God is all-knowing and all-powerful, but it would be a contradiction for Him to impose His will upon us. God is Love, and love is a gift of the self that must be accepted and received as that gift. In those times and moments when we choose something else, when we say no to God’s offer of love and friendship, we place a block in our relationship that prevents His love and grace from reaching us.

In those times and seasons, it would be normal for us to have a visceral reaction. We’d feel the distance, the coldness, the winter in our relationship. Our human nature is quick to assign blame, or to try to make sense of what’s missing, but it comes to the wrong conclusion. It is not that God has withdrawn from us, it is that we have withdrawn from God. We placed in our relationship barriers that necessarily prevent the kind of relationship that God desired for us to have.

We see this time and again in our human relationships. There is some obstacle or barrier that is difficult, if not impossible, to overcome. Instead of reflecting upon that obstacle, and how it might be removed, we assume an agenda on the other person’s behalf. They have abandoned me, they are callous towards me, they are mean. It does not matter the lengths to which they are striving to set things right, or the depths of sorrow they are experiencing; it is their fault and their problem to fix.

This is what we properly understand as sin. In using that word in its technical sense, sin is that block, that thing which comes between and causes dysfunction in relationship. It distorts and prevents love from flowing freely. It creates doubts and casts aspersions. It leads us to draw conclusions about others without basis in fact or reality. Its effects move on to second and third order consequences, introducing chaos and division far beyond its origin.

The way that sin disrupts our human relationships teaches us something important about our relationship with God. God always and forever desires us. The cross is the final word on how deeply God wants to be in proper relationship with us, and how far He’ll go to set the conditions to make it possible. Whenever there is a block in our relationship, it is always downstream from our choices. It is always within our power to remove that block, and to allow things to be as they ought to be. We do not always have that luxury in our human relationships, but with God, the choice to remove the obstacles is ours.