(upbeat music) - The Bible is full of about 20 major themes and another 50 to 70 smaller ones. And when it comes to explaining how each theme develops from Genesis to Revelation, I don't know of anyone who does it better than Dr. Don Carson. On Select Fridays, we release a little longer episode than normal where we call up Dr.

Carson, he takes a theme and explains it to us. We have now done this five times with an episode on what is biblical theology, which was a good sort of overview of this sort of thing. Then we recorded an overview of the whole Bible, which was very popular, as you can imagine, thank you for the response.

It was then followed by a theology of creation, a theology of the temple, and then a theology of resurrection just a few days before Easter. And each of those episodes can be found on the APJ app, just search the word Carson. It has been a great series, well-received, and we've only begun.

Dr. Carson joins us again today over the phone, which is the fruit of our partnership with our friends at the Gospel Coalition. Carson is the co-founder and president of the Gospel Coalition, and also the editor of the NIV Zondervan Study Bible, which is the study Bible version of what we're doing in these podcasts.

I called Dr. Carson at his home office and asked him to share with us a whole Bible theology of the theme of sin. Here's what he said. - In one sense, what the Bible says about sin is so comprehensive that it's really challenging to get to the heart of the issue in 10 minutes or so.

Virtually every page of the Bible says something implicitly or explicitly about sin. One thing it does not say is that sin was there in the beginning. Sin is portrayed in Genesis 3 as rebellion. It's not that matter is intrinsically sinful, for example. Sin is portrayed as doubting God's word.

Has God said, or it's involved with mocking God, standing in a position where we can criticize God. God knows that if you eat this fruit, then you'll be like him, and he doesn't want you to be like him. He's jealous and narrow-minded and rather bigoted. Sin is first and foremost rebellion against God and what he has disclosed of himself in words.

And that notion of sin prevails in one fashion or another across the entire sweep of scripture. The reason why it's important to think clearly about sin is manifold, but in particular, to think clearly about sin helps you to think clearly about salvation and the Savior. The problematic of the Bible storyline, the problem that is addressed by the Bible storyline is the problem of sin.

And the solution that is presented in the coming of Christ and in his work must match the problem itself. If the fundamental problem of humankind is bad economics, then what we need is a superb economist. If the supreme need of humankind is good health, then what we need is superb medical facilities.

But if the supreme problem is sin, then what we need is a salvation that addresses sin, not only the concrete acts of rebellion, but all of its effects, including alienation and suffering and sickness and war and hate and finally death itself and hell. The notion of sin in scripture is the notion of what is wrong with the universe and therefore constitutes what it is that God is sending his son to address.

Now, within that framework, it's easy to start teasing out the Bible storyline in terms of sin. So after Genesis 3 and the temptation of Adam and Eve, Genesis 4, you have the first murder, a fratricide. By the time you get to Genesis 5, you have the repetition of the phrase, and he died and he died and he died and he died, which is the entailment of sin.

When you sin, you will die. And then Genesis 6 to 9, the flood account, which is generated by God's disgust and hatred of sin and its pervasive judgment attracting evil across the face of the earth. And so on, right through the biblical accounts of the stories of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, the patriarchs and the story of Joseph and so on, all of which take up the rest of the book of Genesis.

Abraham was a man of faith. He was a godly man. He was also a liar. The 12 patriarchs include 10 who are trying to decide between killing and selling into slavery, the 11th, and Judah, who is ultimately the great, great, great grandfather of King David and ultimately of Christ himself, is busy sleeping with a stepdaughter.

Sin is interwoven into the accounts. And one could similarly go through Exodus and Leviticus with its sacrificial systems to deal with impurity and sin of various kinds. Everything turns on the pervasiveness of sin. And then one comes to the book of Judges and we witness the cycling down of periods of reformation as people are broken and they cry to God for help and God restores them by raising up a judge and bringing about some measure of purity into the land.

Again, within a generation and a half or so, things spiral down to idolatry and perversity and so on, until you get to the last three chapters of the book of Judges. And they're so grotesque that even the so-called good guys are pretty horrendous and it's hard to read those chapters in public.

So we could proceed through the kings and the prophets and so on and witness the pervasiveness of all of this. But let me instead direct your attention to a few passages of scripture that are in many ways determinative. In Exodus chapter 34, verses six and seven, God intones certain words to Moses as Moses is hidden in a cleft in the rock so that he cannot see God.

