I want to talk about a topic that's very basic to Christianity at its core. It’s something we all have to understand, it's something we have to come to terms with. It’s something we have to avoid. It's sin! And we’ll dive deep into this topic in certain ways, we will be jumping around a lot and hearing many stories, but I hope this can be a useful word. I first want to start with a little story in the old testament, where it leads to Moses saying a very interesting thing. And then we are going to take that statement he says, and apply it to the rest of the Bible and our lives.
Let's look at the book of Numbers, way back in the beginning of the Old Testament. It was during this time Moses was leading the Israelites towards the promised land. The books of Exodus and Leviticus set the stage of the Israelites leaving Egypt, and for a while they were near Sinai. And as they moved towards the promised land, they thought they couldn’t actually take that land, against what God originally told them. With God’s wrath they were forced to wander the wilderness for 40 years. They then get to the point where they are ready to cross the Jordan and to finally take the land God has promised them. And right before they went, there were two tribes, called Gad and Reuben that didn’t necessarily want to go take the promised land. They said where they were was great for raising cattle, they wanted to stay there. Moses’s first answer to this was no, but they convince him that they’ll help take the promised land with the others, and then go back.
Now this is happening in Numbers 32 and I'll paraphrase what’s happening here but in verses 1:5 the two tribes are making their plea to stay and not cross the Jordan. And then in verses 6:13 Moses is basically calling them out saying your going to let all your fellow Israelites go to war while you sit here? Don’t you know this is exactly what happened to us before?
That God made us walk in the wilderness for 40 years? And it's the same thing you're asking here? And then in verses 16:20 they say we’ll build here for the women and children but we will fight alongside the Israelites, help fulfill what needs to be fulfilled, and then come back later. And we get to verses 22 and 23:
Numbers 32:22-23 “Then when the land is subdued before the Lord, you may return and be free from your obligation to the Lord and to Israel. And this land will be your possession before the Lord. But if you fail to do this, you will be sinning against the Lord; and be sure, your sin will find you out”
Moses ultimately agrees with the plan of the two tribes, but he says something very interesting at the end: “and be sure, your sin will find you out”. In this sermon I want to look at this phrase specifically: “and be sure, your sin will find you out”. What does that mean? Does sin always find you out? What does it mean to have “sin find you out”?
Simply put, sin has unavoidable consequences. Whatever you might do or try to do, sin has a price. Sin has a consequence, sin always has something attached to it. And knowing the origin of sin, a set of angels fell from heaven, and utlimately the serpent that deceived Adam and Eve, tricking them to eat of the tree which introduced sin into the world. The fall of man happened right then and there. And right after this we start so see the sinful nature of us people shine through. In the old testament, and throughout the whole bible as a matter of fact, we see story after story of people dealing and fighting with sin, and oftentimes paying a price for it.
But going back to that concept, “be sure, your sin will find you out”. Let's look at some people and some stories in the Bible to try to pick apart this statement and see what that really means. There’s so many stories we can actually look into, but I want to just highlight a few and see what they say. If we look in the old testament back to the story of Joseph and his brothers, we see a great example of this.
The Story of Joseph
In the book of Genesis, we see the story of Joseph, born of Jacob, and he had many brothers. Many of us know the story but let's look a little closer! If we skip a couple of verses into Genesis 37 we see:
Genesis 37:3-4 “Now Israel loved Joseph more than any other of his sons, because he was the son of his old age. And he made him a robe of many colors. But when his brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, they hated him and could not speak peacefully.”
And then if we look further and i'll paraphrase, Joseph had a dream and he told his brothers the dream and it was that one day his brothers will bow down to him. And as you can imagine, they hated him even more. The rest of the story follows as we all know. After that they thought about making a plan to kill him, but they ultimately decided to sell him into slavery. After he was sold to slavery he climbed the ranks in Egpyt until he was second in command there. He rose from slavery to quite a powerful person there by interpreting a dream to the Pharaoh. And that dream predicted a famine and when that famine hit, Joseph’s brothers came to Egypt to buy food.
