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What is sin?

What is sin?

Last updated on: October 19, 2017 at 1:47 pm by Adrian Warnock

What is sin? 2017-10-19T13:47:07+01:00 Adrian Warnock

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The following post has been crossposted at theologica and submitted to the “God or Not” carnival which is a unique opportunity for dialogue between atheist and christian blogs. Do consider submitting your own posts on sin to their first “carnival”.

Sin is not a popular word these days. We might talk about mistakes, even failures but sin seems like such a strong word. Are we really evil ? Our culture today likes to believe that people are essentially good. The Christian doesn’t share that optimism.

When you really get to know what is inside people’s hearts you realise that sin is possibly the best word for it.

Historically sin has been seen as both acts of commission and acts of omission. Thus, the total failure to evacuate elderly and poor residents of New Orleans prior to the hurricane and in the immediate aftermath can be seen as a result of sin. Somewhere, somehow the system didnt value the lives of the vulnerable highly enough to provide them with free transport. Such an omission would classically have been defined as a sin.

It is easier for many to identify the violence and looting seen in New Orleans as sin. What is less clear to us is that such extreme behaviour is merely at one end of the spectrum of normal human behaviour. We may have society that restrains our natural impulses but to the bible certain thoughts and impulses are defined as sin.

Sin destroys relationships by the recriminations it prompts. Sin destroys people by the guilt they feel. Sin kills, steals, hurts, and divides. To Christian theology sin is something to be battled against in our own personal minds, and indeed this war never stops. John Owen said “Be killing sin, or it will be killing you.”

The concept of the seven deadly sins in less spoken about these days but in December 2003 the times did a series of articles on them. These sins are as real today as they have ever been.

Christianity is at its heart a message about sin and how to deal with it. We are like the doctor telling their patient they have cancer in order to cure them. It may be uncomfortable to realise that we have fallen short and are all sinners. But before we can understand the good news that Christ died for our sins, we have to understand that we have sins in the first place.

Sloth

Many a life is ruined by sloth. These days there are many who live their lives from one holiday to the next. There is no doubt, however that people are not meant to be gainfully employed. Rseearch published in the BMJ in 1992 showed “Without work all life goes rotten….unemployment is associated with early death, divorce, family violence, accidents, suicide, higher mortality rates in spouse and children, anxiety and depression, disturbed sleep patterns and low self-esteem

The continual desire for laziness and the wish that we didnt have to work is foolishness. Work, as hard as it is, generally does us good. God has a purpose for our lives, if we are lazy and slothful we will fail to achieve it. The Times said:

To the medieval theologians, however, sloth was more than simply lazing around. It was the self-indulgent desire for ease, ignoring God’s known will. Thomas Aquinas defined sloth as sluggishness of the mind which neglects to being good, and said it drew man away from good deeds. A slothful person, the moralists concluded, was not only morally deficient, but knowingly perpetrated evil by failing to make the effort to do good.

Pride

Pride is the opposite of meekness. When I preached on meekness a couple of years ago I said the following-

Once you know just how hopeless you are on your own, how can you stand up for yourself anymore. How can it bother you that God or man has seemingly unfairly treated you? Does it matter that people have said horrible things about you for you know that there are many more horrible things that could be said. How can you hold yourself as an example of virtue when you truly know the natural evil of your heart and that in the right circumstances you would have been as big a sinner as anyone alive!

A dead man cannot complain at being mistreated, for he is dead. ‘He who is already down cannot fall’. Bunyan To the truly meek the cry ‘its not fair’ should probably not issue their lips.

As the Times puts it:

Pride makes the confident reckless, the charismatic manipulative and the compassionate careless. It is one big puffed-up chest. The perfect target to be shot down……Pride is the most antisocial sin, and the seed of all others. It is the mistake of forgetting your flaws while remembering everyone else s

Envy and greed

One could argue that the whole market economy rests on generating and pretending to satisfy greed and envy. Of course the trouble is our appetite for more never goes away. As the Times put it:

Charity rejoices in our neighbour’s good, while envy grieves over it, said the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas……

Envy is green-eyed, the sin of focusing on others to the detriment of oneself. It is impossible to cure with material things, without self-belief.

Gluttony

It is not possible to improve on what the Times says about gluttony in my view:

It is a curious fact that no man likes to call himself a glutton, and yet each of us has in him a trace of gluttony, potential or actual. I cannot believe that there exists a single coherent human being who will not confess, at least to himself, that once or twice he has stuffed himself to the bursting point…… unlike pride, envy, wrath sins we can wholeheartedly condemn, sins that are hard to love there’s something about the serious glutton (or some serious gluttons) that inspires a respect for the life force the appetite asserting itself in all that prodigious feasting. It’s not unlike our secret feelings about Don Juans and Casanovas; even as we understand the compulsive quality of their behaviour and the destructive effects it has on their hapless lovers, we can’t help feeling a grudging regard for so much sheer sexual energy.

Lust

Lust is the big liar of our day. By destroying the opportunity for long-term loving relationships lust can produce lonely old people. It promises much but delivers nothing except a continual desire for more. The Times said:

Such is the peculiar status of lust in our society that one could be forgiven for thinking that it had been transformed into a cardinal virtu

e rather than a deadly sin. Contemporary culture is saturated with lust in the most banal of ways. So pervasive is this most shapely of sins that it is difficult to think of a sphere in which lasciviousness does not make its presence felt. Sex sells and everybody, it seems, is selling sex……

Yet lust does not merely describe a state of erotic rapture, but a desire so compulsive that one or both participants objectifies the other, using their body as a means to a bathetic end. Sex in this context is a curiously isolating experience, rendering lovers stripped of their humanity, reduced to a beguiling assembly of limbs…….

With the possible exception of gluttony, lust is accepted as the friendly face of the deadly sin line-up a soft sin, its perpetrators roguish at worst. Even Gregory the Great considered it least problematic. Yet lust is not a victimless sin.

It is a painful paradox that a vice that children are uniquely free of should so often make children its victims, as families topple where marriages fall apart. The causes of such personal tragedies are impossible to explain to the young because there is no rational cause.

Wrath

It is possible to be angry and not sin, but hard. Our own sense of our violated rights drives much anger. How often do we meditate on the wrongs we have done to others rather than the wrongs they have done to us? How much does anger contribute to sadness in the world? Recriminations, and a tit-for-tat mentality lead to conflict in the home and on the world stage. Sooner or later someone needs to stop the cycle and forgive.

The sad truth is that sin produces wrath partly because it should do. We are right to be angry at the damage sin has done. So is God. It is just for sin to be punished. So, a consideration of sin should leave us slightly despairing of ourselves. It should leave us aware that we deserve nothing but punishment from the hands of God.

The Christian message starts with bad news. This bad news should cause us to cry out to God for a solution. The good news is that in Jesus death, the one who had never sinned took the punishment for out sin.

The good news is as follows:

Gal 1:3-4 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father

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