Spiritual Life and Leadership

20. Sin and Shalom

Jan 21, 2019

30:20

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Sin and shalom. What's the connection?

Cornelius Plantinga, Jr., describes sin as “culpable shalom-breaking.” What does that mean? In this episode of “Spiritual Life and Leadership,” Markus Watson discusses what sin is and what we should do about it.

THIS EPISODE’S HIGHLIGHTS INCLUDE:

To understand sin and shalom, we have to start at the beginning in Genesis.
Shalom is a good word to describe the world as God created.
Shalom refers to a comprehensive sense of well-being that touches every aspect of life.
There is a four-fold nature to shalom (see Episode 3: The Fourfold Nature of Shalom)—shalom with God, with one another, within ourselves, and with the created order.
Something happened that disrupted world’s shalom—namely, sin.
We read about the disruption of shalom in Genesis 3.
The fact that men tend to dominate over women is not a prescription of how God wants things to be. It is a description of how things are because sin has entered our story.
Cornelius Plantinga, in Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin defines sin as “disruption of created harmony.” It is “culpable shalom-breaking.”
Plantinga says, “God is for shalom and, therefore, against sin.”
Sin is “culpable shalom-breaking” because we are responsible.
We can participate with God in the restoration of shalom.
I don’t believe human beings are inherently sinful, though we may have a tendency toward sin. We are originally creatures of shalom. We are creatures of both sin and shalom.
The result of sin is that we have a broken world.
How do we respond to sin? We surrender to the God who wants to restore shalom.
We surrender in two ways: 1) confession and 2) living fully into our vocations.
Confession restores the shalom between us and God. It also restores shalom within ourselves because it heals our shame.
Irenaeus said, “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.”
We need to confess to one another. Confessing to a person makes God’s forgiveness tangible.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in Life Together, talks about the need to confess to one another.
Living fully into our vocations is about more than just our jobs. It has to do with all of our callings—as a parent, student, citizen, etc.
When you live out your vocations you are participating with God to restore shalom in the world.
God is moving us toward a world of beauty, goodness, healing, and relational health--out of sin and into shalom.