We cannot know and love the truth about God without knowing and loving the truth about ourselves and our neighbors The very act that brought a false judgment about God also brought a false judgment about Adam and Eve, and thus about all of humanity. We cannot reject the truth about God without thereby rejecting the truth about ourselves and our neighbors. And we cannot refrain from loving God without thereby refraining from loving ourselves and our neighbors.

Adam and Eve were seduced into believing that there was something they could get that would improve their lot in life, something the Creator was holding back from them out of fear. This presupposed that something was lacking in their lives up to this point and that it was up to them and them alone to get it.

The very act of believing she was on her own was causing Eve to be on her own. The very act of believing she was deficient was creating a deficiency. By accepting the serpent’s lie, Eve was beginning to great her own alternate, godless reality.

The lure that brought Eve – and us – into this self-centered reality traps us in a vicious cycle. Believing a lie, we judge God to be untrustworthy or inadequate to fill us with life. Our judgment then blocks God’s fullness and makes us feel empty and on our own. Our emptiness in turn makes other things seem like viable candidates to fill us. Things like religion, sexual pleasure, fame, riches, and power take on an illusory god-like attractiveness to us when viewed with the hungry eyes of our vacuous souls. We can only ascribe worth to others when we no longer need to use others to acquire worth for ourselves. Yet all these diverse gods are fundamentally alike in that they attain their status only because people are striving to become god-like on the basis of a lie that they are not already like God. Our lies feel like truth. Our false gods feel like life.

These false gods seem potentially filling only because we live in desperate hunger. They promise fulfillment but create only striving. But they are never truly satisfying and are never permanent. The serpent convinced Eve that her life had to be found in doing rather than simply being. Her life, and the life of her descendants, would from that time on consist of futilely chasing what God has always intended to give us for free.

One symptom of our fallen condition is that we usually don’t feel our situation is very grave. The seriousness of an illness can be assessed by how radical the cure is that is required to overcome it. By dying for us on the cross, Christ revealed the depth of human sinfulness. In the God-forsaken death of Jesus on the cross, we see the wrath of God condemning sin. It is only when we look at the cross, God’s “cure” for our sin, that the full gravity of our condition becomes apparent. We see the gravity of our condition in how radical the cure is.

We usually have difficulty accepting this assessment, for we evaluate ourselves by our own standards over against other people. This judgment is not only false, it is the essence of the very sin from which we need to be freed. To free us from this false, sinful, judgment, Scripture frequently reminds us of the true standard we are up against: God Himself.

Paul says that every act that does not flow out of faith is sin (Rom. 14:23). Every act and every thought that does not flow out of trust (faith) that God is who he reveals himself to be – everything that in inconsistent with the purpose for which God created the world – is sin. Whenever we fail to love God with all our heart, mind, and body, we stand condemned. Whenever we fail to ascribe to our neighbors or to ourselves the worth that God ascribes to us, we stand condemned. We all stand equally condemned!

The same act that exposes our hopelessness before God uncovers our hopefulness in God, for it reveals the unsurpassable worth we are mercifully given by God. The act that reveals the disease accomplishes the cure. The very act of exposing our sin accomplishes our salvation. The crucified Messiah is simultaneously the full expression of God’s judgment and mercy. He became our sin so that we might become his righteousness (2 Cor. 5:21).

Jesus is who God always intended humanity to be and who humanity truly is – if only we will yield to God’s Spirit and relinquish the illusory reality of the serpent’s lie. It is not enough to understand abiding in Christ intellectually as a fact: we must yield continually to it in order to know it experientially and transformationally. We are to live in faith and live in love (Eph 5:2).

The goal of the Christian life is to increasingly let go of the alien and illusory world “in Adam” and to live in this center, our true home, “in Christ.” If frees us to do the one thing we are created to do: love without judgment.

Boyd, Gregory A. Repenting of Religion – Turning from Judgment to the Love of God. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004.