He's later permitted to peek out and see something of the trailing edge of the afterglow of the glory of the Lord. But as God goes by and intones certain words, there is a built-in tension in what God says. This is in Exodus chapter 34. On the one hand, God presents himself as a God of immeasurable mercy and grace.

God says, "The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, forgiving wickedness, rebellion, and sin." That's the one side. On the other side, "Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished. He punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation." At the end of the day, that tension is not really finally resolved until you get to the New Testament and the cross, or another passage that gives a lot of insight.

In Psalm 51, we find David penning this Psalm of contrition after his horrible lapse, seducing Bathsheba, murdering her husband, corrupting the military, betraying his family, lying about everything, until finally he's confronted by the prophet Nathan and comes to real deep repentance. But there is a lot of damage that's been done just the same.

One of the most intriguing things that he says, however, in Psalm 51 is found in verse four. He begins in verse one by saying, "Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love, according to your great compassions, blot out my transgressions. Wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin." The man really knows how guilty he is.

"I know my transgressions. My sin is always before me." And then he says, verse four, "Against you, you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight." So you are right in your verdict and justified when you judge. But the truth of the matter is that at one level, the reader is tempted to say, "Come on, David, how can you say that you've sinned only against God?

You've sinned against Bathsheba, you seduced her. And you've sinned against Uriah the Hittite, surely. You had him killed. You've sinned against the military high command. You corrupted them. You sinned against the nation in that you're the chief magistrate and you fail at a fundamental level. You sinned against your own family.

You betrayed them. It's hard to think of anybody you didn't sin against. Then you say, "Against you only," addressing God, "Have I sinned and done this evil in your sight?" Yet at another level, that is exactly the point. What makes sin so heinous is not all of its, shall we call them, horizontal dimensions, but that it is defiance of God.

It is not loving God with heart and soul and mind and strength. If David had loved God with heart and soul and mind and strength, he wouldn't have committed any of these sins. In all of our sins, whether it's cheating on our income tax or nurturing bitterness or succumbing to fits of rage or jealousy or anything else, God is always the most offended party.

That means in Scripture, whatever else we must have, we must have forgiveness from God. The heart of the worst effects of sin is being alienated from God, cut off from him who is our maker and the giver of life. If he stands against us, then we are lost. We are undone.

So although the Bible does stress the importance of reconciliation at the horizontal level, the heart of the Bible's storyline is how sinful human beings made in the image of God, alienated from him, deserving of his wrath, nevertheless can be reconciled to him, which brings us again and again back to the gospel of the cross and resurrection of Christ.

Some other things need to be said briefly about the Bible's storyline. Sin tends to be a generic word for evil, but there are other words that overlap in semantic range, in the range of meaning with sin, but have some sort of specialized focus. Idolatry, for example, shows how sin erects a false God.

It displaces God. One could track out the significance of idolatry right through the Bible. The New Testament can insist that greed is idolatry because what you want strongly enough becomes God for you, and God becomes de-Godded. Or another word is transgression. Now, it's not evil in some summary sense.

It's actually going against, crossing over, transgressing the boundaries that God has put in place. It is doing what he prohibits. It is failing to do what he explicitly commands. So there's transgression and iniquity and failure and dirt. There are many different words that describe sin, and all of them together need to be thought through.

Now, in that connection, then, there are related theological notions that need to be borne in mind. For example, the wrath of God. About 600 times in the Bible, in the Old Testament alone, in fact, apart from the occurrences in the New Testament, the Bible speaks of God's wrath. This does not mean that God is bad-tempered or loses it or anything of that sort.

His wrath is not an intrinsic part of his character the way his love is. His wrath is the outworking of his holiness when he confronts sin. And if God did not express wrath, condemnation, judgment on sin, he would not be thereby nicer. He would be morally indifferent. He would not become morally attractive.

He would become irrelevant to questions of truth and integrity and morality, both in this life and in the life to come. Then there are other elements of sin that we should think about. For example, the prophet Habakkuk can ask the question, "I understand," he says, in effect, "how God might use a wicked nation "to punish another wicked nation.

"But how can he use a nation that seems to be more wicked "to punish a nation that is, "on any measurable front, less wicked?" And he's thinking about how his own people, the Israelites, are being punished by the regional superpowers of his day, which on any measurement are more wicked.

