Sin Is Serious

Mark 9:42-48
Gregory Broderick | Sunday, January 03, 2021
Copyright © 2021, Gregory Broderick

In Mark 9:42–50, we encounter a strange, perhaps even bewildering, passage.  Here we find the Lord Jesus Christ saying, “Put out your eye, cut off your hands, cut off your own foot.”  It seems quite extreme.  At least on the surface, it seems a marked contrast from the Jesus Christ we see in the rest of the gospels.  He is the one who heals the lame, who restores sight to the blind, and who even healed the shriveled hand of a man on the Sabbath day.  Is He now counseling self-mutilation as an act of piety?  The answer is no.  Has He changed in some way?  The answer is no.

So what is the word for us in all this gory imagery about in cutting off your hand and foot and plucking out your eye?  Why so stark?  Why so serious?   Here Jesus is speaking about the seriousness of sin.  We must do whatever it takes to avoid its consequences and to stamp it out of our lives.

1. Sin Is Serious

The first point is that sin is serious.  Sin is deadly serious.  Sin is the most serious thing in the world.  It is the most serious thing that has ever happened.  That is why Jesus is so serious: because sin is so serious.

The modern world says sin is no big deal.  In fact, they say there is no such thing as sin.  They say it is a relic of a bygone and ignorant age.  Even the modern church says nothing about sin, or, worse, it promotes sin.  “Let us sin the more that grace may increase.”  This, of course, is a dangerous heresy.

Sin is the biggest problem today and it is the biggest problem in history.  It is the source of all problems that have ever happened.  It is the source of all suffering that has ever happened.  All disease, all poverty, all conflicts, all wants.  Sin is the source of every war that has ever been fought, every crime that has ever been committed, every divorce, every death, and every pain ever suffered.

Before sin, none of these things existed.  Let’s look back at the opening chapters of the book of Genesis.  In Genesis 1:1, it tells us, “In the beginning God.”  So we started with perfection.  It was just God in the beginning.  God’s initial creation was good.  In Genesis 1:9 we read that God made the land and the seas, and it says, “God saw that it was good.”  And this refrain, “God saw that it was good,” is repeated after the creation of the trees and vegetation; the sun, the moon, and the stars; all living creatures in the sea and sky; all wild animals of the land.  And at the end of each paragraph is the refrain:  “And God saw that it was good.”

The same is true of the creation of man and woman in His own image (Gen. 1:27).  And, finally, God sums it all up in Genesis 1:31:  He steps back and surveys all that He had made, and it says, “All that He had made was very good.”  There were no problems in the world.  There was no suffering in the world, no death in the world, no conflict in the world, no shame in the world.  All there was at that time was God and His perfect creation, God’s perfect order.  In other words, paradise.  There was no problem, nothing negative in any way until God’s creatures sinned.  And so they sinned against His holy and perfect order.

We know the story.  Adam and Eve distrusted God, and they disobeyed His express command not to eat the fruit of a certain tree.  And this sin—this one sin—brought a curse into the whole world.  Before there were no problems, there were no issues.  There was just perfection, just happiness.  But after this sin, suddenly Adam and Eve cut themselves off from fellowship with God, hiding themselves in the garden.  They did not hide before, but now they hid from him (Gen. 3:9–10).  Suddenly there is discord between man and woman, and between man and God.  Suddenly there is discord between man and the other creatures.  There did not used to be two sides.  There did not used to be enmity.  But now there is.  Suddenly there is pain, where before there seems to have been none (Gen. 3:16).  Even the ground was cursed by sin.  The ground, which was lush, which produced fruit and plenty and bounty, is now cursed, producing thorns and thistles and requiring much more intense labor to get a crop (Gen. 3:18-19).  Suddenly, after this one sin, there is death, there is separation, and there is shame when there seemed to have been none before.  There is toil, there is grief, there is pain, there is sorrow.  All due to sin which had entered the world.  Sin is serious indeed.

