Sin Breaks the Covenant With A Holy God
And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” Genesis 2.17
When God had finished creating the world, the first thing he did is made a covenant with the people He had created. This covenant had enormous benefit and just one stipulation. Adam and Eve were to live in the garden and enjoy the multitude of blessings contained within. The one command was: do not eat the fruit from one tree.
But they ate. When Eve took the fruit and gave some to her husband, they had done much more than make a mistake. They had not just done something that God had asked them kindly not to. Adam and Eve had broken the covenant. They had brought sin into a relationship that previously had been free from sin. In doing the one thing that God had told them was forbidden, they had severed the possibility of remaining in the presence of a God who cannot be in the company of sin.
Sin is more than just doing bad things. When you view sin as nothing more than a blunder that you stumble into, than it is difficult to understand why you need a savior. If sin is something that has been thrust upon you by your parents mistakes, the difficult neighborhood you were raised in, or culture’s need to produce video games and movies of questionable content, than all you need to do is unlearn, move away, or avoid. If this is all that sin is, than you can take the steps to make yourself right.
But sin is an offensive rejection of the deal that God made with us, so only He can make it right. Sin is the conscious breaking of God’s covenant. It is the denial of God’s plan for the world, and thus a dismissal of God Himself. When you sin, you snub a God who offered everything (including HIMSELF) but one tree, because you think that you are better off with the ‘freedom’ of your own plan.