Someone asked whether God forgives every single sin conceivable or possible. Most likely, the person asking the question thinks of ‘sin’ as some immoral, atrocious deed. As Christians, we see sin as inherently a rebellion against God and His order.
So, I’d answer that God, indeed, can forgive every single sin. And He has shown that by sending Christ to die on the cross. He made Christ pay the price for every sin.
The follow-on question, of course, is, “So why isn’t everyone saved?”
That is because I’d continue, “Every sin is forgiven, but not every sinner is repentant.”
The modern narrative about wrong-doing and forgiveness is such that forgiveness is an antidote against resentment, as if the forgiveness is for the victim or recipient of the wrongdoing, rather than the wrongdoer. And then that’s it; we say nothing about the wrong-doer or the part he/she has. Apologies? Making a restitution? What if that is beyond the person? The very least is repentance. Repentance is an appreciation of what sin constitutes, acknowledgement of culpability, and recognising the forgiveness for what it is, and subsequently being liberated from the guilt.
Growing up in a church kindergarten and then attending bible study as a child, I always had the impression that David, the king of Israel who properly ‘unified’ the Israelites after the period of Judges was a blessed man with a well-celebrated life.
Yet when you really read through the books of 2 Samuel and also the Psalms, you begin to see the flaws of David as a man, the countless mistakes he had made. He clearly became very depressed in different junctures of his life, whether it was during the time he was escaping from Saul’s pursuit, or dealing with the betrayal of his son. Nevertheless, he was described as a man after God’s own heart – evident from the occasions he bounced back from having acknowledged his great sins, accepted the consequences, and reconciling with God, each time he made the mistakes and sought to repent.
And skeptical scholar of history and the bible you might wonder why David is held up as a model or given so much credit. I think the exposure and place that David had was not so much a matter of giving him credit as he pointing to God and His ways.
David’s as he was simply a man chosen by God who had responded to God in ways that a very human, but faithful follower would. The achievements of David actually laid the foundation for the reign of Solomon that by secular standards would have been much more impressive than David’s reign.
From a secular perspective, Solomon would be held up more but he wasn’t. This was because we see so often that even though Solomon was given wisdom by God, he seemed to trust in his own wisdom more than God. And to that extent, most of his reign and his behaviours did little to point towards God. The book of Ecclesiastes, brings up the struggles, deep depression and sense of futility that exists in a reality without God.
There is so much to learn from David with regards to his approach towards struggles and challenges in life; because for most part, we allow ourselves to be like Solomon, going into a downward spiral of rationalising one brutal fact after another, ending with the declaration ‘vanity of vanities’. Depression is something Christians can face and there is nothing to be ashamed of. Whether in riches, or in poverty, through great circumstances or poor, the issues around mental health can strike us. Nevertheless, our response matters. And we can spiral out of control when we are not responding with the spiritual resources that our faith grants us.
There are lots of excuses to choose from for a business to avoid the sustainability pressures upon them. Especially those who doesn’t want to have anything to do with activities that are not geared towards generating profits. One of them is the lack of standards in terms of what constitutes being sustainable.
And so the wheel turns and regulators churn out a whole bunch of different kinds of standards: CSRD, TCFD, GRI, CDP, SASB, UN SDGs – and all of them are basically reporting standards.
Technically they don’t tell you exactly what being a sustainable business is about; but they do emphasize some aspects and bring to fore different aspects of the business that may not be captured in more traditional business disclosures.
Nevertheless, no one is going to be able to tell you what is the ‘sustainability standard’ threshold that marks your business as being sustainable. There are ways to look good in each of those disclosure standards of course – and businesses sure knows how to cherry-pick the ones. The whole industry could even gear up to pander to that kind of work.
Yet at the heart of building a sustainable business is really considering the relationship of the business with everything else other than profits. And only you as the leader, the business owner, the manager, the employee can make decisions that determine how sustainable the business it. The metrics that you care about will naturally be tailored to your business.
You don’t have to wait for some regulators or the ‘market’ to make up their mind.
I was listening to this episode of John Dickson’s Undeceptions Podcast, in which he and his guests discuss Guilt. With sin being a vital part of the Christian faith, it is unsurprising that a Christian podcast will explore this topic of guilt. What is surprising to me is that the culture of victimhood that we find ourselves in today is so intertwined with the sense of guilt that is ever-present in our lives. I say it as though it’s a statement of truth, but don’t take my word here for it.
Playing the victim has become so much more acceptable, so it has become a way to avoid culpability. If you’re the victim, it’s hard to be in the wrong; in fact, you’ve probably been wronged by some perpetrator – whether it is the system or some rules and process that didn’t have you in mind or just someone else! Moreover, we are now more conscious of the ‘victim-blaming’ behaviours, so it is all the more advantageous to identify oneself with and as the victim.
Yet in trying to stave off our guilt about the conditions of life that we might have to go through, the sense that we did not live the best life we could have, we might also take away our agency. When you cast yourself as the victim, you’re just someone subject to others and everything else.
What if we don’t have to be the victim to be non-guilty?
Since starting my career in the environmental sector more than 10 years ago, I’ve been dealing with waste management issues. Frankly, the circular economy wasn’t spoken of yet. And in any case, a lot of the waste generated cannot be recycled. The fact is that we never even quite gone into the first ‘R’ of the three ‘R’s yet.