It is the biggest problem in history and it is the biggest problem today.  Man has not solved the sin problem.  Indeed the trendline is all in the wrong direction.  We see that right away in Genesis 4.  As soon as man is expelled in the garden, he graduates from breaking God’s command about the tree to murder.  His heart is hardened by sin.  When Cain sins by bringing the wrong offering to God, God graciously meets with him and offers him repentance and restoration:  “If you do what is right, will not your face be lifted up?”  Does Cain take advantage of this offer of free grace?  No.  He murders his righteous brother instead.  His heart was hard due to sin.  Over hundreds or maybe thousands of years, the descent into sin continues.  And by Genesis 6, just a few short chapters later, man is so wicked that it says, “Every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time” (verse 5).  That is total depravity—every inclination, only evil, all the time.  God previously called His creation “very good.”  But God is now grieved, and “filled with pain” because he made man—man who sinned.  Sin is serious.

So what does God do?  He destroys mankind in a great flood, saving only a tiny remnant of eight people.  Of course, wiping out man in the just judgment of the flood did not wipe out sin.  It was still in the world after the flood, and it is still in the world today.

In fact, we see it all around us today.  It is pervasive.  But look through the Bible—we see sin in the perversion of Sodom in Genesis 19, in Lot’s wicked daughters, in the rape of Dinah by the Shechemites, in the evil enslavement of the Israelites by the Egyptians, in the hardness of Pharaoh’s heart.  We see it in the overflowing sin of Canaan that caused the land to vomit them out.  And we see it throughout all of human history.  Man enslaves his fellow man.  He cheats his fellow man.  He robs, he rapes, he murders, and he takes what is not his.

We don’t have time to list every example, but it is clear across all time periods across all cultures, across all circumstances, that man is and remains totally depraved.  He is just as depraved as the day that Adam walked out of the garden.  In Asia, there is Genghis Khan; in Europe, the Roman Empire, which was known for its disciplined brutality; in Central America, the Aztecs; in Europe, Bloody Mary—different cultures, different continents, different centuries, but the same depravity.  All due to sin.  And it is not confined to the ancient past.  Man is not improving in our day either.  Man is as bad or worse than he has ever been.  The twentieth century is marked by one genocide after another.  The twentieth century began with the Armenian genocide where more than one million civilians were brutally murdered.  Nobody talks about it, but that’s the start of the twentieth century.  Then came Lenin and Stalin with twenty million intentional deaths, all in the name of the collective good.  The evils of Hitler’s Germany with systematic genocide of Jews, Soviet civilians, Poles, the handicapped, and many others.  This is the so-called “modern man.”  Chairman Mao killed some forty million in China through intentional starvation and forced labor in what they called the “Great Leap Forward.”  Idi Amin killed three million in the small African country of Uganda.  Three million doesn’t sound as bad, perhaps, next to the forty million of Chairman Mao, but consider that the population of Uganda was less than ten million people, and he killed three million.  The list goes on and on: Castro, Pol Pot, Pinochet, Hussein, Milosevic, Chavez, and Maduro.  The twentieth century is a list of blood, blood, blood.  No, modern man is no better than ancient man.  If anything, he is more depraved.

And the wickedness is not confined to such “great” men or leaders.  General society, the common man, is also totally depraved.  They are slaves to sin.  There have been about 100,000 forcible rapes in the United States per year for decades—this is a constant rate for decades.  Or, in the last year, on record, almost ten billion dollars in credit card fraud occurred just in the United States.  And, of course, this wicked sin targets the most vulnerable people—the old and the needy.  We are surrounded on every side by sexual immorality, pornography, homosexuality, adultery, and transgenderism.  Every perversion is now not just in the shadows, not just tolerated, but it is openly promoted and lauded.  And, of course, our crowning achievement in the twentieth century—abortion, the murder of the most innocent.  According to the Guttmacher Institute, which is an advocate for abortion, there are about 73,000,000 abortions per year worldwide.  That’s more than Hitler, more than Mao, more than Stalin.  And every year.  Yes, man remains totally depraved due to sin.  He is getting worse.  He is not getting better.  In fact, the only thing he is getting better at is sinning at scale.  Man finds a way to dedicate every new technology and new development to sin and depravity.  He uses it all for evil, from weapons of war to the Internet.  And it all started with one sin in the garden.  How serious is sin?  It is deadly serious.  It is the cause of every suffering in the world.

