How Do I Explain Sin to Someone for the First Time?

00:00:00.000 | (upbeat music)

00:00:02.580 | - We're back one more time with guest Don Carson,

00:00:07.800 | and one of the things that impresses me

00:00:09.560 | about you and your ministry is your eagerness

00:00:12.040 | to share the gospel on college campuses.

00:00:15.360 | And given the difficulty of communicating

00:00:17.920 | biblical truth to post-moderns,

00:00:20.040 | here's my question for you,

00:00:21.960 | and it's a question we get quite frequently

00:00:23.920 | from listeners and from ministers, and it's this.

00:00:27.180 | Is it possible to explain original sin

00:00:30.240 | to an audience of non-Christian college students

00:00:33.400 | without appealing to biblical evidence?

00:00:36.400 | How would you do it?

00:00:37.360 | Where would you begin?

00:00:39.080 | And do you sense this challenge yourself?

00:00:42.280 | - The hardest thing to get across

00:00:43.440 | on a university campus today is the nature of sin, by far.

00:00:46.360 | If you start talking about the Trinity,

00:00:48.920 | or the incarnation, or the resurrection of Christ,

00:00:51.560 | and you explain as best you can

00:00:53.520 | in the time you've got what you mean,

00:00:55.680 | then the people who are biblically literate there

00:00:57.620 | will say, "Oh, is that what Christians believe?"

00:00:59.380 | Well, that's pretty weird.

00:01:01.380 | But yeah, I understand what you're saying,

00:01:03.500 | and they're not gonna push back on it, particularly.

00:01:06.960 | The people who ask the hardest questions

00:01:08.640 | at those sorts of meetings are not the non-Christians.

00:01:10.580 | They don't know enough to ask the tough questions.

00:01:13.340 | They're the Christians who show up

00:01:14.540 | and then try to use that forum

00:01:16.900 | to get their theological questions answered,

00:01:19.700 | which is not the best forum.

00:01:24.180 | But if you start talking at all about sin and evil,

00:01:27.600 | then you get immediate pushback.

00:01:29.940 | To my mind, one of the best ways of tackling that

00:01:33.640 | is to begin with idolatry.

00:01:35.600 | Idolatry involves betrayal.

00:01:38.480 | It involves the de-godding of God.

00:01:40.780 | Begin with the Bible storyline, and God made us.

00:01:43.920 | And because he made us, therefore we owe him.

00:01:46.840 | And to think that we don't owe him is already betrayal.

00:01:51.000 | He knows what is best for us.

00:01:53.520 | So that sin is portrayed, first of all, as insult to God,

00:01:58.520 | as the de-godding of God, as the erection of other gods,

00:02:03.020 | as a form of selfishness.

00:02:05.840 | So that I find that many biblically illiterate,

00:02:10.840 | contemporary 2030-somethings can understand

00:02:14.860 | and sympathize with.

00:02:16.500 | They might not agree with you,

00:02:17.500 | but they understand it as a category

00:02:20.100 | more quickly than sin as transgression of law.

00:02:24.260 | Now, obviously, in a full-orbed biblical doctrine of sin,

00:02:28.980 | sooner or later you have to talk about idolatry

00:02:31.340 | and the fall and transgression of law

00:02:35.180 | and a bunch of other categories, too,

00:02:37.720 | falling short of the grace of God,

00:02:39.260 | of the glory of God, and many other things.

00:02:41.860 | But if you're talking about a place to start,

00:02:45.300 | then what I do is start often with the nature of idolatry

00:02:49.860 | and show how idolatry involves

00:02:52.420 | not only loving bad things,

00:02:58.900 | but loving good things to the point

00:03:01.500 | that they become God for you,

00:03:03.240 | because that's betraying God.

00:03:05.340 | That's making a false God.

00:03:07.940 | And that means your heart is following something

00:03:10.460 | that should not claim ultimate value.

00:03:13.260 | And so to begin, I mean, I've often preached Genesis 3

00:03:16.500 | in university campuses.

00:03:17.660 | And the people who give me most stick for it

00:03:21.220 | are rarely the non-Christians.

00:03:22.780 | They see the point right away.

00:03:25.060 | It's sometimes the Christians who want me to answer

00:03:26.820 | all of their technical questions

00:03:28.920 | and miss the big storyline.

00:03:31.140 | So that's where I go.

00:03:33.820 | I mean, ultimately, if you have enough time

00:03:36.860 | in the context of a local congregation

00:03:38.500 | where you have both Christians and non-Christians and so on,

00:03:41.300 | then you've got to unpack sin

00:03:42.860 | in its many, many different dimensions.

00:03:45.500 | It's helpful too to give some books to people.

00:03:48.940 | Cornelius' "Planting" is not the way it's supposed to be.

00:03:52.620 | For serious readers, it's not a bad place to begin.

00:03:55.440 | The book of essays edited by Robert Peterson

00:03:58.500 | and Chris Morgan called "Fallon"

00:04:01.180 | is not a bad place to begin as well,

00:04:03.740 | if you're dealing with people who are serious readers.

00:04:06.700 | But for people who are biblically illiterate,

00:04:08.340 | those books are usually too advanced.

00:04:11.020 | And in my view, it's better to start off with Bible studies

00:04:15.040 | and get people into the text

00:04:16.620 | and see how the texts portray the glory of God himself.

00:04:21.180 | - That's very helpful, Council.

00:04:23.280 | Dr. Carson, thank you for your time this week,

00:04:25.780 | and thank you for being with us.

00:04:27.540 | That was theologian Don Carson,

00:04:28.920 | who appeared in the last three episodes,

00:04:30.700 | and he appeared earlier in a special episode

00:04:32.700 | to help us think through the consequences

00:04:34.540 | of the SCOTUS ruling on same-sex marriage.

00:04:37.780 | You can find that episode in the archive

00:04:39.420 | most easily in the app for Apple and Android devices.

00:04:43.380 | And for links to the app and for really everything

00:04:46.040 | you need to know about this podcast,

00:04:47.480 | it can be found online at desiringgod.org/askpastorjohn.

00:04:52.480 | Well, tomorrow is Friday,

00:04:54.220 | and we will hear from Matt Chandler and his wife, Lauren,

00:04:56.800 | about the challenges of living out God's design

00:04:58.940 | for marriage in today's world.

00:05:01.120 | I hope you'll tune in tomorrow.

00:05:02.760 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke.

00:05:03.760 | Thanks for listening.

00:05:04.800 | (upbeat music)

00:05:07.380 | (upbeat music)

00:05:09.960 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

How Do I Explain Sin to Someone for the First Time?

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