Category: Sin

What Is Sin?

Sin is not breaking a petty taboo or overstepping a mere tradition. Sin violates the sacred covenant God made with us. Sin also tears down the beautiful solidarity he built among us.

For example, in Psalm 51, David’s prayer of repentance, he uses three words to describe his sin with utter realism:

Have mercy on me, O God,
     according to your steadfast love;
according to your abundant mercy
     blot out my transgressions.
Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,
     and cleanse me from my sin! (Ps. 51:1–2)

First, “transgression.” That is, willful, open-eyed, deliberate revolt against God. David knew exactly what he doing when he took another man’s wife and got her pregnant (2 Sam. 11). He defied God. His behavior was like giving God the finger. This is the same word used for Joseph’s brothers deliberately selling him out (Gen. 50:17). It wasn’t a mere mistake.

What on earth was David thinking? Maybe he was feeling confined by his life of obeying God. Maybe he was feeling sorry for himself, like God owed him. Maybe he started thinking, “Why not break free and explore my options?” Restless self-pity gets us doing horrendous things.

Second, “iniquity.” That is, a warped, twisted, destructive act. This word appears in Isaiah 24:1, where the Lord “will twist” the earth’s surface into an unnatural form. The English word iniquity sounds quaint, old-fashioned. But think of Gollum, that weird little villain in The Lord of the Rings. He wasn’t himself anymore. He had descended into something bizarre. Like Gollum, David distorted and degraded his God-given sexuality from life-giving to life-taking, from noble to repulsive.

Iniquity is like taking a smartphone—brilliant communications technology—and using it to hammer nails. That isn’t what a smartphone is for. It will break.

Third, “sin.” That is, missing the mark or losing one’s way. This word appears in Judges 20:16, where some highly skilled men could sling a stone “and not miss.” We too miss when the map says, “To get home, turn right here.” But we think, “I know a better way,” and we turn left. No surprise, then, that we get lost, waste time, show up late, disappoint others, and more. Sin is like trying to get healthy eating junk food. It can’t work. Sin can only miss out and let us down. We end up lost, isolated, depressed—and too proud to admit it.

David sums it up in Psalm 51:4: “[I have] done what is evil in your sight.” “Evil” is a strong word! Can we be honest enough to use that word to describe things we have done, not just what other people have done?

In each kind of wrong—defying God, misusing his gifts, veering off from his path—we end up in the same low place, with losses and injuries and sadness we didn’t foresee. On his thirty-sixth birthday, the brilliant Lord Byron, still a young man, wrote this:

My days are in the yellow leaf;
     The flowers and fruits of love are gone;
The worm, the canker, and the grief
     Are mine alone!¹

It’s not as though, if we just sin more cleverly, we can avoid those painful outcomes. No, sin always entraps us in consequences that leave us defeated and shamed. Then our tears flow. Rock bottom, for sure!

How Does God Feel About Us Now?

Does God look at sinners like us with disgust? Why shouldn’t he? Look at what we’ve done—or left undone! What hope do people like us have by now? The Bible shows us the heart of God for sinners like us, who don’t deserve God. Check this out:

How can I give you up, O Ephraim?
     How can I hand you over, O Israel? . . .
My heart recoils within me;
     my compassion grows warm and tender. . . .
For I am God and not a man,
     he Holy One in your midst. (Hos. 11:8–9)

You are not such a spectacular sinner that your sin can defeat the Savior.

God is agonizing over his people. What grieves his heart, more than their sins against him, is the thought of not having them as his people. “How can I give you up?” is his way of saying, “I could never give you up!” To God, breaking covenant with us is unthinkable, even when we hurt him. And he feels such tender compassion, not because he’s bending his rules, but precisely because he is God: “For I am God and not a man.” In other words, “I am not touchy and explosive and vindictive, like you. I am the Holy One. I am upholding all that it means for me to be God, right in your midst. The door to your better future opens here: my endless capacity to love you.”²

Behold, the God of grace!

And don’t tell him he’s wrong to be so kind. His grace does not need your correction. You need to accept his grace and stop keeping your distance and run to him and fall into his arms. What are you waiting for?

The Bible says Jesus is our sympathetic high priest (Heb. 4:15). The Bible says he deals “gently with the ignorant and wayward” (Heb. 5:2). The Bible is clear: God does not match our sins with his grace. He overmatches our increased sins with his surplus of hyper-grace (Rom. 5:20). His greatest glory is how he responds disproportionately to our sins upon sins with his “grace upon grace” (John 1:16). The whole logical structure of the biblical gospel is summed up in two simple words: “much more” (Rom. 5:15, 17). Your worst sin is far overshadowed by his “much more” grace.

Excuse me for being blunt, but you’ve met your match. You are not such a spectacular sinner that your sin can defeat the Savior. You might as well give in, come out of hiding, and wave the white flag of surrender. What awaits you and me, right down at our lowest rock bottom, is the finished work of Christ on the cross for the undeserving. And we will find such an astonishing hope nowhere else.