In the midst of that Joseph revealed himself to them, and he put them in prison for 3 days. Some more time passes and Joseph’s father died, and his brothers thought Joseph would be angry at them and seek revenge. So Joseph’s brothers came to him and they fell down and begged for his forgiveness. See, many many years later, the sin that Josephs brothers did found them out. They probably forgot about it for a long time and all of a sudden they’re reminded of what they did. Their sin found them out!
Now this same kind of thing happens in the New Testament too! If we look at the simple story of Annanias and Sapphira:
Acts 5:1-11 “But a man named Ananias, with his wife Sapphira, sold a piece of property, and with his wife's knowledge he kept back for himself some of the proceeds and brought only a part of it and laid it at the apostles' feet. But Peter said, “Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and to keep back for yourself part of the proceeds of the land? While it remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it was sold, was it not at your disposal? Why is it that you have contrived this deed in your heart? You have not lied to man but to God.” When Ananias heard these words, he fell down and breathed his last. And great fear came upon all who heard of it. The young men rose and wrapped him up and carried him out and buried him. After an interval of about three hours his wife came in, not knowing what had happened. And Peter said to her, “Tell me whether you sold the land for so much.” And she said, “Yes, for so much.” But Peter said to her, “How is it that you have agreed together to test the Spirit of the Lord? Behold, the feet of those who have buried your husband are at the door, and they will carry you out.” Immediately she fell down at his feet and breathed her last. When the young men came in they found her dead, and they carried her out and buried her beside her husband. And great fear came upon the whole church and upon all who heard of these things.”
And if this isn’t a showcase of “be sure, your sin will find you out” when I don’t know what is. We can see in these verses that Ananias and Sapphira both directly lied, they sinned. And immediately once they were found out of their sin, they breathed their last breath. Their sin found them out. See sometimes it takes twenty plus years like it did for Joseph and his brothers, or sometimes it can happen almost immediately. But it will always find us out. The final example I want to look at of this, and its one of the main people I want to look into is King David back in the Old Testament, specifically of his story with Bathsheba.
The Story of David
David was a man after God’s own heart, and he grew up and became the King of Israel through a whole chain of events with Saul, slaying Goliath, and other things. I won’t go into that but David was a true man after God’s own heart, he did everything with and for God.
If we look in 2 Samuel 11 we see the start of this story. King David saw a beautiful woman bathing from the roof of the king’s house. And he sent messengers to take her, and David layed with her. And then the woman got pregnant and told David. And David tried to persuade Bathshebas husband to come home and to be home with his wife to make it seem like he was the one who got her pregnant. But Uriah didn’t do so after a few attempts from David. And so after that didn’t work, David had Uriah sent to the frontlines of battle so that he would be killed. And he was. Once Bathsheba found out, she lamented and David took her to his house and became his wife and bore the son.
But if we fast forward to the end of the last verse in the chapter, it says “But the thing that David had done displeased the LORD”. And this goes into the next chapter where the Lord sends a prophet named Nathan to confront him. And in 2 Samuel 12 Nathan meets David and gives him a parable about a rich man taking a poor man's only sheep and slaughtering it instead of his own.
After hearing this David got angry and said whoever has done this deserves to die, and he should restore his lamb! David here is saying that's so unfair, that rich person deserves death! And look at verse 7: “Nathan said to David, “YOU ARE THE MAN!” Ive anointed you King of Israel. I delivered you from Saul. ”
God’s saying he’s done SO much for David. Why would you do such evil? Imagine how David felt when he got exposed here. He was called out by the Lord through Nathan. His sin found him out. And the Lord then tells David the sword will never depart from your house and evil will be raised against you. See, David’s sin was found out. And there’s real consequences for it. We see in verses 13 that David admitted he sinned against the Lord. and the Lord forgave him.
But we see that the physical consequence of that sin will still stick with him in verse 14:
2 Samuel 12:14 “Nevertheless, because by this deed you have utterly scorned the LORD, the child who is born to you shall die.”
There’s so many stories of this same thing happening. Someone sins, and sometime down the road, their sin finds them out. Sometimes you get found out immediately, like Ananias and Sapphira, sometimes it takes years and decades. But regardless of the time, they were found out for their sins.
See, sin can show itself physically, as we saw in those stores, but it in the same way shows itself spiritually. In the midst of those sins, those people in the stories get separated from God, as he hates sin.
