Do we find it difficult to understand why God considers sin to be such a great offence that He has prepared hell for sinners? When He says that the wages of sin is death – eternal separation from God – many people seem to think that the punishment is disproportionate to the crime. That is because we have not thought about it and understood what sin really is.
When Eve ate the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, it was not just a matter of simple disobedience. If we look at what transpired between Satan and Eve when she was tempted, we can see that many factors were involved in her choice. 1) She didn't believe what God had said that if she ate that fruit she would die, and she chose to believe Satan who said she wouldn't die. 2) She stopped trusting in God and began to trust in Satan. 3) She stopped believing in God's love for her and concluded that He had a selfish motive in denying her that fruit. 4) She moved from the lordship of God to the lordship of Satan. 5) She made herself her own authority and independent of God. 6) She moved out of the protection and provision of God and landed herself vulnerable to attack from Satan. 7) She gave more importance to how she felt about the fruit than to what God had told her. 8) She handed over the dominion over the earth that God had entrusted to Adam and Eve to Satan who now became the prince of this world. 9) She defiled all of humanity that would come from her.
Did she imagine that all this was involved in that simple act of eating that fruit? No. But neither do we when we disobey God's commandments and sin. Is it any wonder that we imagine it is just a small matter that God should simply overlook?
When Jesus died on the cross, He went through that separation from the Father that was the sum total of what we all deserve (Mt.27:46). For Him who had been one with the Father through all eternity, this was more painful than all the physical torture that He went through. This was what He pleaded with the Father the night before He was crucified to see if it could be avoided if possible (Mt.26:39) because He had been prepared earlier itself to physically die for us (Mt.16:21). Can we see the extent of His love for us that He was finally prepared to make even this ultimate sacrifice in order to save us?
Jesus came so that He could not only forgive our sins but also that He could save us from sin (Mt.1:21). His whole aim is that we should stop sinning (1Jn.2:1). How sad it is that we take sin so carelessly as if it is something acceptable or inevitable? Each one of our sins cries out, "Crucify Him!" We don't also realise how our sins cause a distance between us and God and spoil our fellowship (Is.59:1,2) because we think that all we have to do to be restored is to confess them (1Jn.1:9). Do we think that since we are saved by unmerited favour from God it wouldn't matter if we sinned now and then (Ro.6:15). The chances are we don't even know Him.