Crouching at the Door!

Pay close attention to the way Paul describes sin in Romans 6.  He says we should not allow sin to reign over our mortal bodies. Paul argues that to do so means that we will no longer obey our own passions as followers of Christ, but instead will obey sin’s passions (Vs. 12). Notice how Paul personifies the idea of sin by using a grammatically possessive phrasing – almost as if sin is a living being with the ability to rule, having passions it wishes to impose upon others. Later, in Verse 16, he personifies sin as a slave master who pays out death as his wages (Romans 6:23). These personifications are not alien to the bible, and they are not unique to Paul. They begin all the way back in the infant chapters of Genesis. 

The first clear case is in Genesis 4:6-7. Right after God rejects Cain’s offering, Cain becomes angry, so God tells him to be aware because sin is crouching at his door while possessing a desire for him. Did you get that? Sin has a desire for Cain. God tells him that he must rule over that desirous sin. In other words, if Cain does not have rule over sin, then sin will have reign over Cain. The Apostle James personifies sin as something that is conceived by and birthed from our own desires, and which matures to evil ends (James 1:15). Interestingly, this kind of desire is the same kind of curse that is conceived in Eve after she sinned in the garden of Eden (Genesis 3:16). God imposes a curse upon her that manifests as pain in child bearing, but she also has a curse that is an unimposed natural consequence of her sin. God tells her that she will now have a desire for her husband. This is not a romantic, sexual, or otherwise intimate desire. That wouldn’t be a curse at all. That would be an enhancement of an already existing blessing. The verbiage for “desire” in this passage is the same exact Hebrew phrasing that is used to describe the personified sin that is crouching at Cain’s door.  No longer would the man and the woman enjoy an egalitarian harmony with one another as they equally managed their mission in the world, but she would be cursed with a desire to control him, and he would be cursed with having the need to rule over her. The Genesis 3 curse of Adam and Eve isn’t a prescriptive teaching about the superiority of men over women. It is a description of disunity that is imposed by a living sin that grows in us if we do not rule it. A sin that we do not rule kills the harmony we have with ourselves and with each other. More tragically, it destroys the harmony we should have with a loving God who is superior to us and has righteous authority over us. Not only does it destroy the harmony we should have with God, it actually creates a dissonance between us and him (Isaiah 59:2). This dissonance robs us of an eternal quality of life that only he can give. Any sin to which we are shackled pays us with a kind of death. One of those death payments is a perversion of our God given good desires -- a perversion that leads to self-destructive consequences.

Paul tells us not to let sin use our bodies as instruments for wickedness, but instead we are to present our bodies to God so he can use us as his instrument for righteousness (Romans 6:13, Ephesians 2:10). When we sacrifice our bodies daily to God (Romans 12:1), then sin will not have dominion over us (Romans 6:14), and we will be gifted with genuine life (Romans 6:22-23), instead of fettered to a poisonous, rotten, and counterfeit life (Proverbs 16:25).