But sin is also serious for another reason.  It is not just the bad effect sin has on mankind.  Indeed, the primary reason that sin is serious is that it earns you eternal hell.  Notice the reasoning that Jesus gives in our passage for the extreme actions He suggests.  “If your hand causes you to sin,” He says, “cut it off.”  It is better for you to enter life (eternal life) maimed than to go to hell with two hands.  So also the foot: it is better to be crippled on your way to heaven than healthy all the way to hell.  These are the stakes: eternal life with God, or eternal hell in torment and agony.  As Jesus says in verse 48, hell is the place where the “worm does not die and [where] the fire is not quenched.”  It’s all imagery; it’s all beyond our ability to comprehend how awful hell is, but this is hell:  where the “worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched.”  And these are the only two outcomes for humankind, for every human being: eternal glory and unimaginable joy with God in heaven or eternal agony and conscious maximum torment in hell forever.  This is not some fluke passage.  This is taught throughout the Bible, through the gospels (Luke 19, Matt. 25:41, Matt. 13:42).  This is a core doctrine of Christianity.  You will go to one or the other.  To heaven or to hell.  Your children will go to one or the other.  Everyone we know will go to one or the other forever.

Every person is a sinner who deserves eternal hell both due to our own sinful nature inherited from Adam and Eve, and due to our own particular sins.  Infinite hell is the just and proportionate punishment for our infinite sin against infinite God.  This is, of course, logical—all sin is infinite because God is infinite.  Sinning against him is thus an infinite wrong and requires an infinite punishment.  That is why there is an eternal hell.  It’s also explicitly biblical.  Romans 3:23 and 6:23, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” and “the wages of sin is death”—eternal death.  Revelation 14 and Revelation 20 also teach about an eternal hell.  So, it’s logical, it’s biblical, but it’s still uncomfortable.  In our flesh, we do not like the idea of an eternal hell.  We’re second chance people.  We are an exceptions people.  We like a way out.  So many false ministers will preach a pleasant but dangerous lie.  Some say, “All will be saved.  Everybody is going to heaven.  Hell is not real.”  Or they look for a moderate middle ground—“some will be saved, but other will just be wiped out.  They will cease to exist, maybe after even a season in hell.  But certainly, not an eternal hell.  That would be unfair.”   These are all lies.  Comforting lies, perhaps, but lies.  Lies of the devil.  These are lies that will send you to that hell that they tell you is not real.

Any idea that we have we must judge against the Scriptures, not against our own understanding.  The Scriptures say that hell is eternal, so we say that hell is eternal.  And we say, “Let God be true, and every man a liar.”

Against this understanding of an eternal hell, against this understanding that all people are headed to one or the other, against this understanding that all of us deserve that eternal hell, the shocking gore of Jesus’s statements in our passage seem not so shocking.  Indeed, they seem downright understated.  Sin sends us to eternal torment in hell, and must be avoided at every cost.  It is better to cut off your hand or your foot and enter heaven.  Is that better?  Or is it better to keep your hands and feet and go to hell?  Now that’s an easy one isn’t it?  You would cut off your hands, no questions asked, right away.

I was reminded of a story about a rock climber in Utah—they made a movie about it.  He got trapped under a boulder and he had to cut off part of his arm with a dull pocketknife in order to get out of there and survive.  But it was a simple choice.  Not easy to do, but it was a simple choice: stay under the rock and die, or cut off part of your arm and live.  Easy choice.  This choice is even easier.  Is it better to go to heaven half-blind or to go to hell with your 20/20 vision?  When you frame it like that, it is a stupid question.  We should be willing to do whatever it takes, to pay whatever price, to undergo whatever hardship in order to trade our just punishment of eternal hell for the unspeakable joys of eternal heaven.  This is what Jesus is saying here, at least in part.

