Text Treatise:
Pride, Lies and Murder
There
is a passage that starts, “these six things the Lord hates, yea, seven are an
abomination to Him,” and it singles out 7 particular sins. While I could get
the interpretation off on 2-ish of them, I can easily understand the rest,
which are basically pride, lies and murder. There is no mention of sexual sins
of any kind in the list, nor is there a mention of gluttony, greed, jealousy or
anger. In short, there’s a list of sins God hates in particular but they aren’t
= “the 7 deadly sins,” which though they are sins, are not the worst. That list
is actually an invention of the first Pope.
To
wit, all sins are equally sinful, in the sense that all result in separation
from God and merit His righteous judgment. But 3 x infinity is still infinity,
and God does hate some sins more than others, which is further justified by the
passage (I forget the location) that says that there are degrees of punishment
in hell.
Justifying
that not all sins are equally evil is Jesus Himself, who said to Pilate, “he
who delivered Me over to you has the greater sin.” Seems pretty clear cut.
Why these more
than others?
Why
should God hate pride, lies and murder more than other sins? I think it’s of
interest to note that these sins strike at God’s character more than others.
Pride is literally having a higher opinion of yourself than you ought and
thereby a lower opinion of God than you ought. Pride is a lack of
acknowledgement of how great God is. If a person understands God’s greatness,
they can’t logically believe that they deserve anythng from Him, so thinking
that you deserve what you don’t is basically saying that God owes you
something, and that He is subservient to you and that you can require Him to
obey you. How offensive this must be to a holy God, since it’s so obviously
offensive even to us, if someone behaved that way toward us without warrant.
Lies.
Then
you get to lies, which attack God’s character as being Truth—not just
truthful, but Truth itself and the source and foundation for all truth. Further
there’s the fact that lies deceive people and by the very nature of causing
them to make wrong decisions, hurt people. Lies are fundamentally tied to
murder because lies that prevent a person from repenting and seeking Christ
lead people to damnation. Lies are also connected to pride because it’s pride
that fuels lies. If you think you’re above or beyond the rules, you can do what
you want with impunity. Since pride is itself a lie (I am greater than I am,
God owes me life and happiness etc), it’s clear why pride leads to more lies.
It’s a snowball effect. Once you lie, you have to keep telling more lies to
protect your central lie. The only alternative is telling the truth, which
would require giving up your pride. See how it hangs together?
Murder.
And
then you get to murder, which is offensive to God because man is made in His
image—therefore a murder is literally an attack on God’s image. It’s as if by
killing a person, you are vicariously attempting to symbolically kill God.
There’s also the sense in which a person’s death deprives God of that which He
deserves (not to say that God’s impotent—this is in the context of Him
sovereignly allowing events to come to pass through personal choices). Whereas
a person is prideful by thinking he deserves what he does not, God actually does deserve everything, so
the refusal to submit in faith to Christ and the act of murder are both
essentially the wrongful refusal to allow God to be given that which is due
Him. Hence how murder is also fundamentally a lie. God deserves a man’s life’s
work in life and a man’s life in death, but to cut his life short on earth or
to send him to hell by killing him before he’s repented and thereby depriving
God of his soul in death, the lie is the prideful assertion, implicitly, that
God does not deserve what belongs to Him. As you can see, this is outrageously
offensive, all these things. They are unfair denials and refusals of the truth.
And
it’s essentially then to wrongfully treat God, treat Him unfairly. To act
unjustly toward the just Judge of the universe. See how backwards it is? SO in
short, Pride and Lies and Murder are among the most hated sins of God because
of how directly they attack Him and how Offensive they are to His character.
Wrap-up
Sex
before marriage, homosexuality, pedophilia, rape, pornography, sex with
multiple people, cheating etc are all sexual sins that are very offensive to
God, too, and I didn’t name all (oh no. That list is nearly endless). But they
are less direct in their perversion of truth (though they still
symbolize/represent lies about God) and less direct in their assault on God’s
character (though still they attack it). It is fundamentally, I think, sins of
an intellectual sort, the kind that make people consciously choose damnation
over reconciliation, that are the worst of them all. I think that’s the
distinction.
~ Rak Chazak
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