The Biblical Articles: What Sin Is Not

On the basis of this understanding of sin as rebellion against God which separates us from God and man and defaces the "image of God" within us, we can see the inadequacy of some of the more conventional interpretations of sin.

Sin is not simply ignorance. Against those who assert that we do the wrong because we don't know any better, and that once we know what is right we will do it, must be set the more profound assertion of Paul:

I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do ( Rom. 7: 18, 19).

The problem is precisely that we so often choose the evil when we know very well what is good.

Sin is not simply the legacy of our "animal" origins. As Dostoevsky points out, that's an insult to the animals. Animals may kill other animals, but they never nail people up by the ears or cremate them in concentration camps while they are still alive. Man can be much more fiendishly clever in his wickedness than an animal can ever be.

Sin is not simply our "physical" impulses conquering our "spiritual" impulses. This is the commonest misunderstanding of the Biblical view. The Bible does not make the distinction between "body" and "soul" that we are inclined to do. In Biblical thought, man is a complex unity -- not, say, a soul inhabiting a body. (See further Chapter 17.) When Paul talks about the "flesh," he does not mean evil physical impulses that stand opposed to good spiritual impulses. He means rather our total humanity as such, our moral and religious life just as much as our sensual passions. The point is well brought out in one of his lists of the "works of the flesh." He includes things like

idolatry,

strife,

enmity,

jealousy,

anger,

selfishness,

dissension,

party spirit,

envy, and the like,

as well as the more obvious "sins" of

immorality,

impurity,

drunkenness,

licentiousness,

carousing, and the like.

( Gal. 5:19-21)

Perhaps now we can see why the "Sunday school sins" are superficial. In the Bible sin is a fundamental dislocation of the whole of life. At its very center life is wrenched apart in such a way that all of it is affected and distorted. Sin, rather than being a series of specific acts, is a condition of life on all its levels. Getting drunk, for example, is not so much a sin in itself as it is an indication that something has gone wrong and that life has become profoundly disrupted at its very center.

The person who cannot handle his relationships with other people, or who is afraid to face himself as he really is, may get drunk to escape from the harsh real world which he feels unequipped to handle, into a pleasant make-believe world of his own creation where he is king of all he surveys. His getting drunk, in that case, is only a symptom of a more profound disorder.

The source of our sin, then, is not found in our ignorance, or in a "carry-over" from our animal origins, or in our physical impulses. It is found in the fact that we abuse the freedom which God has given us. The thing that ought to make us great -- the fact that we are free, responsible creatures -- is the very thing that makes us such a problem to ourselves. We use our freedom in the wrong way. We say no to God, rather than yes.

As a result, we are so enmeshed in wrongdoing that we can't set the situation right ourselves.