Grudem summarizes the subject of “sin” in three parts:
- What is sin?
- Where did sin come from (originate)?
- How sin affects us.
The last point, the effect of sin, opens a vast door to issue of the resolution (removal) of sin. Is it possible? Do we do so? If so how? If not, then what? What, then, did Jesus really do about it? Who really was Jesus?
To the degree we underestimate sin and its effects, we in a parallel way tend to denigrate the Person and Work of Jesus Christ. If, for instance, God holds us accountable for self-salvation (in the sense of redeeming out sin, and making full satisfaction to a perfect, righteous God who can behold no sin), then it follows that Jesus was something less than our Redeemer. Perhaps, according to this false view, Jesus was only a later Prophet chastising us for our sin and pointing to a better way. Or, perhaps Jesus was the living Exemplar of what it will take for us to live as He did to be resurrected as He was.
If, on the other hand, we fully grasp that there is no road to self-redemption, then we are indeed “poor in spirit,” and, humanly-speaking, utterly without hope. But that is exactly when and how we will see God, because we come in our abject need for unmerited favor (Grace). Such an attitude is no flippant thing, sort of covering all my bases I’ll just utter some words that maybe will get me out of trouble if this stuff is really true. No, saving faith is that innermost poverty of heart, realizing that only God’s unmerited favor can redeem, as nothing in my hands (or life) I can bring.
The link immediately below is an outline handout that begins with a review Grudem’s chapter on sin, and considers more deeply the implications of sin’s effect upon the Bible’s teaching of the Person and Work of Jesus Christ.
Linked here are passages in the NT where Jesus Himself spoke on sin, sinful generation, and sinners.
Linked here is a section of the Lexham Theological Workbook that provides an overview of “sin” in both the OT and the NT.
Linked here is a John Piper essay on our duty of glorifying God.
Linked below is a pdf summary of a famous, challenging book by John Owen: Mortification of Sin in Believers.
owens-mortification-cheat-sheet-11-28-16
Part 2 of our study on “Sin”
Let’s delve deeper into the nature of sin. In our culture there is essentially no understanding of the essential nature of sins as particulars or, more importantly of “sin” as a basic principle.
Everyone accepts some sense of human imperfection. We’ve all taken tests and obtained less than perfect scores. What made them less than perfect were certain “mistakes.” Perhaps they were mistakes of transcription, one meant to check box “b” in a multiple choice but checked “a,” which was the incorrect answer. A wrong answer could have been simply because we did not know and were forced to guess, or we did not study that particular matter, or were confused by the question, or the question itself was unfair in some sense. Then there is the human condition that we are not automatic machines. Spreadsheets can add columns of numbers over and over again obtaining the same, exact, correct answer. If there are lots of digits involved with lots of numbers, humans just cannot replicate machines.
In all these examples, and many others like them, we do not see such imperfections as anything other than human limitations. We cannot lift 2000 pounds the way a hydraulic jack can, we cannot see objects trillions of miles away or in other wavelengths than “light” the way telescopes and spectroscopes can. We cannot leap our way to the moon the way a rocket can. We are human, and such incapacities are not “sin” but limitations.
More subtly are “mistakes” of judgment. In this end of year football season many people have judgments, even confident ‘certainties’ as to a particular team defeating its opponent. Oftentimes what occurs is the very opposite to what one expected. Or we may fully convinced that buying shares of some particular company will be a financial beneficial investment. However, it often turns out not to be the case (and for us to buy such shares in the first place required the seller to believe that it was better not to own the stock, and they turned out to be “right”).
These kind of “mistakes” we similarly lump into the category of human limitations, more specifically our inability to know the future with certainty.
Deeper still are other kinds of “mistakes” of judgment. Judges and juries in serious criminal cases have to meet a high standard of certainty–“beyond a reasonable doubt”–to convict an accused person. Yet it occurs with some regularity that those convicted were later found to have been innocent. We may similarly make judgments of people we meet as being good or bad, as being someone we could be good friends with or not. Again we can each recall situations where our judgments though confident were later demonstrably wrong. We regularly make judgments about what will make us happy, as to some purchase, or activity, employment, or marriage partner. Sometimes these judgments are made with self-confident certainty, and often enough, we later conclude that we were wrong. (Sadly, the statistics and personal pain of divorce is a clear demonstration of such misjudgments).