We can make that trade; it’s available.  We cannot earn heaven.  We’ve all sinned already, and we all owe the eternal punishment already.  Even if we were to be set back to zero and were given a clean slate, we would blow it again due to the total depravity I already spoke about.  We can’t pay it, and we already owe it.  What are we to do?  We must do the one thing needful.  The only thing that can be done.  We must cry out to God for mercy.  We must call upon the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, trust in Him alone for our salvation, and be saved.  You don’t have to cut off your hand or cut off your foot.  You don’t have to take out your eye.  They are not needed; you can keep them.  Jesus wants more than your hand or your foot or your eye.  He wants your all—all your heart, all your mind, all your soul, all your strength.  “Whether you eat or drink or whatever you do . . .” Total commitment, total surrender.

Now, of course, the hand, the foot, and the eye are largely metaphorical, though if you did have to make the choice to cut one off it would be easy.  The hand speaks about what you do.  The feet speak about where you go.  The eye speaks about what you see.  We could add our tongue for what you say, or your ears for what you hear.  Total commitment, total surrender to Jesus Christ.  Cutting off your hand or your foot is both unnecessary and insufficient.  Instead, it will cost you your all.  But I tell you it is surely worth the trade.  Is it better to go into hell with your all or to surrender your all and enter life of eternal joy?  That’s also an easy choice.

We finite creatures could never solve this infinite problem, so infinite God solved it for us.  He sent His own Son, himself infinite God and the second Person of the Trinity, to become a man, to live a perfect life of obedience to God’s perfect law, and then to suffer His full wrath in our place, and to die on the cross.  As a man, He could be our representative.  He could represent man.  As infinite God, He could pay the infinite price which we could never pay.  He is the unique God-man, the only way to be saved; it’s the only way.  That is the way He made and it’s the way we need.  All we have to do is receive it.

You don’t have to cut off your hand.  It is offered to all and it is offered free of charge.  There is no fee to be paid.  There is no work of service to be done to earn it.  God would not cheapen the infinite and priceless sacrifice and payment of the precious blood of Christ by adding our worthless works to it.  Nor would He sully the pure sacrifice of Christ by mixing our filthy rags with it.  So receive it.  Call out to Christ, “Have mercy on me a sinner!” That’s how you receive it.  Commit your life to Christ as Lord, and He will be your Savior.  He will wipe out your infinite debt because He paid it on the cross.

Now we would reject even this great deal due to our total depravity.  So He enables those He has chosen, His elect.  He enables a few here and there, just like the eight He saved from that flood.  He enables a few to call on His name and be saved.  Even that is a work of God’s mercy.

Sin is surely serious.  It is serious enough that God paid the highest possible price to deal with it.  It is serious enough that it merits you eternal hell.  It is serious enough to give up anything and everything to escape its consequences:  your hand, your foot, your eye, your own will, your temporary pleasures, your money, your autonomy, your very life.  These are very minor trade-offs compared to the great gain of eternal life.  Cut off your hand?  God cut off His only Son in order to deal with sin for us.  He had perfect fellowship, perfect love, from all eternity, but He cut off Christ and poured His wrath out on Jesus Christ to deal with sin for us.  Sin is very serious.  (GTB)  Don’t be a fool.  Accept God’s free and gracious offer of salvation today.  You can keep your hand and go to heaven, but you cannot keep your sin and go to heaven.  So don’t do it.  Don’t keep your sin and go to hell.  Give it up, call upon Christ, repent of your sins, trust in him alone, and go to heaven

