Dressing up sin in fancy clothes

Repent! Turn away from all your offenses; then sin will not be your downfall (Ezekiel 18:30).

After ignoring God’s laws, the children of Israel were condemned to 40 years of wandering in the wilderness. During those long years, they compounded their sin by repeatedly grumbling about how God was treating them. At one point, God punished the people by sending venomous snakes into the camp. When the people cried for mercy, God told Moses to fashion a bronze snake and set it up on a pole; all who looked at it and trusted God for healing would recover from their snakebites.

Eventually the bronze snake was stored away, because it had served its purpose. But hundreds of years later, some people set it up again and started praying to it. King Hezekiah was horrified—his subjects were worshipping a gift from God instead of God Himself. The king immediately had the metal snake destroyed—instead of serving God’s purpose, the bronze serpent had become a distraction.

God’s law clearly forbade the worship of idols. Evidently, the people praying to the metal snake didn’t think of it as an idol, so they didn’t believe they were doing anything wrong. We tend to behave the same way. God calls adultery a sin, but many people just think of it as "a meaningful relationship." God says that greed is evil, but many people are proud of being "power shoppers." God warns against fixating on bodily pleasure, but we respect those who "live life to the fullest."

We like to play the name game. The guy picking up your trash isn’t a garbage man, he’s a sanitation engineer. But changing what you call something doesn’t change what it is. In answer to a critic, Abraham Lincoln once asked, "How many legs does a cow have?" "Four," was the reply. "If you call her tail a leg, how many does she have?" "Five," was the answer. "No," Lincoln said, "just calling a tail a leg does not make it a leg."

We tend to do this with sin. We rename it to make it acceptable. But our word games don’t impress God. A sin remains a sin, no matter what you call it. God wants us to love Him more than the things He gives us. He wants us to recognize sin for what it is, and turn away from it. He won’t excuse bad behavior just because you’ve dressed it up in a fancy name.