Again, most of us, most of the time, will attribute such undesired outcomes as simply a reflection of human limitations.
Is there any domain, then, where “sin” occurs? In our time and place the prevalent answer is “no.” Adverse outcomes are simply reflections of human limitations. What about an act that is morally wrong, evil in itself?
The prevailing response in our present time is that “evil” only occurs in the context of some extremely serious violation of societal norms. So if something “feels good to me” it is good, and is not subject to anyone’s moral judgment. So the moral boundary, where it occurs, is only determined by some popular assent, and only with respect to be–what appears to such popular assent–uniquely heinous. So, speeding 10 mph over the limit deserves a penalty, but is not “evil.” Killing a five year old child is “evil” but (our popular assent says) it is not “evil” to extinguish the life of a womb baby, even a million times a year (which is the current frequency in the U.S.).
What is missing in the above examples is the connection of the idea of “mistakes” with God as Creator, Soverign, and Savior. All of the above discussion is about a reality without God: it is everyone doing what is right in their own eyes and except for the recognition of certain human limitations, all of us generally conclude that we only do what is right, given our composition and circumstances.
Now, grasping God’s standards, we can begin to see “sin” as something far deeper than “mistakes.” We see such ‘doing’ as acts of violation, even direct rebellion against One who has a claim on moral reality. But beneath such ‘doing’ is an inner being–our ‘heart’–which gestates such transgression. The great Sermon on the Mount beginning in Matthew Chapter 5 presents the shocking teaching that it is this heart, innermost being, that is truly guilty before God, not just the outward act, the ‘doing.’
Dr. Al Mohler has a great summary of the noetic (knowledge) effects of the Fall, which includes.
- Ignorance
- Distractedness
- Forgetfulness
- Prejudice
- Faulty Perspective
- Intellectual fatigue
- Inconsistency
- Failure to draw right conclusions
- Intellectual apathy
- Dogmatism and closed-mindedness
- Intellectual pride
- Vain imagination
- Miscommunication
- Partial knowledge
His talk on the subject is available at Ligonier:
http://www.ligonier.org/blog/session-3-albert-mohler-2012-national-conference/
How do we go from “mistakes” to “Sin?”
But, let’s take one step further in this quest for evil’s origins, is such heart-sin a compartmentalized bad spot, sort of like a pothole in the road, a localized defect? The Bible’s answer is “no.” We don’t have bad spots in our heart, our mainspring of life. The consequence of the Fall is that the heart is entirely and irreparably (in human terms) evil with respect to God Himself. We ourselves do not naturally see the situation this way, or see it even in other people (for the most part). But such blindness itself is a consequence of the Fall.
The Bible teaches that the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.
John Flavel (1627 – 1691) was a great English Puritan writer who gives us deep insights into the predicament of the Fallen heart. In his book Keeping the Heart (originally published, and republished many times, as A Saint Indeed) he develops the doctrine, based on Scripture, that keeping the heart right before God is the great business of a Christian’s life and is only possible by the power of God. The primary focus of his book is about our life with uneradicated (and uneradicatable) sin as a new creation in Christ. However, relative to our purposes here he directs our attention to our true, natural state of utter heart degeneration. Attached below is an except of his Keeping the Heart that I have reformatted to ease reading.
Background on John Flavel including a brief video clip by Sinclair Ferguson is available at the below home page (search for “Flavel” then click on “The Works of John Flavel”):
Summarizing
Sin and the heart of man can be summarized by three facts, “Sin” is:
- Invasive,
- Pervasive, and
- Evasive
Sin is invasive in that it has invaded us all, in a parallel way to the DNA of our parents being present in every cell of our body. Sin is pervasive; it spreads to occupy and control our entire inner being, our heart, making it (in Calvin’s term) a “factory of idols.” Finally, sin is evasive; we cannot cover it, extinguish it, extricate it. What is needed is an entirely new heart, which the Bible promises is God’s gift.