And that raises some fundamental questions, which he resolves finally by going into the temple and being convinced of the goodness of the Lord and of an eschatological reconciliation on the last day. There are other pictures of sin. Apostasy, for example, seen as a kind of spiritual adultery. All of these pictures come together.

In Matthew chapter 11, verses 20 and following, the grievousness of guilt is tied in part to how much revelation we've already received. So in that connection, Capernaum and Bethsaida, cities which witnessed a great deal of Christ's gospel, preaching, and powerful miracles, will stand more condemned in a worse place on the last day than Sodom and Gomorrah, or pagan cities like Tyre and Sidon, or to put it in contemporary terms, it may well be then that on the last day, Kabul, Afghanistan, will be in a less dangerous place than Tulsa, Oklahoma.

It really is important to see that the doctrine of sin in scripture is really very complex. It's not just a matter of bean counting. It includes very complex notions that only God himself can finally sort out, in which guilt is tied, at least in part, to how we have done, what we have done with the revelation that we have received.

And all of this presupposes a universality, too, in the very interesting comments of the Lord Christ in Luke chapter 13, verses one to five, where Jesus reminds the people of the tower that fell on a number of people and crushed 18 of them, or where he talks about those whose blood was mingled with the blood of the sacrifices.

In both cases, he asks the question, do you think that these people who thus suffered were more wicked, more sinful, than others who did not similarly suffer? And it's a bit like asking, do you think that the people who came down in the Twin Towers on 9/11 were more wicked than everybody else in America?

And Jesus does not say, oh, they're not wicked at all. What he says is, unless you repent, all of you will similarly perish. In other words, the disasters, whether made by human beings or so-called natural disasters, are marks of judgment that is deserved by everybody. And it's of the Lord's mercies we're not consumed.

And that eventually sets us up for the long, long passage, Romans 118 to 320, which begins, "The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all human wickedness." Human beings suppressing the truth and so forth. Section after section is taken up with proving that Jews are guilty before God and Gentiles are guilty before God.

We're all shameful and dirty and sullied until you get the concatenation of biblical quotations from Romans 3, 9 or thereabouts to 320, all verses that are designed to prove that human beings are lost and guilty. Reminds me of some passages in the Old Testament. I occasionally set myself to memorize a psalm or something like that.

And one I've been working on recently is Psalm 36. I have a message from God in my heart concerning the sinfulness of the wicked. There is no fear of God before their eyes. In their own eyes, they flatter themselves too much to detect or hate their sin. That's almost a description of contemporary culture.

We flatter ourselves too much to detect or hate our sin. The words of their mouths are wicked and deceitful. They fail to act wisely or do good. Even on their beds, they plot evil. They commit themselves to a sinful course and do not reject what is wrong. But when one is finished with all of these reflections on sin and one tracks out the myriad lines that describe sin across the entire biblical canon, one cannot help but remember that at the end of the long passage in Romans 1, 18 to 320, comes one of the most glorious atonement passages in all of Holy Scripture, Romans 3, 21 to 26, where God takes action in Christ Jesus and his dead, both to justify the ungodly and to be just himself in the sacrifice of his own dear son, a sacrifice that simultaneously turns aside God's wrath.

It propitiates God and it cancels sin, it expiates sin. Until you come to the final two chapters and the portrait of a new heaven and a new earth, where part of the glory of the portrait is that there is no more sin, no more death, no more decay, no more fear, no more shame.

The glory of the Lamb is everything and God's people will see his face. And here then finally is the abolition of all sin and its effects. Grounded in the triumph of the Lion's Lair. - So good and rich. This is world-class biblical theology made to look so easy. That was Don Carson from his home office, joining us again by way of our partnership with our friends over at The Gospel Coalition.

Carson, of course, is the co-founder and president of The Gospel Coalition. We now break for the weekend, and this weekend feel free to look back on the episodes from the week, search our archive of hundreds of episodes, download the app, subscribe to the podcast, or even send us a question of your own.

Do all of that at our landing page, desiringgod.org/askpastorjohn. And of course, you can find all the episodes with Dr. Carson in the app. Just search for his name, Carson, and you will find them there. I'm your host, Tony Reinke. I'll see you on Monday with author and longtime pastor, John Piper.

We'll see you then. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)