--So far in talking about sin, I’ve exclusively been using some pretty grand metaphors to convey the magnitude of the nature of the problem.
--In so doing, I’ve probably frustrated some of you who like more particular or even simple definitions for sin.
--As you should expect, there is a reason I have employed this approach, and I’ll explain it all tomorrow.
--But for the moment, let’s look at some of the more common definitions for sin, the ones I’ve mostly ignored so far.
1. Sin is violating the command of God. God is fond of issuing instructions, and any time we break one, this is a sin. Thus, sin entered the world when Adam and Eve first broke the only command there was by eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
2. Another common definition of sin is missing the mark of God’s intended perfection for our behavior. Again, we see that God wants an ideal, and we always fail to give Him what He rightly expects and deserves from us.
3. Yet another definition is that sin is a disposition to evil or an inability to do right. Sin is the thing that makes it so that even the things we do right aren’t right, because we always mess up, whether in our overt behavior or in our motives. We literally can’t do anything right, as was intended, because we are sinful.
--There’s nothing wrong per se in these definitions. They’re Biblical, even. The problem is they seem to suggest that sin is fundamentally a matter of bad behavior, which invites the error of thinking we can avoid sin by willpower or education towards behaving properly. And to call this the greatest error in the history of religious thinking is actually an understatement.
--But there is a definition of sin that helps coalesce much of the rest and explains these behavioral definitions at the same time.
--And I’ll talk about that tomorrow.
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