Theological Journal: The Nature of Sin, Brokenness, and Metaphysical Separation

As a pastor, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the nature of sin. While I don’t pretend to have it figured out. Here’s some musings…

Sin, Sickness, and the Shattered Self

As someone who spends his days in the trenches of pastoral ministry, I’ve had more than a few long nights turning over the nature of sin in my mind. I’ve seen it up close—in the people I shepherd, in the culture we swim in, and, most disturbingly, in the mirror. I don’t claim to have it all mapped out. But here are some things I’ve been thinking.

First: I’m convinced that sin is more than just a list of bad behaviors. Yes, of course it includes doing things that are wrong, disordered, and deeply out of sync with God’s heart.

But that’s surface-level. The roots go down far deeper. Sin, in its essence, is a rupture in our relationship with God. A defiance. A disorder. A kind of spiritual cancer that infects every layer of who we are—warping our longings, misaligning our priorities, and making even our noblest efforts curve inward on the self.

A lot of people grow up with the courtroom model of sin. You break the law, you get sentenced, end of story. And there's truth in that framework—God is just, and there’s a reckoning.

But I’ve come to see another lens as more existentially haunting and pastorally helpful: the sickness model.

Sin as disease. As affliction. As this tragic, stubborn illness that eats away at our minds, our motives, our affections. It darkens what we think we know. It locks our will in a kind of invisible cell. It makes us fall in love with counterfeit goods and forget how to even recognize what’s truly beautiful.

It is not just that we do wrong things—it’s that we’re bent. Fallen. Disfigured in the soul. And if that diagnosis is true, then self-improvement won’t cut it. We need something stronger. Something miraculous.

We need grace. Not just grace as a cosmic permission slip, but grace as healing. Grace as resuscitation.

Grace as the wild, initiating mercy of God that lifts us off the mat and breathes new life into our poisoned lungs. Because good behavior can’t resurrect the dead. And sin, at its root, is death.

This is why I believe that sin can’t be addressed by moral performance, and certainly not through effort alone.

Sin is not just something we do, it’s something we are, apart from Christ. And so the remedy has to go deeper than behavior modification. It has to reach into the core of the self.

The only true hope is spiritual rebirth, the kind Jesus spoke of—a transformation that begins in the heart, by grace, through the cross.

That’s how I understand sin: through years of watching broken people try to fix themselves (myself included), through Scripture, through theology, through experience. Sin is the distortion of the image of God in us. And Christ is the one who restores that image, not by demanding we try harder, but by giving himself in love.

As Tim Keller once put it, and I think he’s spot on:

“Sin is the refusal to find your deepest identity in your relationship and service to God. Sin is seeking to become oneself, to get an identity, apart from him. The reason people are so drawn to sin is that they think it will give them a sense of identity and self-worth. But it does the opposite. It makes you feel empty and worthless.”

What we need is not more striving. What we need is healing.
And healing has a name.

Where did sin come from? Did someone create it?

Melkor Writes His Own Discordant Melody

Let’s ask the question that keeps philosophers, preachers, and sleepless parents up at night: where did sin come from? Was it created? Did God, in some celestial thought experiment, conjure up evil just to prove a point?

I don’t think so. In fact, I’m convinced that sin doesn’t originate from the Creator at all. The Scriptures declare that everything God made was “very good” (Genesis 1:31)—not just functional or pretty, but teeming with purpose and wholeness.

The problem didn’t begin in God’s hands. It began in the will of the creature.

From the beginning, God gave His creatures a real, frightening gift: freedom. The ability to choose. The terrifying dignity of saying yes or no. I’d assert this includes angelic beings and humans alike, (yes, even to the dismay of my more deterministic Calvinist friends.)

What this means is that sin was born not in the mind of God, but in the hearts of those who turned from Him.

First came the ancient defector: the Devil. Once a mighty and radiant being, now twisted into the accuser, the enemy. His fall was the prototype—pride, ambition, the delusion of self-sovereignty. Then came the rebellion of other angelic beings. Then came Eden.

Under the influence of this deceiver, humanity—Adam and Eve, our mythic and mysterious ancestors—chose autonomy over trust. God had made them whole. Good. Innocent.

And yet, the voice of suspicion crept in. “Did God really say…?” (Genesis 3). It’s always that question. They reached for something that wasn’t theirs: the right to define good and evil on their own terms. And in that grasping, something shattered. A break. A dislocation. And we’ve been limping ever since.

There’s a helpful image in The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien’s lesser-known but deeply theological masterpiece. In it, the world is created through a cosmic music—the Great Song—composed by Eru Ilúvatar and sung by the Ainur, angelic beings.

