“Be Sure Your Sin Will Find You Out” – Brad Jersak

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“… be sure that your sin will find you out” (Numbers 32:23 NKJV)

At a very early stage in my Christian training, a Sunday School teacher taught me and my classmates the Bible verse (wildly out of context1), “Be sure your sin will find you out.” His finger-waving point was that we never get away with sin. Eventually, we’ll certainly get caught. At least that’s what I heard.

Then used the sad story of Achan (Joshua 7) as an illustration, where his secret sin was miraculously exposed, and he and his whole family were stoned to death and then burned.

I suppose, in his mind, that the “therefore” is “therefore, let the certainty of getting caught motivate you to avoid sin altogether.” But that’s not what I heard. Tragically, my takeaway was an intense aversion to shame, and therefore, “To avoid shame, I need to become more adept at keeping secrets!”

I was eventually convinced through those terrifying “Chick tracts” that even if I could keep my secrets until I died, the final judgment would reveal my every secret thought and action (the Bible says so) to the multitudes of heaven on a giant theatre screen in a feature film titled, “This Was Your Life.”

While Jack Chick’s motive was to scare me with shame into repentance, all I heard was, (1) Look, I’m inevitably going to sin, (2) I’m inevitably going to get caught, (3) I’ll inevitably be shamed, and (4) since there’s no escaping the inevitable shame… therefore, I’ll keep my secrets for now and defer the shame of getting caught until after my inevitable death.

What I completely missed was that it’s not getting caught that creates shame. It’s the secrecy itself. And maybe that is a better way to understand the misquoted Bible phrase. How about: “Be sure your secret sins2 will lurk and haunt you, even while they remain secret.” The truth is that we can only overcome shame in the holy light of honesty, not in the shadows of secrecy or evasion.

I know this all too well. But that’s not to say we publish every loathsome detail of our sin for the ever-ravenous social media voyeurs and vultures who know nothing of redemption. That’s scandalous exhibitionism, and it normally shames those we hurt while seeking to massage our own guilt. But I can say that (1) bringing my malformed and harmful passions to my wife, my confessor, my confidants, and my recovery fellowship is an experience of embodied grace. They speak the hardest truths in deepest love. And (2) doing what I can to make amends to those I’ve harmed (while honoring their boundaries) is necessary for liberation from my shame and may be a step toward their healing.

In the presence of God and in honesty with our closest and most caring judges, we can “find our sins out” (rather than visa versa) and be freed from the shame that grows in secrecy.

  1. Note: the context of Numbers 32 is that Moses is telling the tribes of Reuben and Gad, who had settled east of the Jordan River, that they are still expected to cross the river to help the other tribes with the conquest of Canaan. And if they don’t keep their vow and help, they’re sinning, and they can be sure their sins will find them out. That is, there will be some kind of consequence.
  2. Note: It’s the sin that finds us out. It’s not “God will catch you” or “Your mom will catch you”… it’s our sin that finds us out. Maybe it’s that sin carries its own punitive consequences, so it’s far better to suffer the healing pain of the stricken conscience and run to the grace of God.