Sin is Dead

SIN is DEAD

Welcome to the New Covenant

For apart from the law, sin is dead. 

Romans 7:8 NASB

We have been lied to.

We have been lied to about many things: our bodies, our food, our medicine. Many of the things we have been told and sold are doing the exact opposite of what we were convinced they would do. 

It is no different with the church and the popular teachings about the things of God.

In the case of the world, we’re primarily lied to because of greed. People want to make money and they are more than happy to lie in order to do so. This motive is alive in the church, but there is a more sinister power at work as well. 

How many of you were told that you are a wretched sinner, God is disgusted with you, and that you must repent of your sins and beg for mercy or face an eternity of pain and suffering in hell after you die?

This is a lie. It's an extremely tricky lie, because it’s wrapped in truth, like all of Satan’s lies. Yes, we are all evil wretched sinners, there’s no doubt about that, but the God is disgusted with you, repent and beg or spend eternity in hell part is the lie. The Good News of the Gospel has been corrupted.

The scriptures actually tell a very different story. The narrative that I see is of a God who created Mankind to be in relationship with Him, a God who has gone to great lengths to repair and restore this relationship, over and over and over again, though Man consistently rejects Him. The story I see has God coming down to deal with the situation personally, and that the sin issue was finished about 2,000 years ago when Jesus said it was. I see a world full of people who do not understand or believe this.

Millions of people believe that Jesus died to forgive their sins but now expects them to live a righteous life, worthy of His grace and mercy. THIS IS A LIE, and it’s absurd. We cannot live a life that is worthy of God’s grace and mercy. That’s what makes it grace and mercy. The enemy uses this lie because it makes sense to us. We are taught to pay for what we get. That is ingrained in us from an early age. It follows that we owe a great debt to Jesus for his astounding love proved by his sacrifice on our behalf. But attempting to live a life worthy of Him is always going to become a life of serious bondage. We cannot do it. We never could. God fully understood this. 

It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.

Galatians 5:1 NIV

The Apostle Paul knew something about living under a yoke of slavery. Life under the Law of Moses was rough. The 613 laws of the Old Covenant were all encompassing. Every aspect of life was dictated by the Law and the Israelites struggled under it for generations. The prophet Jeremiah made it clear that there would be a New Covenant and that it would not be like the old, some six hundred years before Jesus came to make it so:

³¹ "Behold, the days are coming, says the

Lord

, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, ³² not like the covenant which I made with their fathers when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant which they broke, though I was their husband, says the

Lord

. ³³ But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the

Lord

: I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. ³⁴ And no longer shall each man teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the

Lord

,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the

Lord

; for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more."

Jeremiah 31:31-34 ESV

Does this say, I will offer them mercy only if they beg me repeatedly for the remainder of their earthly lives? Does it say, I will forgive them begrudgingly and constantly remind them how unworthy they are?

No. It says, I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.  When they ask me to? No. When they beg and plead for it? Nope. It just says, I will forgive their iniquity and I will remember their sin no more.

How many people do you know who live like God remembers their sin no more? How many actually live their lives, moment by moment, knowing for sure that God is not angry and, in fact, does not even remember their sin?

Many people who claim to believe in Jesus do not even begin to understand what this means. This is because Satan is brilliant and he and his demons do not want us to understand what this means. They have the whole world tied up in knots, Christians most of all. 

I have been a follower of Jesus for 30 years, but just in the last few years have I finally begun to understand this New Covenant Jesus spoke of, due largely to the teaching of Pastor Aaron Budjen of Living God Ministries in Colorado. I became aware of Aaron’s teaching in 2008 and I was blown away. I listened to every recording he had available. While I started to understand a lot more, I was still confused.

Ten years later, in 2018, I reconnected with Living God Ministries and there was a lot more content available, including verse by verse teachings through the books of Acts, Romans, Galatians, and Hebrews. I devoured these, and, over the course of a few months, huge pieces of the puzzle started falling into place. The scriptures began to make sense in a way they never had before.

I highly recommend you listen to all of Aaron’s teaching, freely available in the radio archives at www.livinggodministries.net. I would start with his series on Forgiveness. That is the foundation of everything.

In this book, I aim to tackle a lot of different topics, to look at them through the lens of the New Covenant, which is our Freedom in Christ. My hope is to impart an understanding that our enemies are very interested in keeping us enslaved to and perpetuating lies, but we have the power to overcome.

In order to understand the freedom we must first see the bondage. In order to find a solution, we have to understand the problem. So, let’s begin at the beginning.

Part I

1

Defining the Problem

God made Adam and Eve naked and carefree. They had God, they had each other, and they had a beautiful garden to look after and eat from. We have no idea how long they existed in this blissful state. I would love to think it was a long, long time. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like it. Cain and Abel don’t turn up until after Adam and Eve are kicked out of the garden.

But the serpent shows up:

"Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the

Lord

God had made. He said to the woman, Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?

² The woman said to the serpent, We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, ³ but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’

⁴ You will not certainly die, the serpent said to the woman. ⁵ For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.

Genesis 3:1-5 NIV

What God actually said was:

You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.

Genesis 2:16-17 NIV

God says, You will certainly die, and the serpent says, You will not certainly die. You have to choose whom to believe. It’s hard to imagine that Eve would choose to believe the serpent over the Lord God. Adam and Eve walked with God in the garden. They knew His voice. Why in the world would they believe this snake who turns up? 

My hypothesis? They wanted to eat from that tree.

Again, we don’t know how long they had been in the garden, and we don’t know how many other things there were in the garden to eat, but, regardless, I don’t think they were swayed by just one lie from the serpent. I think they wanted to taste the forbidden fruit because that’s human nature. 

God, being God, surely knew this. So why did He create the Tree of Knowledge at all? 

The answer has to be love. If God didn’t give Adam and Eve any restriction, if there wasn’t anything that they were told not to do, then there would be no way to show God that they loved and trusted Him. Trust isn’t trust if there’s no option to break it. Love isn’t love if you don’t have the option to not love. The Tree of Knowledge was essential to establishing free will. If there is no way to exercise free will, then it doesn’t exist. God decided that choice was going to be an integral part of the human condition. We are given the power to do what He wants us to do or not. 

The angels were also given free will. We learn about Satan in Ezekiel 28:

'This is what the Sovereign Lord says: 'You were the seal of perfection, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty. ¹³ You were in Eden, the garden of God; every precious stone adorned you: carnelian, chrysolite and emerald, topaz, onyx and jasper, lapis lazuli, turquoise and beryl. Your settings and mountings were made of gold; on the day you were created they were prepared. ¹⁴ You were anointed as a guardian cherub, for so I ordained you. You were on the holy mount of God; you walked among the fiery stones. ¹⁵ You were blameless in your ways from the day you were created until wickedness was found in you. ¹⁶ Through your widespread trade you were filled with violence, and you sinned. So I drove you in disgrace from the mount of God, and I expelled you, guardian cherub, from among the fiery stones. ¹⁷ Your heart became proud on account of your beauty, and you corrupted your wisdom because of your splendor. So I threw you to the earth; I made a spectacle of you before kings."

Ezekiel 28:12-17 NIV

The pride that caused the Fall of Satan is the same pride at work in Adam and Eve. God created the forbidden Tree because there had to be a choice between obeying Him and not obeying Him. In the Fall, Adam and Eve chose themselves over God, and every human since has been confronted