Sin Stinks

One cold and dark Saturday night in the country, when I was growing up in Wisconsin, our extended family drove out to some event, probably a wedding. I was about 8 at the time, and whatever it was didn’t impress me.
What did impress me was what happened afterward.
I was happy to be driving home with my grandparents on my father’s side, Olaf and Myrtle Berkedal. Wind-driven snow flurries had started before we left, and we knew we needed to get right home. The weather whipped up in the darkness, and snow blocked what the darkness didn’t.
We slid off the road into a ditch.
We were all fine. As an accident, it wasn’t much and the car seemed fine, but we couldn’t get out. There was no traffic on the road the way we had gone.
So, having landed in a place where we could see the lights of a farmhouse, we got out and started to walk.
The people in that house welcomed us, let us get warm, let us use their phone to tell my parents we were OK, but that they should not come after us. We would spend the night.
My grandparents were given a room, I think, and I was assigned the couch with some blankets in the living room.
I woke up sometime around midnight. I heard the hiccupped song of a cuckoo clock, and I saw the lights from the adjacent kitchen. The farmer and his sons, or maybe his help, were up enjoying a late-night snack of whole sardines between soda crackers.
I shuffled in to see what was going on and they offered me one.
I took it back to the couch and I look at that thing looking back at me. There was no way I was going to bite the head or any other part of that thing so, being too polite to return the gift, I dropped it behind the couch and went back to sleep.
Secrets like that do not stay hidden for long.
The family in that farmhouse, or maybe one of the cats, would be let by their noses to the scene.
That is what sin is like.
The Bible says that, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Romans 3:23. We can try to hide our sins, but the word of God, “is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” Hebrews 4:12-13
Nothing is hidden from God. Sin stinks. The separation from God that is the consequence of sin, the condition that is expressed in our sins, stink.
And yet God comes to us as a suffering servant and calls us to repentance and, by God’s grace, to take away our sin and our sinfulness. John 3:16
God did not come to deodorize them. He came to wipe them away.