All we do in response, all we can do, is receive his grace with the empty hands of faith—and yes, even the dirty hands of sin.

This article is adapted from Good News at Rock Bottom: Finding God When the Pain Goes Deep and Hope Seems Lost by Ray Ortlund.

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The Battle with Sin

One catechism defines sin this way: “What is sin? Sin is rejecting or ignoring God in the world he created, not being or doing what he requires in his law.”¹ Or as artist Shai Linne says, “What is sin? Sin is the breaking of God’s law plus our condition, which means from birth we all got flaws.”²

Sin is in us and comes out of us. We are born with a sin nature, and even after we become Christians, we still battle with ongoing sin. Sin appears in our affections and our actions, in what we desire and what we do, in what we seek and what we say. It consists in doing what we shouldn’t (sins of commission) and in not doing things we should (sins of omission).

Sin Is Personal (Prov. 51:4)

Sin is also personal. During the Last Supper, Peter assured Jesus that he would die for him (Luke 22:33). Jesus, however, knew that Peter would succumb to temptation and deny him three times. Over the next few hours, Peter did just that. While Jesus was being beaten and wrongly accused, Peter distanced himself from his master, and even said “I do not know him” (Luke 22:57). As soon as the rooster crowed, “the Lord turned and looked at Peter,” causing Peter to recognize his sin against a man he loved and had followed for three years (Luke 22:61). We then read that Peter “went out and wept bitterly” (Matt. 26:75; Luke 22:62).

In other words, sin doesn’t merely break an arbitrary rule. It rejects God, who is personal. It effectively says to him, “I do not love you. I will not follow you. I will not obey you” (see Ps. 78:40; Isa. 43:24; Eph. 4:30). When Jesus looked into Peter’s eyes, he suddenly felt the weight of his betrayal. He had denied the one who had only ever loved him.

Or think of that famous story about King David committing adultery with the wife of one of his soldiers and then arranging the man’s murder. The Lord sent the prophet Nathan to expose David (2 Sam. 12), and David’s subsequent prayer shows how personal sin is. He cries out to God, “Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight” (Ps. 51:4). Sin is always against God, and it’s always personal.

Sin Is Painful (Prov. 22:5)

It’s also painful. God designed life in this world to be lived in line with his law. This means that the world is “rigged”—rigged to work best by obeying God. Sinning, however, brings painful consequences. In Jesus’s story of the prodigal son, for instance, a younger brother spends all his wealth on prostitutes, parties, and perversion. Maybe he has fun in the beginning, but soon enough the consequences catch up with him, and he finds himself sharing slop with swine (Luke 15:11–32).

I’m not saying that obedience always brings happiness and sin sadness. Yet the Bible teaches again and again that “the way of transgressors is hard” (Prov. 13:15 KJV) and “thorns and snares are in the way of the crooked” (Prov. 22:5). As a pastor, I’ve sat with hundreds of people who compromised with sin and suffered the consequences. As a believer who struggles with my own sin, I’ve compromised countless times to my shame. Sin promises to be sweet, but its aftertaste is always bitter.

Sin promises to be sweet, but its aftertaste is always bitter.

Sin Is Punishable (Rom. 6:23)

Sin is also punishable. My family was driving down a country road recently when one of my children exclaimed, “That’s a lot of tombstones!” As I looked, I saw an entire hillside lined with gravesites.

The picture of all the graves reminded me of God’s warning that sin would bring death. God had said to Adam, “In the day that you eat of [the forbidden tree] you shall surely die” (Gen. 2:17). Or as Paul later explained, “The wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23).

But physical death is merely the “first death.” The second death is far worse. The book of Revelation contains a harrowing vision of the day of judgment, harrowing at least for those who do not know Jesus:

Then I saw a great white throne and him who was seated on it. From his presence earth and sky fled away, and no place was found for them. And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Then another book was opened, which is the book of life. And the dead were judged by what was written in the books, according to what they had done. . . . Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire. And if anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire. (Rev. 20:11–15)

Sinning against God has great consequences. It separates us from relationship with him and incites his righteous, eternal wrath (Isa. 59:2; 2 Thess. 1:7–9)

Sin Is Pardonable (Isa. 55:7)

Gratefully, sin remains pardonable. Though our sin is great, God’s grace is greater (Rom. 5:20). Punishment is his “strange” work (Isa. 28:21). He doesn’t want to punish. He desires none to perish but for all to “turn, and live” (Ezek. 18:32; cf. 1 Tim. 2:4). God cried out through the prophet Isaiah,

Let the wicked forsake his way, . . .
let him return to the Lord,
that He may have compassion on him, . . .
for he will abundantly pardon. (Isa. 55:7)

In pursuit of this pardon, God loved the world and sent his Son to die for our sins and then rise again so that we could be forgiven (John 3:16). The good news offered to us is that God will not only forgive us if we turn to Christ but also empower us to fight sin (Titus 2:12–13). This means that, if we are trusting in Christ, we don’t have to be dominated by sin any longer. We can walk in freedom and joy (Gal. 5:16–17).

