God accepted Jesus’ death as payment in full for our sins, and raised him from the dead. It’s a prospect we all face, because we’re all guilty of rebelling against God. This is a terrible thing, to fall under the sentence of God’s judgment. And since God is the source of life and all good things, being cut off from him means a destruction that never ends. He will cut us off from himself permanently. The sentence God will pass on that day will be to give us what we have asked for-which is separation from him. We will all one day stand before God and give account to him for our lives, for the damage we have done, and for our personal rejection of him as our ruler. The corruption, decay and death in our world are part of God’s punishment for humanity’s rejection of him.īut there is a further judgment that we will face.

We experience God’s judgment against our rebellion in the reality of death. In other words, God won’t let the rebellion go on forever. He holds us accountable for our actions because it matters to him that we dishonor him, that we treat other people so poorly, and that we ruin his world. Like any good ruler, God cares enough to take our rebellion seriously. Our self-rule fails and we suffer the consequences, including the damage we do to ourselves, to the people around us, and to the world we live in. We find ourselves in a world full of little “gods,” each of us doing things our own way, each of us selfishly trying to bend the world and other people to our own will. The common Bible word for this rebellious stance towards God is “sin,” and we all do it-whether we follow a particular religion or not. We follow our own desires and priorities, and live by the values we decide are best (whether religious, secular, or a mix of both). We don’t honor and obey him as our ruler. We don’t thank him as we should for being our generous creator and provider.

Most of the time, we simply ignore God or keep him at a distance, and get on with living our own lives. We rejected him as God by deciding to live our own way, in defiance of him. From the very beginning, we didn’t want God to be our ruler. Everything that is wrong in our lives and in the world stems from the fateful choice humanity has made.

Religion gone astray pdf