Joshua 6-8
Achan … took some of the devoted things … and the men of Ai killed about thirty-six of their men…
Joshua 7:1b,5a
One man sins, and thirty-six other men die.
All the spoil from Jericho is to be devoted to the LORD: metal objects are to go into the treasury of the LORD, and all else is to be destroyed. But a few things catch Achan’s eye. He covets those things and takes them for himself. I can easily imagine Achan’s train of thought:
“My, that cloak from Shinar sure is beautiful. It would be a shame to just burn it. What a waste that would be! And the silver and gold — there is so much of it! Why should that go into the LORD’s treasury? I mean, what does that really mean, anyway? The LORD already owns the whole earth, so why does He need a treasury? Besides, what are these few bits out of all the rest? No one needs to know, and no one is getting hurt. I think I’ll just tuck these things away for later…”
I hope I’m the only one who can imagine such a train of thought — but I rather expect you can, too. I’d be willing to bet that the real clincher for Achan is the idea that this whole thing is his own private affair, that he’s not hurting anybody. He can quietly get a little bonus, and no one else is affected. But that’s a lie: thirty-six other men pay the price.
The truth is that we are all interconnected. My sin always affects others, no matter how much I might try to convince myself that it’s my own personal issue, just between God and me. No, as a believer in Christ, I am a member of His Body. When I sin, even in the most private way, I injure myself, and in so doing, I injure the Body, causing harm to the entire Body. Even the smallest sin (if there is such a thing) brings injury so that the Body cannot function as well as it might. (When you have a hangnail or a paper cut — small injuries, surely! — your finger cannot say to the rest of your body that only the finger is affected. Your whole self knows it, feels it, is distracted by it, and so your whole self underperforms.) My sin affects you. And your sin affects me.
Private sin? There’s no such thing.
A sobering reminder of our interconnected lives, John. And not only 36 warriors died when they went up against Ai, but all of Achan’s family, sons and daughters, as well.
Later, however, we see that God does not condemn the other members of a sinner’s family:
I have always been slightly confused and upset by the punishment of an entire family of someone who breaks a commandment of God in the Pentateuch. I can only trust that this was necessary to instill obedience and trust in the people of Israel.
Similarly, our modern sense of justice can be appalled at the destruction of all the Canaanite people as they conquered the land. But again, we know that every time some were spared, the Israelites ended up being ensnared in their idolatry. Sigh…
It is instructive to read the Old Testament again and again to reinforce how necessary it is to be formed by obedience in our own lives.
Just to be clear, I was not primarily talking about direct punitive consequences for sin being shared beyond the individual sinner. What I was trying to say is that any time I am not living fully in Christ, I am inherently depriving the rest of the Body of Christ of the blessing of a fully-functioning body part. And so, I should not — cannot — treat my sin as somehow “self-contained” and isolated. It never is.