2. Sin is Serious Even for Christians

You say you have already trusted in Christ?  Sin is even more serous for you.  First, don’t be so certain that your profession is true.  We know that people have great capacity for self-deception.  If you do not take sin seriously, then you are not a Christian.  You may be self-deceived.  After all, if you understood that it was your personal sin that put Jesus Christ on the cross and caused God to pour out His full wrath on Jesus Christ, you would not sin more.  If you understood the unimaginable price that He paid, you would do whatever it takes to avoid compounding that evil.  Moreover, if there is some sin that you will not give up for the sake of Christ, then you are not saved; you are certainly deceived if there is some sin you are hanging on to.  If there is something that you love more than you love God, that is an idol; that is a sin, and you are not saved.  Now, I am not talking about sinning from time to time.  We are still fallen people and we still sin from time to time.  And when we do that, we must repent, we must return to the straight way, and we must remain in it.  Some sins may take a lifetime to conquer by God’s grace.  It may go away for a while, and we may have victory for a while but when they come back, we repent again, we renew our commitment again, and then we keep on guard for the time when they return.  That is not what I’m talking about here.  I am talking about secret sin or besetting sin; sin that we know that we have, that we know that we do, but that we will not give up because it is too precious to us.  The sin that we hide beneath our tent like Achan, refusing to give it up.  That sin that you won’t cut off like your hand or pluck out like your eye—that is the sin that will prove that you are false, that you are a deceiver, that you are not born again.

We know from the Bible that people have greatly deceived themselves.  Consider Solomon.  Solomon had great lust for just about everything.  For women, for fame, for money, for prestige, for pride.  He was unwilling to cut off his lust, and so he was destroyed.  Remember this is a man who started out very great, who achieved more things than we’re going to achieve for God, but who ended up worshipping idols and bringing pluralism into Israel.  Solomon would not give up his sin and so he was destroyed.  Or consider Judas, a key disciple who walked and talked with Jesus for three years.  I’m sure Judas thought he was saved.  I’m sure it never entered his mind that he was self-deceived.  And yet he was taken down by his sin of greed, his love of money, his lust.  He was greatly deceived, and he was destroyed, and he is in hell now.

Every person who says he is a Christian but is deceived falls for the same lie:  “I can have both sin and God.”  It’s not true.  You cannot keep your sin and go to heaven, as our Pastor recently preached.  First John 3:6 says, “No one who lives in him keeps on sinning.  No one who continues to sin has either seen him or known him.”  No one.  You are not the exception.  So let us be clear.  If I or anyone else persists in sin, if there is a sin that you won’t give up, then you are destined for hell.  It does not matter what you call yourself.  You can call yourself a Christian, you can call yourself a pastor—it doesn’t matter.  If doesn’t matter if you prayed the sinner’s prayer.  If you continue in your sin, you will be, as our Pastor preached, surprised by hell.  You will hear, “Depart from me, I never knew you,” and you will be sent away to hell.  So I say, don’t do it.  Give it up.  Cut it off.  If going to heaven is worth cutting off your hand or your foot or plucking out your eye, then surely it is worth giving up the periodic temporary and ultimately unsatisfying pleasures of sin for a season.  It is better to enter life without your sin than to go to hell with it where the fire never goes out.

Another reason sin is dangerous for the Christian is that it brings needless suffering for you and for the generations after you.  Even if you are truly saved, you can still inflict many troubles on yourself by your sin.  God does not wink at or overlook the Christian’s sin.  He forgives it in Christ, so it is paid for, but God brings progressively more severe discipline on us to drive it out.  First Corinthians 11 says, “For this reason many of you are weak, many of you are sick, and many [die].”  You see the progression.  First, there is weakness, then there is sickness, then there is death—all due to sin.  God disciplines those He loves (Heb. 12:6, Prov. 3:12).  So when we sin, we can expect His discipline.  Look at King David.  He committed horrible, horrible sin.  God forgave that sin, but King David still suffered terrible loss.  His newborn son was killed.  His reputation was severely damaged.  His own beloved sons rose up against him in a coup, and many died in Israel.  His private sins done in secret were revealed and dealt with by God in broad daylight (2 Sam. 12:12).  After this, his name was tarnished and his kingdom was never quite the same.  And you ask, “For what?  For a little adultery?  To try to cover it up?  Was it worth it?”  The answer is no.

