I want to talk to you today about breaking the law. I want to talk to you about breaking God’s law. God gave many laws to Moses in the Bible and He commanded the people to follow those laws. Many of those laws are found in the 10 commandments. Some of those laws are: Do not steal; do not lie; do not kill anyone; respect your mother and father; and do not worship any idols.
Those are some of the laws given to us by God that He expects us to follow. Now, where there is a law there is a punishment for breaking the law. If you break the law in a Western country, like if you steal something, or commit fraud, and you get caught and convicted, then you will have to either go to jail, or you will get some other kind of punishment. There is a punishment waiting for those who break the law. As the saying goes, do the crime – do the time.
But what is the punishment for breaking God’s laws? Let’s first understand something here. If we break any one of God’s laws, we are no longer perfect. We are imperfect and impure. And only perfect people are able to go to heaven. You can only be perfect if you never broke God’s laws.
The Bible says:
“For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 6:23).
When you go to work you get paid, and the payment you receive is called wages. If we break the law, that is called a sin. So if we sin and break God’s law, the Bible says our payment is death. That means we are not going to go to heaven if we sin or break God’s law.
This is not good news, in fact it is really bad news. All of us have sinned. We have all broken God’s laws, none of us is perfect. We are all doomed to die and suffer for our sins unless we are saved from that death.
Jesus said that if we believed in Him we would not have to suffer the second death. The first death is the death of the body, and the second death is the death of our soul. We will all die once. All of us will die in our bodies. But that does not mean that we have to die with our souls. Our soul continues to live even if our bodies die.
“For everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God’s glorious standard.” (Romans 3:23).
We are all guilty of breaking God’s law. We are lawbreakers, we are guilty sinners. None of us is perfect and we all need to be forgiven of the sins that we have committed.
If you think that you can live your life, and keep breaking God’s laws, and keep evil in your heart, and still go to heaven, that is not going to happen. “The wages is sin is death”. If you have sinned against God, you are guilty. It shows that you are not perfect and that you need to be forgiven by God.
But who is going to pay the fine for you? Who is going to take the punishment for the sins that you committed? There is no special place where you will go after you die and be punished for awhile and then get to go to heaven. That is not going to happen. You may experience some bad consequences because of the sins you committed here on earth, but that is not the only punishment you will receive for breaking God’s law. Whenever we sin there are always negative of bad consequences.
But when we break God’s laws, we have disobeyed God. His law is perfect, and if we break just one of those laws, we become lawbreakers. By breaking just one of the many laws that God has, we become lawbreakers. We broke one law, and by breaking one law, we become guilty of breaking God’s law as a whole.
So we have a big picture that is called God’s law, and that contains all the laws God ever made – that is called God’s Law. But God’s law is made up of many individuals laws, and when we put all the laws together we end up with God’s law.
So if you break anyone of God’s laws, you have broken God’s law. And you are not able to go to heaven because you have broken the law, even if you broken just one of them.
The Bible says:
“For the person who keeps all of the laws except one is as guilty as a person who has broken all of God’s laws.” (James 2:10).
This is a difficult subject and I want to look into next week as well. But for now, let me just say that because we are all lawbreakers, we are guilty, and God will punish us for our sins. But that punishment will come after we die, and it will be forever, unless we are saved from our sins.
And the good news is that God sent Jesus Christ to die for our sins. Jesus was sent to be punished for our sins. And He was punished on the cross. Jesus paid the price for our sins upon the cross. God poured out His anger and punished Jesus for all the sins that you and I have committed.
In that way the punishment for our sins has been done, what payment for our sins has been paid by Jesus. Jesus suffered and died the death that we deserved to die because we sinned. But Jesus, even though He never sinned, was willing to be punished for our sins, so that if we believe in Him, we will not have to be punished.
If we believe in Jesus it is as if we had never sinned because God forgives us of our sins because Jesus is the one who paid the penalty for our sins.
We are going to talk more about his next week because it is a very important piece of salvation and the Christian faith.