What is Sin?

What is Sin?

By Richard Joseph

What is sin?  If you ask 10 people you would certainly get ten different answers.  Here are some common answers you might get: something bad, something you did wrong, something God does not approve of, something religion made up to control people, nothing because everything is ok, something you did against someone else, a bad habit, etc, etc.  Actually some of those answers could be helpful but there really is a better way to explain it.  Hopefully this will help.

I have recently been told by a so called long time Christian that “sin” really isn’t even mentioned in the bible.  Here is the best way to answer that; just ask them where it says that the Messiah would suffer, die and rise on the third day?   Most church goers would never find that in the scriptures.  When Jesus met the two disciples on the way to Emmaus he made this statement to them after they admitted that they were puzzled by the recent events of Jesus being seen alive just three days after he was crucified;

25 Then He said to them, “O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken! 26 Ought not the Christ to have suffered these things and to enter into His glory?” 27 And beginning at Moses and all the Prophets, He expounded to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself.

So Jesus is saying that the answer is in the scriptures: can you find them?

They are right near where it describes what sin is.  Does that help?  If not then let’s take a short journey and see if we can locate it.  Let’s start with the suffering of the messiah first.

Although we get glimpses of a suffering messiah in the Psalms (22 etc) or in Isaiah (53 etc), these still do not spell out exactly what was going to occur.  This is, of course, on purpose.  God hid his message in the scriptures so that it could not be faked when the messiah finally did appear.  The Old Testament is really a shadow of things to come and the New Testament is the realization of that shadow.  The suffering, death, resurrection and return of Christ are all foreshadowed in the seven feasts of Israel.  These feasts, which are detailed in Leviticus chapter 23, are probably the first place that Jesus showed the two travelers to Emmaus.  Paul, who was a scholar, preached exclusively from the Hebrew Torah on his missionary trips as he explained that the message of the law was a prediction of the Messiah and his life.  The seven feasts of YHWH is an exact account of what Jesus went through when the Jewish leadership hastily put him to death on the day of preparation of the Sabbath and when he rose three days later, sent the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, then returned in Judgement against his accusers 40 years later.  A couple of good resources for a study on this is a book by Ed Stevens called: Final Decade (gives a historical perspective of the time right before the second coming which occurred between 66-70 AD) which you can order at:  www.preterist.org and a sermon series called Feasts of the LORD by David B. Curtis at www.bereanbiblechurch.org . This is how the life of Christ was hidden in the scripture which was perfectly fulfilled by the Messiah.  This is the same way that sin is hidden in the scripture.  Let’s see if we can’t find a simple and practical way to describe sin.

I think the best place to show what sin is, is by taking a look at the Ten Commandments.

Exodus 20New King James Version (NKJV)

The Ten Commandments

20 And God spoke all these words, saying:

2 “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.

3 “You shall have no other gods before Me.

4 “You shall not make for yourself a carved image...

7 “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain...

8 “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy...

12 “Honor your father and your mother...

13 “You shall not murder.

14 “You shall not commit adultery.

15 “You shall not steal.

16 “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.

17 “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor’s.”

Just doing a quick review of these commands you can see that in order to break any of the commands, especially 5-10, you would have to be “selfish”.  The 10th commandment sums it all up when it orders you to not covet.  To covet is to be selfish.  It is to want something out of jealousy or out of gluttony.  It is to want, not out of need, but out of greed. It is to give in to the flesh instead of the spirit.  In the 23rd Psalm, David starts out by saying “The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want”.   We are to be satisfied in God and in life without greed or being over indulgent.  If you want to know if you have sinned, simply ask yourself if you have acted in a selfish way or not.  Jesus made this clear in the sermon on the mount by showing that sin is something that begins in your inner soul.  In Matthew 15:11 Jesus said:

Not what goes into the mouth defiles a man; but what comes out of the mouth, this defiles a man.”  So, what is sin?  It is an act of selfishness that originates in the heart of man.  If you steal, it is not necessarily that you took something that is not yours, it is the idea that you felt that your “want” has justified your means.  In God’s eyes, you have sinned before you acted.  It is not something you did or some act your performed, it is your impure heart that defiles you.  Another way to look at it is by comparing the word “lust” with the word “love”.  Lust only thinks of himself (selfish) while love considers the other person first.   Here is an example of people who externalize sin instead of internalizing it;  I have met many people that attempt to make themselves feel justified when they say “I would never have an abortion but I believe it is ok for others to choose to have one”.  Sorry, but in God’s eyes, you are just as guilty as the person that murdered their child.  You are not off the hook.  You have sinned in your heart whether or not you performed the act.  If you are not born again into God’s family then you are a slave to sin.  

If you are truly born again then you are tempted to sin but you have options.  You are not bound by that sin and have an escape by way of the blood of Christ.  The simplest way to explain this is the difference between animals and humans.  If a male dog is placed near a female which is in heat he would have no choice but to mate.  He does not attempt to reason anything out, he just acts on instinct.  A carnal human does pretty much the same thing.  But once you are filled with the Holy Spirit, you then enter a different dimension.  You can now reason things through.  You no longer have just one option, you have two.  You can act upon your selfish desires or you can choose to seek the counsel of the almighty and make a wiser decision.   You are no longer bound by sin. Sin also is tied in with the original sin of Adam. We are all born into that sin and therefore are in a condemned state of being just by being born. We are only released from that sin by the blood of Jesus Christ but that is a subject for a later date.

In conclusion, we do find sin spelled out for us in scripture, but you have to open your spiritual eyes to find it.  It is all over.  There are many things hidden in scripture that are like fine pearls but you have to dig to find them.  You need to desire the truth.  This is why Jesus said “...Everyone who is of the truth hears My voice.”  You cannot hear the voice of Jesus unless you are of the truth.  You must come first, then you can hear.