Careful students of the Word of God have pointed out to me the deadly consequences of sin. Most Evangelicals say that sins send a person to the lake of fire. That is not true. A person who is cast into the lake of fire will be there because they did not believe in Jesus for eternal life (John 3:16; 5:24). Sin is, nevertheless, serious business. Our sins can cause death (Rom 6:23; Jas 1:13-15).
This can refer to physical death. But it is broader than that. Our sins can cause sickness. Sin always causes chaos, lack of spiritual fruitfulness, the discipline of God, and the loss of eternal rewards. Sin destroys everything it touches. Bob Wilkin uses the illustration of a card dealer in a game of blackjack. When we sin, it is like telling the dealer, “Hit me!” with another card. The dealer says, “Sure! Here’s another card of death.”
Friends of GES will be familiar with such Biblical teaching. Recently, I noticed another way that sin deals us a card of death. It’s another example of the negative consequences of sin in our lives. We probably realize it subconsciously, but I don’t think we verbalize it very often.
Proverbs 28:1 says, “The wicked flee when no one pursues, but the righteous are bold as a lion.” The wicked and the righteous do not refer to the unbeliever and believer respectively. They refer to the way somebody lives. A believer can live wickedly or righteously.
It says that the one who lives wickedly runs away, even when nobody is chasing him. Why would he do that? He has a guilty conscience. He is afraid people will find out what he’s been doing. He wonders whether anybody knows. He lives in fear. He loses sleep. He’s always looking to see if somebody is close to finding out what he has done in secret.
Think about a Christian leader who is carrying on an adulterous affair. Will his wife find out? Is there any evidence of the affair on his phone that his family might see? Will the woman’s husband of the find out? What could this do to his reputation? His employment? What will a divorce cost him?
Think about what that does to a person’s health. It would be deadly. If there’s a husband involved, it might even cause physical death! Adultery is not the only sin with negative consequences. There are a lot of “deadly” traps out there.
The believer who is living righteously does not experience such things. He can strut around, “bold as a lion.” A lion doesn’t run from real or imaginary enemies. He doesn’t fear them. The proverb is using the analogy to describe a person with a clear conscience. He doesn’t have to look over his shoulder and wonder whether a jealous husband or an angry wife will find out what he’s been doing.
When I see lions on TV, they’re almost always sleeping. What a picture of the tranquility of a righteous life. A lion is not afraid. The believer can never lose eternal life. But sin can cause a lot of problems in his life right now. One of those problems is a guilty conscience. Even if the sin is never found out in this world, that guilt alone is not worth the payment sin gives.
I would rather be a lion lying down wherever I want and sleeping in peace.
