Seriousness of sin
“If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell” (Matthew 5:29 ESV).
These are the words of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and he is using extremely graphic language. He does this to draw stark attention to the seriousness of sin. Sin in the Old Testament had been codified. The Israelites had been told: “thou shalt not commit adultery” and “thou shalt not murder” (Exodus 20:13,14 KJV), so they had come to think that if they refrained from committing murder or adultery, they were free from those sins.
But Jesus has just stated that sin begins in the heart. When He speaks about adultery, He says that it begins by looking. When He speaks about murder, He says that it begins with hating. So, what are we to understand from the Lord’s words about “tearing out” and “throwing away” an eye? First, we must appreciate that dismembering the body does not deal with the heart issue. Jesus uses this graphic language to drive home that we should be ruthless in dealing with temptation because of the dire consequences of committing sin – ultimately eternity in hell and the lake of fire (Revelation 20:11-15).
Slavery to sin
“Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin” (John 8:34 ESV).
In this section of John chapter 8, the Lord Jesus makes two claims, not mutually exclusive, but complementary. Firstly, He says, “the truth shall make you free” (v.32). Later He adds, “If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed” (v.36 KJV). The claim is that I can be free from sin and from its power through knowing the truth, and according to John 14:6, the Lord Jesus Christ is the Truth. So, it is the One who is “the Truth” who says, “whoever commits sin is the slave of sin”.
That means, as far as my sin is concerned, however much I want to be free I am not free; sin dominates me. It causes me to do, say or think things that ought not to be done. said or thought. It makes me do things that are harmful, yet I cannot seem to stop. You might ask yourself, what kind of person would do something they did not want to do, even something that was harmful to them? Only a slave would act like that.
Salvation from sin
“Afterward Jesus found him in the temple and said to him, “See, you are well! Sin no more, that nothing worse may happen to you” (John 5:14 ESV).
Here, Jesus is dealing with a man who has been healed by Him after having had an illness for thirty-eight years. Can you imagine what it would be like to be finally free, to be finally healed, to be finally cured from your illness after all those years? When the Lord Jesus finds this man again, He reminds him of what has happened and tells him what should happen now: “you are well! Sin no more”.
The glorious claim of the gospel is that when I truly believe I can say once and for all that I am spiritually “well”. When I repent of sin and receive Christ as Saviour and Lord, I am assured that the thing that afflicted me, my sin, was finally and fully dealt with by the Lord Jesus Christ when He died on the cross, because He “died for [my] sins” (1 Corinthians 15:3). I no longer must suffer the ultimate consequences of the seriousness of my sin because Christ suffered for me (1 Peter 3:18) when He endured God’s wrath on the cross. In effect, the Lord Jesus says to me, “you are well, healed, finally, fully and forever.”
More than that, though, I am no longer a slave to sin, for I have a new Master, the Lord Jesus Christ Himself, and the Bible says that “sin shall not have dominion over” those who belong to Him (Romans 6:14). It is not the case that we will never commit any sin again, but it should be the exception in our lives because the same chapter of Romans says “do not let sin reign in your mortal body” (v.12).
To summarise, the person who knows the Lord Jesus Christ as Saviour is no longer separated from God by sin but has been saved from sin’s consequences and set free to live for God.