Total waste generated and disposed in Singapore (tonnes per annum), Source: NEA Statistics
The thing is, as the country’s population grew and economic activities multiplied, waste growth continued. There was probably a dip in terms of per capita waste generation, but the overall amount of waste we were disposing of grew even if the gross waste generation didn’t quite reach the ‘peak’ we had in 2017.
Our ability to manage this waste is important and it is largely because we’ve been able to get rid of them and maintain the cleanliness of our city, and not burden our businesses with the excessive waste that we have been able to keep up with our economic growth and remained an attractive destination for business, and economic activities. These are, of course, the positive externalities of having a robust waste management programme.
Yet waste is a complicated matter; the fact that waste management produces a positive externality doesn’t necessarily mean that we need to have more of it because that is usually based on the amount of waste that needs to be managed. On the other hand, when you subsidise the management activity, there is a risk that you’re undercharging the people generating the waste, which is the source of the problem in the first place. That brings us beyond the territories of your traditional economic externality analysis.
So, it becomes a political issue. And there’s even a question of willingness to pay, not in the traditional sense that people will not do it anymore. It is about how much you can keep charging the people without losing political support and risking losing votes. This is why public policy surrounding waste is complex, and you can’t leave it to a technocratic government to solve such a problem. You can employ some of the technocratic arguments to help you get some buy-in, but you’d likely need to deploy more tactics than that.
There is a fair bit of stress that is associated with uncertainty and we know it. Yet modernity gives us a lot of tools to prepare, and make certain bits of the future which only makes us crave for more control and perhaps heighten our expectations that the uncertainty can be eliminated.
So part of our stress now comes from the expectation of certainty. We no longer how to enjoy flexibility, and embrace the dynamism that exists in uncertainty. And then when everything is under control, we find ourselves bored, craving for some kind of variation and so on.
As the aspects of work that has complete certainty slowly gets outsourced to computers, robots and perhaps even artificial intelligence, we are going to be getting the harder bits of work. The ones that require us to actually embrace uncertainty; the type that involves no one knowing the answer. We need to regain our ability to think and solve problems bit by bit as opposed to treating everything as though there has to be a right answer and we have to get it right.
In public finance, there are multiple approaches to determining how to use the public budget. There will always be the standard expenditures that will have to be costed in, the overheads to cover the public service.
Then there are past liabilities that will need to be paid for. But then, each time, the government can make a decision whether those liabilities are still worth their while to continue financing.
After which, we determine the infrastructure and other investments essential for development of the society. When it comes to investing into infrastructure, the government will definitely need to meet needs, but they might have to ask themselves what kind of social benefits are generated in order to work out whether the price tag for fulfilling those needs make sense.
This is the realm of externalities. And the reason we care about that is because the free market would not. If private benefits exceed private costs, then the free market will find its own means of fulfilling those needs. When there are externalities, the government has to step in. From a business point of view, where there are negative externalities, it is a revenue-opportunity for the government. And where there are positive externalities, the ruling political party can get some political mileage out of it.
Such is the interaction across politics and economics that is worth a bit more attention.
We are embarrassed about our mistakes. We need to get over them, and often, we do so by avoiding them. Please don’t talk about it or revisit the experience. That can be psychologically comforting. But are we doing justice to the cost that we bear for the mistakes?
I’ve written quite a fair bit in the past about the social or culture attitude towards mistakes, and I think a lot of the ideas are still worth exploring:
All of this is so that we can build and develop wisdom, where we know how to work within and navigate a dynamic environment. The problem with theoretical approaches and specific methodologies to achieving outcomes is that they assume that there is an ordered, stable environment within which we conduct our activities. Sometimes, that is just not exactly the case.
The only time you have to say something is a feature, not a bug, is when it appears to be a flaw. The notion behind this idea is that there was an intention. That aspect of a software, or product design, or service experience was not supposed to be a flaw but an intentional part of the design. It assumes there was an intention, some objective being served.
The reason people might think it was a bug could be because:
They had different objectives from that of the way the product designer had imagined the objectives of their users to be
They were not the target audience of the product/service
They were forcefully making a product fit their needs
They did not know how to use the product – which could reflect badly on the UI design or the UI of whatever instructions needed
The product had a poor product-market fit
The product designers were giving excuses for themselves
There isn’t supposed to be a debate whether something is a feature or a bug. It should always be resolved by the one who had designed the product/service. If it was a result of something being overlooked, it is a bug, and pointing out that it could be a feature is just an excuse.
You bought an expensive foie gras meal and paid for it but can’t finish it. So who foots the bill?
If you finish it and get sick as a result? Is the doctor’s fee part of your foie gras bill?
If you don’t finish, and it goes into a food waste heap that requires public subsidy to manage and clean up, are the taxpayers footing your bill?
Would knowing all that change your decision to buy that foie gras meal?
What if you knew the future path of your choices? Who would you allow to foot the bill? How far ahead would you care about the consequences of your actions?
This is a story about externalities, cost and consequences. Who should care? Who should we care for? How much should we care? No one teaches us all these? We have to work them out and make decisions.
