Identity

Yesterday I wrote the definition of Sin from the words of a Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard. If you weren’t quite sure what he was saying, it wasn’t that sin alone is breaking the “divine rules.” It’s not having a close relationship with God and finding an identity apart from him. We all get our identity from something or someone and our identity is our sense of being distinct and valuable. Some of our identities come from our job, being a mom or dad, or being an athlete or a new love relationship. However Kierkegaard asserts that human beings were made not only to believe in God in some general way, but to love him supremely, center their lives on him above anything else, and build their very identities on him. Anything other than this is sin.

The first commandment is to “have no other Gods before me.” According to the bible then, the primary way to define sin is not just the doing of bad things, but the making of good things into ultimate things. It is seeking to establish a sense of self by making something else more central to your significance, purpose, and happiness than your relationship to God.

I’m getting all this from Timothy Keller’s book The Reason for God. The whole chapter is amazing and you see sin in a different light and what it is and why it is bad. There’s a lot of interesting info so I’m just going to write a little at a time. As I’ve said in other posts, I’m a Christian and I believe in God. He is my strength and He helps me get through the days and the trials I face. . So this is encouraging for me. I hope it is for you as well.

Tomorrow I will show an example of what happens when you build your “identity” on anything less than God.