The devil lies and tells us, “It’ll be worth it.”  But it never is.  Don’t believe his lie.  Don’t wander from the faith into sin and pierce yourself with many griefs.  Whether for money, for fame, or for anything else, it is simply not worth it.  It is always loss.  Instead, we must commit to do whatever it takes to avoid sin.  That’s the message here: do what it takes to avoid sin.  As God’s people we must be holy, for He is holy.  Whether we have to chop off a hand, cut off a foot, or put out an eye, let us resist sin even to the point of shedding blood (Heb. 12:4); even to the point of martyrdom, for which there is great reward in heaven.  We read recently about those under the altar in Revelation 6:9.  So let us, like them, stand firm to the end and be faithful to the end and receive the crown of life.  That’s worth it.  Christians, let us put away our sin and live for God’s maximum glory.

As a last warning from this passage, do not lead God’s people into sin.  Verse 42 says, “If anyone”—anyone—“causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to be thrown into the sea with a large millstone tied around his neck.”  We could preach a whole sermon from this alone.  Such drownings were used by the Romans on people of particular infamy.  This was a particularly bad way to get executed in the Roman Empire.  If you were executed in this way, it meant you were a very, very bad guy, even by Roman standards.  A heavy millstone and thrown into the sea means there is no hope.  There is certain death.  Do not be the vehicle through which sin comes to God’s people.  The temptation is going to come, the sin is going to come, but don’t let it come through you.  Do not be the person who sows doubt into believers, or who attempts to lure them away from the faith, or even to lure them into simple sin.  If you do that, you will become the devil’s agent and an enemy of God.  Do not be the person who entices others to join in their sin.  Do not be the person who encourages or approves of the sin of others, especially of professing believers (Rom. 1:32).  God is very protective of His people.  He is very zealous for His name, which He places on each of his people.  Every one of God’s people bears His name.  Do not come against His anointed people and raise His ire.  Do not put your hand in a bad way on God’s segullah—His treasured possession—or He will deal with you severely.  Do not be the vehicle for sin coming to those who claim the name of Christ.  There is a special and terrible punishment awaiting you if you do.

3. Application

First, do not go to hell with your sin.  It is not worth it.  Cut off that sin, whatever it is, cut it off.  Pride, greed, lust, autonomy.  Whatever it is, however much you like it, it is not worth eternity.  It is not worth eternal agony in hell.  Confess Jesus Christ as Lord, repent of your sins, and be saved.  And you can do it today.

Second application: Do not lead others into sin, especially the sin of unbelief, which tempts others to reject Christ and go to hell.  Do not become the devil’s agent.  Do not become the conduit for sin to come into your household, into your church, or into your peer group.  Is it worth the millstone around your neck, to be thrown into the depths of the sea, just to have others join you in your sin?  Is it worth it?  No.  Don’t do it.

Third application: Do whatever it takes to cut out sin.  This is mortal combat.  Either you kill sin, or sin kills you eternally.  You cannot afford to lose this battle.  So make whatever sacrifice it takes.  Know your temptations and avoid them.  Don’t go near them.  If you have a drinking problem, you don’t go to the bar.  So if you have a sin problem, you don’t go near where that sin is prevalent.   If you have a pornography problem, get rid of the things that lead you into it.  It is better to enter into life without a cellphone than to enter hell with the latest iPhone in your pocket.  Whatever it is, figure out what needs to be done and do it.  It is worth it.

Our Pastor preached last Sunday to examine yourself at the end of 2020.  As part of that, you can identify your temptations and avoid them.  Starve out that sin, starve it to death.  Kill it by the power of the Spirit.  Just like men will risk life and limb to liberate their country or to destroy a foreign enemy, we must be willing to do all and to risk all in our war against the devil and against sin.  We must be willing to sacrifice all.  As important as the War for Independence or the Civil War or World War II were, more is at stake here.  All is at stake here.  Eternity is at stake here.  So we must fight, and we must do whatever it takes.  We can win this fight.  Not in our own strength, but in the power of the Holy Spirit, and with the grace that God provides.  God will help us to resist the devil, and he will flee from us.  We can and we must live a holy life for the glory of God.  Let us do so in 2021.  Let us confess and get rid of all sin and enter into life—everlasting life.