirely lost sight of the fact that their great time was in total and complete disregard of the commands God had given them and which they had just agreed to follow as a function of their being in a relationship with Him. God had explicitly told them not to do this, and here they were doing it anyway.

One of the biggest lies about sin that any culture has ever told is that it is about getting our hands on something (tangible or intangible doesn’t matter) that should be ours by right and which the arbitrary rules of some religion have unjustly prevented us from having. This is an easy lie to believe too. After all, we want it. We don’t like being told no. So, we convince ourselves that we should have. Surely we wouldn’t want something we shouldn’t have, right? And besides, what kind of authority does some invisible God really have over us. Who is “He” to tell us what we should and shouldn’t desire? He doesn’t know what it’s like to be human. He’s really just trying to keep all the good stuff for Himself.

This deluded thinking has been in place since the Fall. Whether it was an actual talking snake or the whole thing was just a vehicle for presenting the idea, how did the Serpent frame things for Eve in the Garden? You won’t surely die, you’ll be like God, knowing good and evil. What is that? He’s trying to keep something from you that should be yours by right.

This is the essential argument of movies like Footloose and Pleasantville. In both cases, we are told through the vehicle of the story that dancing and sex (as stand-ins for having a good time – whatever that means – more generally) are things that we have a right to be able to enjoy. It is the restricting forces of religion that are keeping us from these good things.

Yet who says whatever it is we are wanting that some religion’s God or arbitrary rule has said we shouldn’t have is a right? Us? That hardly seems right. Rights have to be granted. They have to be granted by someone. You can’t grant yourself rights. Someone above you has to own whatever it is and declare you as entitled to have access to it. That’s how rights work. So, to think of something as a right that is being denied to us assumes there is someone or something that has granted us whatever it is as a right. What’s more, this someone or something has to have greater authority than the God or religion that has denied it to us. Yet again, who is this? Often these protests against religious commands come from sources that are secular of some variety. That is, they reject the idea of higher powers or divine beings. So then, who grants these things as a right to us? And arguing that, “Well, they just are,” doesn’t cut it here.

The truth is that at the bottom of these arguments is an attempt to make ourselves the gods of our own little universes where we are totally sovereign over the affairs of our kingdom. We do this ostensibly so that we are free from any kind of outside interference. There’s the plot of Frozen in a nutshell. Elsa found her freedom when she went off to live in her own little kingdom all by herself. She wouldn’t have to pretend anymore. She wouldn’t have to hold back. She wouldn’t have to deny who she truly was for the sake of the people around her. She had given herself a one way ticket to reaching her fullest potential. She was also entirely alone. It’s a lot harder to get and stay happy when there’s no one to share in your happiness with you. Yet if your happiness depends on your ability to get and hang onto what you want, you can’t have anyone else around because eventually their desires are going to conflict with your desires, and then you’ll have a problem that you can’t solve except by denying someone’s ability to get what they desire.

No, what winds up happening in each of these little fiefdoms is that we come to be ruled by our desires. Our emotions hold all the power over us. We can become utterly trapped by our wants and “needs.” The tyranny of self is one of the most terrifying tyrannies there is.

So then, allow me to propose an alternative. There exists a God who created the world and everything in it. This God is good and wise. As a part of His creating, He introduced all kinds of good things to the world. Things for us to enjoy to their fullest. Now, we don’t have a “right” to these things such that we somehow should have access to them. Rather, they are gifts to be freely enjoyed. But in each of these cases, He created these good things to be enjoyed in a particular context. When we enjoy them in that context, whatever it happens to be, we can enjoy them to the fullest. Indeed, using a tool as it was designed always results in the best outcomes. Pursuing these good things in any other context will result not merely in less enjoyment, but active harm. Because of this, this good and wise God put some guardrails around these things in the form of what we identify as rules.

Initially, these rules were pretty numerous and restrictive because we needed to learn for sure what the proper contexts for enjoying these good things were. Over time, though, as we learned to trust Him and to pursue His character in more and more things (a pursuit which always results in using His good gifts as they were meant to be enjoyed), He was able to lift some of the rules like a parent taking off the training wheels on their child’s bicycle. He was even eventually able to replace the big block of rules with one very simple rule: love one another the way I have loved you. Now, if we seek to obey that one rule, everything else falls nicely into place.

Sin is living out of sync with God’s character, properly understood. If we are out of sync with God’s character, we are highly likely to be pursuing these good gifts in ways and at times that don’t line up with His intent for them. It may feel good in a moment to do this (and indeed, if you are sinning and it doesn’t feel good, you’re probably not doing it right…although I can think of worse things to be than incompetent at sinning), but the feeling won’t last, and eventually the consequences for pursuing God’s good gifts in ways that don’t fit His design for them will come due. That won’t be much fun. Rather than doubting God’s character and claiming things as rights that we never had a right to in the first place, let’s trust His character and let Him lead us into the life that is truly life.