Why do we sin?
There’s just as much of a spiritual consequence as there is physical. So knowing all of this, why do we still sin? With us being of this world, we are in a fallen world, and we are a fallen people. But being of this world, if we don’t have a relationship with God, we often fundamentally don’t see the power of sin. A physical person in this physical world, we often don’t respond to something wrong that we’re doing until it has some sort of real physical consequence. But if we knew that the spiritual consequences at play here are so much more grave and dangerous, we’d be afraid and fearful to do these sins right?
A person who walks by faith knows this, they know the pain and destruction that sin causes. And without us actively putting faith and working on that faith in God, an invisible God, we often don’t see those often invisible, spiritual consequences until they come out in some physical way. And you may be completely rotting away inside, knowing something is wrong, knowing your doing wrong, but nothing happens and nothing changes until something physical does. We sometimes think we can get away with sinning one time, or two or three, but it’s not always the case.
There’s so many cases of this. Think about an alcoholic. People might notice and constantly tell you to quit alcohol, and you say yeah yeah I will one day. And it's this back and forth of wanting to quit but you stay in it, and it's only until your wife divorces you, your kids never talk to you again because you abandoned them, your liver is failing, its only then do you start to think, oh yeah maybe I should really quit.
After you lost everything physically, you think yeah I really need to make a change in my life. What about sexual sins. What about pornography? You might be in that cycle of sin, over and over again, and you live life as if it's fine. And its been years of being in this same cycle. And maybe you lie to yourself that it’ll change once you get married, and you get married and you end up having such problems within your marriage that it all crumbles apart because your mind is so rotten from what you’ve done over the years. That sin will one day find you out.
If you were to ask true prior addicts in this world or someone else that has gone through something excruciating they caused themselves, they’ll often tell you until you come to the end of yourself and the end of your life, you're just playing games and it wont change. For many people it takes something physically grave to stir that change within you. So where is this disconnect with sin? We all know what it is. Whe know where it came from. We know the consequences, why does it still happen?
Why do followers of Jesus still sin sometimes? And sometimes repeatedly? See its not an issue of understanding what sin is in our heads. We all intellectually understand what sin is and how it works. But it’s a matter of our hearts! It's human nature to live by sight, and all of that is what happens when we live by sight, but we are called to live by faith. And it's that change in how we live that also drives the change in how we understand the grave danger that sin is. That fear of the Lord we build in our hearts, and at the same time the love for God, in our hearts, is what gets us away from it, and truly understanding the gravity of sin to the point where we have the strength to truly fight it and stand strong. Like we’ve seen, it's human nature to not care about bad things we do until something physically bad happens to us. It's just human nature!
Covering up our sin
And another thing that's to the very core of human nature is we often, so so often, think we can cover up our sin. We do something we shouldn’t behind closed doors, at night, or away from people, and we think whatever we are doing will not get out. It won't affect us. We are often prideful to think we can hide these things from God. And there’s so many stories in the Bible, like we’ve seen, where someone sins, but then after that sin they also try to cover it up. And can you guess what happens in every single case when they especially try to cover it up? Their sin finds them out. And it's often worse on you after you get found out after trying to cover it up.
I mean look at the 3 stories we looked at. Look at the story of Joseph and his brothers, when we looked into it earlier I skipped over this part, but if we go back there to Genesis 37, we see after the brothers got jealous, they wanted to kill him but they decided not to have blood on their hands, but rather sell him into slavery.
So they stripped Joseph of his robe and threw him into a pit. And then they sold him into slavery. And let's read verse 29 and on:
Genesis 37:29-34 “When Reuben returned to the pit and saw that Joseph was not in the pit, he tore his clothes and returned to his brothers and said, “The boy is gone, and I, where shall I go?” Then they took Joseph’s robe and slaughtered a goat and dipped the robe in blood. And they sent the robe of many colors and brought it to their father and said, “This we have found; please identify whether it is your son’s robe or not.” And he identified it and said “It is my son’s robe. A fierce animal has devoured him. Joseph is without doubt torn to pieces.”
