Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails) wrote a song called "Hurt". You may have heard the Johnny Cash version before. It's written from the perspective of someone whose addiction has ruined his life and destroyed his relationship with everyone he knows. These are some of the lyrics: "I hurt myself today, to see if I still feel. I focus on the pain, the only thing that's real. The needle tears a hole, the old familiar sting. Try to kill it all away, but I remember everything. What have I become, my sweetest friend. Everyone I know goes away in the end. And you could have it all, my empire of dirt. I will let you down, I will make you hurt."
Sin is like that, isn't it? It hurts us, and it hurts the people around us. When God rejected Cain's offering, God warned him about the evil in his heart. "Then the Lord said to Cain, "Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it." (Genesis 4:6-7 NIV) Cain chose to ignore God's warning, and it destroyed both his life and his brother's life.
Saul lost his kingdom because of his disobedience to God. (1 Samuel 15) The sins of Sodom and Gomorrah led to their destruction. (Genesis 19) The world was destroyed by water because of its wickedness. (Genesis 6-7) The consequences of sin are never good.
Worst of all, sin separates us from God. "Behold, the Lord's hand is not so short that it cannot save; nor is His ear so dull that it cannot hear. But your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God, and your sins have hidden His face from you so that He does not hear." (Isaiah 59:1-2 NASB) The sins of the 10 northern tribes of Israel were so bad and continued for so long (despite the warnings of the prophets) that God eventually removed them from his sight permanently. "The sons of Israel walked in all the sins of Jeroboam which he did; they did not depart from them until the Lord removed Israel from His sight, as He spoke through all His servants the prophets. So Israel was carried away into exile from their own land to Assyria until this day." (2 Kings 17:22-23 NASB)
Here's the good news: God protects the righteous; therefore, we must choose righteousness over sin. "For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to pits of darkness, reserved for judgment; and did not spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah, a preacher of righteousness, with seven others, when He brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly; and if He condemned the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to destruction by reducing them to ashes, having made them an example to those who would live ungodly lives thereafter; and if He rescued righteous Lot, oppressed by the sensual conduct of unprincipled men (for by what he saw and heard that righteous man, while living among them, felt his righteous soul tormented day after day by their lawless deeds), then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from temptation, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment for the day of judgment." (2 Peter 2:4-9 NASB)
