I was thinking how people seem to have a very poor understanding of what problems are hard. They would think that walking on water or creating a Universe is a hard problem, and dealing with sin is easy. However, whatever they think is a hard problem might be trivial or easy not only to the point that God can solve it, but to the point where a huge number of spiritual beings can solve it.

Sin, however, seems to be such a hard problem that God can’t seem to solve it in any way other than by suffering and dying.

Let’s just stop here.

People think sin is a trivial issue – a good and forgiving God will of course forgive it and everything will be fine. No problem. You go to Church, confess, receive absolution, you’re done.

Wrong. Sin is such a hard problem that a good and forgiving God has to suffer and die in order to even try to solve it. That’s because sin is not an accounting issue. It’s not an entry in some book, that logs all your transgressions. No. Sin is a breakage in the structure of your soul. It’s a breakage in your relationship with God. Healing such a breakage, removing its causes, restructuring your soul in vivo without destroying it outright, is much harder than creating the Universe. After all, this Universe was apparently created by a damn fool with some help. Restructuring the soul as to remove a fracture that is sin, to remove a discolouration in the soul-substance, a weak spot at which the soul would break under pressure, and heal it to full theoretical strength, requires something that can best be described as dying and being rebuilt from the ashes of your former self. It requires surrendering to God to break and rebuild you, according to His perfect idea of what you ought to be, in Him, in His light. That’s what “sincere remorse”, the pre-condition of forgiveness, actually means. Sincere remorse means surrendering to God to destroy you and rebuild you in His image, as He wants you. It means not barking your wishes and conditions at God, and instead accepting His guidance and judgment at the most fundamental level of who you are and who you ought to be. It means understanding and accepting that your way was wrong, and had bad consequences, and you need to do more than just erase the bad consequences, you need to be a better person, the one made from God’s light, and not your stupid nonsense. In order to be of God’s light, you need to let Him break you and rebuild you, because He is the one who knows, because the goal needs to build the path towards itself.