Not only did Joseph’s brothers sin against him, but they made up an elaborate lie to their father about it. They sinned, and they covered it up. And look at what happens at the end? They end up bowing to Joseph and pleading for his forgiveness. Imagine how those brothers felt during those twenty something years. They knew it in the back of their heads. They had that guilt. For twenty plus years they carried that until they were found out. Same thing with King David! He didn’t only sin with Bathsheba, he tried to cover it up after! After the sin he tried to very elaborately get Uriah to stay home to lay with his wife to make it seem like he got her pregnant. That didn’t work so he tried again, a couple times until he decided lets just go big and send him into battle to purposefully get killed. And David probably thought it wouldn't come out. He took care of it and made it seem like some fluke or mistake of Uriahs death.
But look at what happens later, Nathan comes and says “You are the man!”, YOU are the one who's done this against the Lord. And look at what 2 Samuel 12:12 says:
2 Samuel 12:12 “For you did it secretly, but I will do this thing before all Israel and before the sun.”
See because of David’s coverup, God makes an example out of him by exposing what he’s done to all. Sinning is one thing, but covering it up after makes it all that much worse. Same thing with Ananias and Sapphira, their sin was the literal coverup! All they had to do was be honest about what they did and they’d be fine.
You know we as humans so so often try to cover up our shame, guilt, and sin. And it's in our very core, what’s the one thing Adam and Eve did after they sinned, they covered themselves with leaves in shame. And its during this covering up that we just spiritually and physically rot away. We know we did wrong and we for some reason think we can cover it up and God won’t see it but deep deep down we know God sees it so we feel shameful but we still do it and don’t want to open it up because of what someone might say or itll make us feel worse, and it keeps going!
We get to this point in our lives where that covering up sin rots us away. And King David felt the same exact way. He actually wrote about this himself in Psalms, specifically:
Psalms 32:1-5 “Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man against whom the Lord counts no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit. For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover my iniquity; I said “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,” and you forgave the iniquity of my sin.”
Doesn’t that describe how we feel in covering up sin? When we keep silent, keeping it deep down in our hearts, our bones literally waste away. We deep down feel God’s hand upon us, and we lose strength. We lose spiritual strength. We lose physical strength. Do you want to know why sexual sins are some of the most dangerous and prevalent sins in our world right now? Because they’re often done hidden. And in that hidden sight from other people, we think we can do those things with zero consequences. Ahh one more time won’t hurt anyone. And we put so much effort into hiding it because we think we’re so smart. But deep deep down we know it's shameful and God sees but no one else sees so we think we can still do it. But when you look from the outside you're spiritually rotting, you're physically rotting, your bones are wasting away. This is the prime example of a kind of sin we think we can often get away with.
Sin is definitely a tough battle. It’s hard to deal with, it's dangerous, it has physical and spiritual consequences. And we often make it worse by trying to cover it up. Or waiting to make a change until we lose something or get really hurt physically.
And honestly, this story I’ve painted so far, it’s pretty grim and dark. We are all sinners and when we sin we get punished in many ways. And the ultimate price of sin is death. That’s pretty dark; but that's not the end of the story.
Jesus Christ
I set this sermon up this way in specific where I avoided one specific topic so that we can see what life with sin is like, without Jesus Christ. See the life of Jesus Christ makes this whole sin equation very interesting, and as we’ll see next, he’s done some of the most gracious, loving, and merciful things in this world that make everything we’ve read so far not have to be our reality, or our ending. And to show what Jesus does, I want to look at a story in the book of John about this, chapter 8, and it's a quite famous story many of us know quite well.
John 8:1-11 "but Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts, where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him. But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground. At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”. “No one, sir,” she said. “Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.”"
And reading that verse over, it's good and in fact it's great, but there’s actually so many subtle details in here that when I heard it all, I just thought wow, how gracious and amazing is Jesus. In the time of the book of John, we know Jesus is moving, he's healing, he’s preaching himself as the messiah, and it's during this time that the Pharisees started to have some real problems with him.
