How does sin separate us from God?

Sin separates us from God in our thoughts; we have no longer the same sense either of His love, His power, or His interest in us. Confidence is lost. Hope, and the value of unseen things, diminish; while the value of things that are seen proportionately increases. The conscience is bad; one is not at ease with God. The path is hard and difficult; the will strengthens itself against Him. We no longer live by faith; visible things come in between us and God, and take possession of the heart. Where there is life, God warns by His Spirit (as in this epistle), He chastises and restores. Where it was only an outward influence, a faith devoid of life, and the conscience not reached, it is abandoned.

Unbelieving men would make Israel's plight a ground of complaint and reproach against God. Either He was indifferent so that His ear never caught their cries, or He was impotent and unable to deliver them. The true state of the case was that their sins had driven a wedge of separation between them and God. They were utterly alienated from Him.

This is a matter that some of us are inclined to overlook. In considering the havoc sin has wrought we are apt to think mainly of the guilt of our sins and the judgment they will incur; perhaps also thinking of the enslaving power exerted by sin in our lives, while giving but little thought to the way in which it has separated us from God. But none of the effects of sin is more disastrous than this — alienation.

This shows clearly the importance of redemption from sin. Sin drives in a wedge between man and God, between the creature and the Creator. My dear friends, let us leave the world’s affairs, it is difficult to govern oneself let alone the world. Let us come down to each one of us in our single experience, the individual. What is true of the world at large, or of the nation is true of the individual, true of me and true of you. Sin separates from God. That is what the gospel is talking about, we are talking about these deep fundamental things. Tinkering with mere surface details will not work, we must come to the root of all the troubles, all the sorrows, all the misery, all the contention, all the strifes and the strivings, to sin which separates man from God. I am talking now to those who do not yet know God. What a wonderful thing it is to be brought back into the presence of God in peace because in righteousness, but let us never forget that if God is going to redeem Israel from her sins and her iniquities (which He is), He has to do the same thing for each one of us, and the fact remains that sin separates from God. You will never be divinely happy until you know God, until you are right with God, until you are put before Him in a new relationship which is that into which every true Christian is introduced.

So long as Israel's sin remained unconfessed, it remained unforgiven, and consequently they had no strength to war for Jehovah. He was not with them, for the sin in their camp had separated between them and their God (Isa. 59:2); but having now confessed and forsaken their sin, God had put it away. Some of God's people spend months — nay, years — of their lifetime in a condition of spiritual inaction, their hearts like water, and themselves afar from the knowledge of God's mind! Let there be but the breadth of a hair severing the telegraphic line of communication between this country and America, and we cannot hold intercourse with our friends across the ocean. Thus does sin separate between God and His people. Not indeed that God foregoes His grace towards His own, or fails to bring them safely home; but here on earth, during this lifetime, unconfessed sin breaks into the communication of God's mind to us, and to it is due the absence of divine power in us, and hence ineffective soldiership.

Externally sin has severed the once happy link that united man, as an intelligent creature, to his Creator. Satan succeeded at the outset in using it to cut the line of communication between man and his true base of operations - God Himself, and ever since the human race has been in the position of the little city of which Solomon speaks. The great king has come against it, besieged it, and built great bulwarks against it (Ecc. 9:14).

Sin has thus brought in distance, estrangement, and enmity on man's side against God, and all his relations Godward are in the direst confusion.

No sooner had Adam sinned than he hid from God behind the trees of the garden—that is, sin had placed a moral gulf between the now fallen creature and his God. Man recoiled from God. Distrust had displaced love, and confidence had given way to dread.

THE SEPARATION THAT EXISTS BETWEEN MAN AND GOD was brought in by sin. The love and the confidence that were natural to him in his innocent state were displaced by the fear and distrust that took possession of his heart in consequence of the transgression of which he was guilty; and that fear and distrust of his Maker dominate and shape the lives of every one of his descendants. And it is not that wholesome and reverential fear that has its congenial habitation in the heart of every intelligent being who is in right relations with God, but it is that terror that is born of the sin of which his conscience tells him he is guilty, and which prevents him from looking at God in any other light than that of a merciless Judge, and this is so wrought upon by his viperous enemy, the devil, that even the overtures of his Creator’s unfathomable grace are utterly disbelieved and refused.

There are three gateways which would seem to emphasize the thought of man's exclusion: the gate at the court, the hanging in front of the tabernacle, and the veil within. When sin had come into the world, our first parents were shut out from the presence of God; as soon as they heard His voice in the garden, nothing in Eden could enable them to stand in His presence. All their surroundings, which spoke of His goodness, could not hinder our guilty parents from hiding from His presence. Although they had endeavored to clothe themselves, they realized in a moment that their guilt rendered them unfit to stand before God; and from that day to this man has been away from God. Why is it that men can talk freely about the world, its business and material progress? They can even talk about moral things, questions of reform, etc., and do not hesitate to tell their minds about them; but the moment you speak of God, or Christ, the moment the truth and the holiness of God are directly presented, if the soul is estranged from God there is at once a shrinking back into silence. And the silence indicates a state of soul which says unto God, "Depart from us, for we desire not the knowledge of Thy ways." Even where the soul has been awakened, there is a sense that it cannot draw near to Him. When our Lord had done an act of grace for Peter and his companions in the miraculous draught of fishes, when they brought the boats to land, Peter fell down at Jesus' knees, saying: "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord."

In order to know man's sinful condition, we do not need to know what is the record of his life. The proof of sin in man is that he is at home outside of God's presence, and absolutely unhappy in that presence — a proof that includes all men. We need not lay specific transgressions to men's charge. God, who knows the heart, alone can do that and He knows there is plenty in every man's life that, when the records are opened, will show much actual transgression. But that man is at a distance from God, none can dispute: the thought of God, as the psalmist says, gives him trouble. This is where God must find a man if He finds him at all. The apostle speaks of it in that way. To saints in the assembly at Ephesus who had been Gentiles, he says: "Ye were … strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world." How did the creature become a stranger to the Creator? There can be but one answer: Sin has come in and brought in alienation and distance from the God of goodness and love. But, thank God, it is just there that His grace begins.

In the parable of the Pounds in Luke 19 the Lord likens heaven to "a far country." Why is this? In the opening chapters of Genesis heaven seems very near, and God a neighbour at hand. We read there of a garden planted by the hand of the Creator, containing everything that was pleasant to the sight and good for food. This was the home of the first man and his wife, and there the Lord God used to come, and hold sweet converse with them. But all this was quickly changed. There came the day when Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden. Sin was the cause of this. It was said to Israel at a later date: "Your iniquities have separated between you and your God" (Isa. 59:2). Sin having thus entered, the divine pleasure in man ceased, and heaven from that moment has seemed "a far country." There is no moral affinity now between heaven and earth.

How much was involved in the entry of sin into Eden. Adam and his wife were at once conscious of their guilt, attempting to hide themselves from God among the trees of the garden. They were evidently aware that they had estranged themselves from God, Who is of holier eyes than to behold iniquity. There was also the entry into man's nature of the principle of sin, and the enmity and defilement that it brought. This principle of sin became the ruling principle of human society and of the world in which man sought to make himself happy without God.