faith2

Why would anyone have to die?

“Be appalled, O heavens, at this; be shocked, be utterly desolate, declares the Lord, for my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water.”

— Jeremiah 2:12,13

The above verse is taken from the book of Jeremiah in the Old Testament where a guy called Jeremiah is speaking to the Israelites on behalf of God. And he's talking about the biggest crisis that has ever faced humanity, which is the problem of sin.

What exactly is sin?

Sin is one of those words that often gets thrown around and misunderstood. It simply means missing the mark. And so, in the context of Christianity, it means missing God's mark or His standard. And it's a problem because it destroys the cisterns (big tanks for storing water) of our lives so that our hearts can't hold any peace or joy or love or comfort. It just seeps out of the cracks.

You need only to take one glance at a history book or today's headlines, and it would appear that there's virtually no end to how we can hurt ourselves and hurt others and, in so doing, decimate our capacity to contain or hold life. But this is just one side of the coin of sin. Jeremiah also tells us that we've forsaken God. We've rejected him; we've given up God and walked away from him. That’s the other side of the coin.