These guys hold the law so fully and when this guy does things on the Sabbath, when he goes against some things they think is right and then they get called out for it, they start to have problems with Jesus who’s this so-called messiah. And it’s not the first time that these “religious leaders” tried to trap Jesus and test him with difficult questions. And they tried to do that same thing here. Jesus was one day teaching and then the Pharisees brought a woman and said she has been caught in the act of adultery. And then they say by the law we are commanded to stone such women. So what do you say Jesus? What are you gonna do? The Pharisees came with this woman here to literally put Jesus on the spot, in front of other people. They want to see him choke and make a mistake. If we dig deeper here, the Pharisees are actually referring to an old testament law written in a few spots, we’ll read the shorter one in Leviticus:
Leviticus 20:10 “If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor, both the adulterer and adulteress shall surely be put to death.”
And there’s a spot in Deuteronomy that says a very similar thing, that the man and woman should be stoned. So what’s interesting about this law? And about what the Pharisees are doing? Something is missing here. That law says if adultery happens, both the man and woman shall be put to death. But the Pharisees only brought the woman.
So where’s the man? If the Pharisees are trying to test Jesus by the law, shouldn’t they follow the law to the fullest? See we don’t know why the man wasn’t there, or maybe the woman was set up or it was all some lie, but it highlights the heart of the Pharisees in this all. They don’t care about the law obviously, they really care about getting Jesus in a gotcha! moment.
So we know the Pharisees are coming with completely tainted hearts trying to test Jesus, and now it's on Jesus to respond. And there’s actually a lot at stake here, if Jesus didn’t uphold the law, then all the times he talked about fulfilling the law would all be a lie. But if he did uphold the law and stoned this woman, where’s the mercy and compassion of this so-called messiah that is all about mercy and passion? It seems like a lose-lose situation for him. But what Jesus says, is “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.” And it might not seem like much but this phrase was actually such a slick, quick thinking on your feet sentence to say. And that’s who Jesus is! He’s perfect! He doesn’t say to not throw any stones, because that’s not what the law says, but he says, sure throw it but make sure whoever throws it is without sin.
He trapped the Pharisees. They came to trap him but he turned it around right back at them. Jesus is basically saying “oh if you want to apply the law, yeah then let's apply it right back at you” what he says is brilliant here! And then in verse 9 we see “When they heard it, they went away one by one, and then Jesus was left alone with the woman”. After all of that, it was just Jesus and the woman caught in adultery, probably all shameful and vulnerable. And in verse 10 he says “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more.”s
Praise God. Look at what happens here, the woman was confronted by people accusing her, she was brought out and publicly shamed. And what did Jesus do? He got rid of them. At the end it was just her and Jesus only. The ones who came to shame Jesus and this woman are now the ones leaving in shame. Look who’s sin actually was found out! And look who was forgiven!
See when we ourselves bring our sin out into the open, in front of Jesus, look at how Jesus greets us with it. There could even be people around us that could even be mocking us for the shameful thing we’ve done. There could be people even attacking us for it. But look at what Jesus does? He gets rid of all of those people accusing you, and what does he do? He has every single right to accuse and condemn you, but instead he does the most gracious and merciful thing ever. He lets it go. He doesn’t condemn you, but he forgives you. See this gets to the very core of Christianity. We sin and we are guilty of sin and we deserve to be condemned. But Christ died for us to take the condemnation on his behalf for us!
We are guilty and we 100% deserve to surely have our sins to find us out and destroy us. But like Romans 8:1 says “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Jesus Christ.” We deserve it, but Jesus took it. Jesus won’t condemn you because he was condemned for you. And it’s such an amazing verse right here. Praise God!
Is there something in your life that you’re still hiding? That you are so ashamed of? That deep deep down you never want it to be brought up and your bones are just wasting away in the midst of it? Or if it's something in your life, that if it was projected on the screen behind me and it got out and everyone saw it, your heart would sink just like when David was called out, or Joseph's brothers?
Bring that very thing to Jesus. Bring it out into the open to him so that your sin doesn’t find you out, but he finds it out for you, and so that he takes it upon himself. Be like that woman caught in adultery. I don’t mean literally but bring your sins out into the light so Jesus’ blood can wash it away so it doesn’t find you out. And do whatever it is you need to to fully bring that sin out with Jesus. Maybe its asking this or that person for forgiveness. Maybe its confessing to a brother. You in your heart know if you're covering something, so do what you need to, to fully let it go. Let Jesus take it upon himself and let him find your sins and take them.