This article is adapted from How Do I Fight Sin and Temptation? by J. Garrett Kell.

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Our Spiritual Condition

We cannot fully comprehend the horror of our spiritual condition, and our spiritual condition is the reason why. Our sin prevents us from seeing the scope and depth of our sin. But as the nature of our condition becomes clearer, we might recoil at what we do see. Think of the prophet Isaiah when he had a vision of the Lord. He saw the glorious presence of God, which was hailed by angelic voices. The seraphim cried out,

Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts;
     the whole earth is full of his glory! (Isa. 6:3)

In the presence of glory and holiness, Isaiah had a keen sense of his own sin. “Woe is me!” he declared. “For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” (Isa. 6:5). The prophet’s recognition and confession are refreshing. He doesn’t sound like Adam. Isaiah knew God’s holiness, so he had a better understanding of his guilt and desperate condition. The response of the Lord is seen in the action of a seraph, who touched Isaiah’s lips with a burning coal and said, “Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for” (Isa. 6:7).

Loincloths and tree coverings cannot atone for sin. We need confession and forgiveness. We offer the former, and God provides the latter. A true sense of sin confronts us with our unworthiness to receive mercy, yet the beauty of mercy is that it is undeserved. To mix metaphors, our loincloths are just filthy rags (Gen. 3:7; Isa. 64:6). We need our guilt removed. We need our sins covered, and only God can cover the deeds we have done against him. Sin, says Mark Jones, is “the soul’s disease, blinding the mind, hardening the heart, disordering the will, stealing strength, and dampening the affections.”¹ We are helpless before God, and our only hope is God.

Our admission could sound like the words of Peter. In Luke 5, Jesus performs a miracle from a boat, and the fishermen witness an extraordinary catch of fish (Luke 5:6–7). In the presence of such power and wonder, Peter immediately senses his own unworthiness. They have never met anyone like Jesus. The holy, holy, holy God is walking among sinners. Peter says, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord” (Luke 5:8).

Peter’s instinct is like Adam’s: in the presence of such greatness and glory, create some distance. But the sinfulness of Peter is not new information to Jesus. He knows Peter’s condition before getting into the boat! Peter knows he is a sinner, but that doesn’t bring the scene to an end; sinners are the people Jesus came for. Peter wants to put up some distance, but Jesus has already crossed the distance to come to him. Jesus tells Peter words that calm the soul of anxious and terrified sinners: “Do not be afraid” (Luke 5:10). Jesus knows the fear in Peter’s heart, so he addresses it. In the presence of unrivaled glory and holiness, fear seems reasonable. But Peter’s fear isn’t a reason to distance himself, and his sin isn’t a reason to send Jesus away.

Jesus has come to call sinners out of the darkness and into the light. He came—and still comes—for the hiding and the fearful, the ashamed and the sinful. Do not be afraid. The rescuing grace of God has stepped into the boat.

This Christian Life

The promise of the new covenant is a deep cleansing of the heart.

I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. (Ezek. 36:25–26) Do you see the truth of your defilement? There is cleansing in Christ.

Do you understand your hardness of heart? There is a new heart in Christ. The new covenant consists of sinners who are now united to Jesus by grace through faith. They have forsaken the loincloths and tree coverings. They have come out of hiding in order to find a new refuge. The work of Jesus is the burning coal to purify us.

The promise of the new covenant is a deep cleansing of the heart.

Because Christians have not experienced the resurrection of the body and the fullness of God’s sanctifying work, we are still short of glory. Nevertheless, we are free in him from the penalty and power of our transgressions. We can walk in honesty, confessing our sins and rejoicing in the finished work of Christ on our behalf. It would be futile to err in the ways that John wrote about in his first letter: “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8). Or, “If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us” (1 John 1:10). Let’s not be deceived, and let’s not call God a liar. We have sinned and have sin.

The believer’s answer to the question “Where are you?” is different from the Genesis 3 context. We now answer “Where are you?” by saying, “I am in Christ.” My covering comes not from fig leaves but from the old rugged cross. Our refuge is not among the trees but under the tree. The cross has become the tree of life for sinners. It is there that our atonement was accomplished.

We may feel tempted to say to Jesus, “Depart from me,” but he is saying to us, “Come to me.” As the light of God’s word reveals our transgressions and we sense greater depths of our shame, we may feel overwhelmed. But your sin does not overwhelm Christ. If you say to him, “I am afraid, for I cannot bear my sin,” he will say to you, “Fear not, for I already bore your sin.” Don’t walk—flee—to the refuge of his mercy tree. The very reasons you think he should depart are the very reasons he tells you to come.

This article is adapted from Short of Glory: A Biblical and Theological Exploration of the Fall by Mitchell L. Chase.

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