Every time we sin, we are putting something else ahead of God’s glory….there is something that our hearts are valuing at that moment more than the glory of God or obedience to him. That rebellious attitude is what makes each individual sin, however “small,” serious in God’s sight. It is an act of cosmic treason against our Creator, in which we choose to believe his mortal enemy, Satan, instead of trusting his word. 

The Bible is both an exciting and a disturbing book.

On the one hand, it is a book that is filled with exciting accounts of God’s grace, mercy, and healing power. We read of the exodus from Egypt, of the walls of Jericho falling down, of David’s victory over the giant Goliath, of Daniel triumphing in the lion’s den. We read of the power of the Holy Spirit healing a crippled man at the Beautiful Gate of the temple just a couple of chapters earlier in the book of Acts. This is all wonderful, exciting stuff.

But then there are the other stories—what we might designate the darker side of the Bible. There is a flood that exterminates all humanity with the exception of one family (Gen. 6–9). There is the fire from heaven that incinerates the entire towns of Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen. 19). There is the slaughter of many of the indigenous inhabitants of Canaan in the time of Joshua. There is the stoning of Achan and his whole family merely for stealing a few objects from the spoils of Jericho (Josh. 7). These stories are not so wonderful and exciting. They seem dark and disturbing. What do they say about the character of a God who would do such things—and about the people who would follow such a God?

Such a story faces us in Acts 5. Consider what happens here: We have a man and a woman who make an extremely generous donation to the church at considerable personal cost. There is then a minor miscommunication about whether or not their gift represents the whole of the proceeds from the sale of their property. The next thing you know they are both dead, struck down by the hand of God. That’s a pretty disturbing picture. Yet if we are going to understand, love, and serve the God of the Bible, we are going to have to come to grips with stories like these.

Sin Is Serious

To begin with, we need to see that sin is serious. I’ve read many internet discussions of these difficult passages in the Bible, and one thing that is immediately obvious is the difficulty that many people have in comprehending the true weightiness of sin. We find it hard to accept that sin is deadly, even though the Bible explicitly tells us this truth. In Romans 6:23 we are told that the wages of sin is death. What sin deserves—all sin and every sin, sins of omission as well as commission, from the smallest to the greatest infraction of God’s holiness—is perpetual separation from the God from whom all life flows. Nonetheless we have a hard time believing that that estimation of sin is really true and right.

The difficulty we have in accepting God’s opinion of sin is not new, of course. Back in the garden of Eden, God said to Adam, “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” (Gen. 2:17). But Adam and Eve believed the serpent rather than God when the serpent said, “You will not surely die” (Gen. 3:4). A more liberal approach to sin seemed much more reasonable—why would such a small action lead to death? Yet the consequence of that decision to trust the serpent rather than God was the entry of death for all people into the world. In the same way, God said to his people at Jericho, in effect, “Don’t take anything from the spoils of war, for I am the one who wins the victory for you” (see Josh. 6:16–18). But Achan saw some desirable items among the spoils there: a Babylonian robe, some silver, a wedge of gold (Josh. 7:21). It seemed a waste simply to destroy these beautiful things! Surely no one would miss them. And so, while no one was looking, he took them and buried them under his tent. The result was death for himself and his family (Josh. 7:25).

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