Fwiw I think God’s heart got broken when being a normal human being got equated with being ‘a sinner’. When someone decided God was simply a legalistic perfectionist – a computer that spits out GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY as each person’s life is evaluated.
Perfect can mean perfectly beautiful rather than legalistically correct, 10 out of 10. Yet somewhere down the line some Christians decided, no, it means people always fail. They are doomed to get it wrong. That a finite human life always deserves eternal hell.
In actuality, many people who believe in God believe God to be kinder than mainstream evangelical Christianity’s portrayal. I tremble a little with fear, over how all that is going to play out.
I believe it’s ok to make mistakes and in its early days sin did mean that. That humans aren’t perfect. That when they inevitably miss the mark they can be reconciled back to God, YHWH anyway.
If we are believing we’re eternally condemned to hell for being a human being, that doesn’t seem right to me. It doesn’t seem like what James was referring to when he wrote of the perfect law which gives freedom?