God doesn’t have to punish you if you break His laws written in you. Saint Augustine once said “Sin and its punishment is one and the same thing”. -E. Stanley Jones

Lately I’ve been reading through parts of a book by E. Stanley Jones, titled “The Unshakable Kingdom and the Unchanging Person”. When I got to the quote above it made me think of the following analogy:

Sin is like a mother who tells her child, “the stove is hot, don’t touch it”. Immediately the child touches the stove and is burned.

Jones goes on to expand his thoughts on Luke 17:20-21:

20 Now when He was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, He answered them and said, “The kingdom of God does not come with observation; 21 nor will they say, ‘See here!’ or ‘See there!’ For indeed, the kingdom of God is within you.”

Note: the word “within” in the above passage comes from the Greek word ἐντός or “entos”, meaning within, inside, the inside.

It’s interesting to note that when Jesus said “The Kingdom of God is within you”, He wasn’t speaking to His disciples or even to His followers. He was speaking to the Pharisees! So is the Kingdom of heaven within everybody – good, bad, indifferent? Author E. Stanley Jones says yes, noting that the laws of your being are the laws of the Kingdom of God.

“This Kingdom is built from the foundation of the world – built in, within the structure of your being. You are built to obey the laws of the Kingdom. If we obey laws written within us, we are fulfilled; if we go against those laws, we are frustrated and if we persist, we are broken. All is Love and all is Law. God doesn’t have to punish you if you break his laws written in you. Sin and its punishment are one and the same thing. You don’t have to punish the eye for having sand in it, nor the body for having cancer in it, nor the soul for having sin in it. As Augustine said, sin and its punishment are one and the same thing. You take one and you get the other.”

By this account then, the definition of sin is anything contrary to the law of the Kingdom. In the example I used about the mother’s warning of the hot stove, the Kingdom written within might be one of preservation, understanding fire is hot. The “law” comes across therefore as “don’t touch the hot stove”, and the punishment is the pain felt by touching the stove and feeling the burn.

Did God make you touch the stove? No. Did He punish you for touching the stove? No. Were you punished for touching the stove? Yes. Why? Because sin and its punishment is one and the same thing.

Sin is not nectar, it’s poison! – E. Stanley Jones

This is why scripture tells us that the wages of sin is death. God doesn’t send anyone to hell. We send ourselves there.