But Melkor craves power and independence. He sings his own discordant theme, trying to drown out the harmony. He introduces chaos.

But here’s the thing: Ilúvatar doesn’t panic. He weaves the discord into something even more beautiful, more redemptive, more profound. The dissonance becomes part of the larger story.

That’s how I understand sin’s origin. Not as something God authored, but as something He allowed because of the dignity He gave to His creatures. Like Melkor, like Satan, like us… we wanted autonomy. Control. Identity apart from the Creator. But it only led to collapse.

The devil’s fall was rooted in pride—a hunger to ascend, to be “like the Most High” (Isaiah 14:12–14). His rebellion ignited a heavenly war, and he was cast down (Revelation 12:7–9). Then came the human version of that same pride in Eden. And from that act of defiance, the infection spread. David would later say, “Surely I was sinful at birth” (Psalm 51:5)—not as an excuse, but as a confession of just how deep the damage goes.

Maybe this analogy helps: sin is like a broken bone. A fracture in the structure of our souls. God, the Great Physician, diagnoses and offers to reset it. He didn’t cause the break—but He’s the one who can heal it.

So no, I don’t believe God created sin. I believe sin came from the creatures who misused the freedom He gave.

And I get it—this is a hard doctrine. It’s mysterious. It’s heavy.

But here’s where I land: God is holy, and good, and love itself. That means He can’t be the author of evil. But He can use it. He can bend it back toward His purposes. That’s not just theory—it’s one of the biggest recurring plotlines in the whole Bible.

At the heart of it all, I think this is a love story. And real love, the kind that matters, the kind that lasts, can’t be coerced. It has to involve choice. And risk. And the possibility of betrayal. But even betrayal can’t derail Him. God takes the free will of sinners, the schemes of devils, the brokenness of the world—and He turns it into the stage upon which He displays His relentless grace, His justice, and the glory of His Son.

That’s where history is headed. That’s what Revelation 21–22 promises: sin undone, death reversed, creation healed, and the will of God finally done on earth as it is in heaven.

Until then, we live between the songs—one broken, one beautiful—waiting for the final chord.

It seems to me sin has metaphysical properties…

I’ve come to believe that sin isn’t just ethical. It’s not just bad behavior or moral failure. It’s metaphysical.

What I mean is this: sin has a reality that goes beyond the physical or psychological. It touches something deeper. Something foundational. Something that gets at the very structure of existence. I know that sounds lofty and abstract, but stick with me.

Metaphysics is the philosophical attempt to get underneath what we see, to ask what things are, what it means to exist, and what lies beyond the observable world. It’s the domain of questions like, Why is there something rather than nothing?

And: What does it mean to be human, to be good, to be real? In other words, it’s the only kind of language that can even begin to hold space for the supernatural—for spirit-beings from other realms, for unseen war, for cosmic fracture.

That’s why, to me, metaphysics is one of the only frameworks expansive enough to hold the weight of sin. Because sin isn’t just a human problem. It’s a problem of reality itself.

Concerning sin as a metaphysical concept, There are a few ways we could understand this

1. First, sin seems to involve a real distortion of our nature. We’re not just making mistakes. We’re cracked down the center. Bent. The human soul is off-kilter, turned away from its intended orientation toward the Good. That means sin isn’t just something we do, it’s something that has altered what we are. That’s ontology. That’s metaphysics. It’s a defect in being itself.

2. Second, sin isn’t just internal—it’s also influenced by external spiritual forces. Scripture paints a world alive with unseen powers, and not all of them friendly. Behind every addiction, every burst of rage, every grasp for control or revenge… there may be whispers. Influence. Opposition. There are agents at work, beyond flesh and blood, seeking to distort and destroy (Ephesians 6:12). If that’s true, sin isn’t just human—it’s infected with the demonic. That’s metaphysical.

3. Third, and this one hits hardest for me: when we sin, we separate ourselves from God, who is not just a person but the very source of Being. The One in whom all things live and move and have their being (Acts 17:28). And when we turn from Him, we lose our metaphysical grounding. We become unmoored from reality itself. We fall into a kind of existential drift, a spiritual entropy. It’s not just that we feel far from God—it’s that we unravel. We slip toward nothingness. Sin, at its core, is disintegration.

4. Fourth, the cross only makes sense if sin is metaphysical. If sin were merely behavioral, then why would it require something as vast and mysterious as the incarnation, the crucifixion, the resurrection? Why would God have to take on flesh and die? Because sin wasn’t just a legal violation—it was a cosmic rift. A rupture in the fabric of being itself. And only a metaphysical act—God descending into flesh, suffering, and triumphing over death—could repair what had been broken.

So yes, I believe sin has metaphysical properties. It’s not just about bad choices. It’s about being severed from the source of life. It’s about disordered loves, distorted natures, demonic voices, and divine rescue. It’s a cosmic problem, and we’re tangled up in it.

I keep circling back to this thought: sin is a distortion of who we are, and a rupture from the One who made us. We were created for something higher, for beauty, for wholeness, for communion with God. But sin interrupts that story. It disorients us from our telos—from our true end and purpose. We start looking for ourselves in all the wrong mirrors.

And behind it all… maybe, just maybe… there’s more happening than we can see. Forces that want us bent. Systems that amplify the distortion. Lies that sing in our ears, luring us to autonomy and away from communion.

It’s sobering. It’s also clarifying. Because if sin really is metaphysical, then the stakes are eternal. And the healing we need is not just therapeutic or behavioral. It’s ontological. We need Christ not just to forgive us, but to remake us. To restore us to our grounding in God. To reattach us to reality.

To give us back our being.

Q: What do I mean by losing our “metaphysical grounding”?

I get it—metaphysical grounding isn’t exactly coffee shop conversation (unless you hang out at weird coffee shops). As I wrote this section, I realized the phrase might feel vague or even intimidating. To be honest, I’m still wrapping my head around it myself. These are ideas I’m wrestling with, not handing down from some philosophical mountaintop. But I’ll try to unpack what I mean.

When I talk about losing our metaphysical grounding, I’m pointing to something deep and foundational: the idea that we, as human beings, were created to be rooted in God. He is not just our creator—He is the source of all being, all truth, all reality. God is the reason anything exists. He doesn’t just light the fire—He is the fire. He doesn’t just give us breath—He is the breath beneath the breath.

So when we sin—when we turn from God, ignore Him, replace Him, resist Him—we lose more than a sense of moral direction. We lose our anchor in being itself. We become metaphysically ungrounded. Untethered. Adrift in a sea of confusion, searching for meaning in a cosmos we no longer trust to make sense.

Sin doesn’t just break the rules—it breaks our connection to the One who makes reality real.

And that break leads to what theologians have called a kind of ontological homelessness. We feel spiritually dislocated. Out of sync with the world, with each other, with ourselves. We carry this restless ache, a low-grade existential anxiety, because we’re no longer at home in the presence of the One we were made for.

Let me try to make this tangible. Here are four real-world ways this plays out:

1. Broken Relationships
   Divorce. Abuse. Betrayal. Neglect. These wounds run deeper than psychology—they’re symptoms of a love that’s been warped. We were made to love like God loves. But sin distorts that. It makes us self-protective, manipulative, indifferent. When we’re ungrounded from the God who is love, we forget how to love well.

2. Moral Collapse in Society
   Think about corruption in leadership, unchecked greed, systemic injustice. These aren’t just policy problems—they’re spiritual problems. They happen when people reject God’s good order and start living as if they’re the center of the universe. It’s autonomy dressed up as progress. But it hollows us out.

3. Physical Suffering and Death
   Disease. Decay. The slow breaking down of our bodies. The Bible is clear: we were not made for death. It entered the world through sin. This isn’t to say every sickness is a personal punishment—but the presence of sickness at all points to a deeper cosmic fracture. Separation from the source of life has consequences.

4. Spiritual Emptiness
   That feeling that something is missing. That no matter how much we achieve, acquire, or distract ourselves… the ache remains. That ache is spiritual. It’s metaphysical. It’s the soul crying out for its Source. For home.

That’s why I keep saying: sin is not just a list of bad behaviors. It’s a metaphysical crisis. It’s what happens when we fall out of sync with the deepest realities of the universe. As some theologians put it, sin doesn’t just make us bad—it unleashes Hell on Earth.

But here’s the staggering beauty: God didn’t leave us in that condition.

Through Christ, the metaphysical gap gets healed. Jesus didn’t just come to improve our ethics—He came to restore our being. His incarnation, death, and resurrection are more than religious events—they are metaphysical remedies. In Him, we are reconnected to the Ground of all being. The Source of all life. The Father we’d forgotten.

When we place our trust in Christ, we don’t just get forgiveness—we get reanchored. Regrounded. Re-rooted in the eternal. We’re no longer adrift. We belong again.

And it’s not just some abstract theological point. It’s personal. We find peace. We find rest. We begin to see with new eyes. We learn how to love again. We recover our purpose. Our story makes sense. Our hearts soften. We become human again.

In Christ, we are restored not just to God, but to reality itself. He is our metaphysical grounding made manifest. The Word become flesh. The solid ground beneath our shaking feet.

Thank Heaven for that.

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