[Sunday School] What Is Sin?

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Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:33

Let's pray before we begin. Heavenly Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for these brothers and sisters in Christ. Thank you for your word. Please help us as we consider some heavier teaching in the Bible in terms of how we have gone wrong, how we have fallen short, how we've fallen from your good design for us. Lord, as always, as we discuss the heavy things, I pray that they would merely amplify the good news of the gospel. It's good to know what we've been saved from. It's good to hear the bad news, Lord, so that we can glory in the good. So we pray these things in Jesus' name as we ask for your help. Amen. Alright, there is a common statement that you'll hear, and I want to ask you what you think about it. To err is human. To forgive divine. And to forgive is divine, right. But to err is human. Forget about that part. To err is human. What do you make of that?

SPEAKER_00 1:44

If you're human, it's automatic, you're gonna make mistakes.

SPEAKER_03 1:48

Okay. Do we agree with that? If you're human, it's automatic, you're gonna make mistakes?

SPEAKER_00 1:53

I think it changes the focus.

SPEAKER_03 1:56

It changes the focus?

SPEAKER_00 1:57

Yes, a twist. Because when we were made, we were made righteous without error. Okay? And we were meant to live without error as humans.

SPEAKER_03 2:12

Okay. So the statement to error is human assumes something about humanity. That to be human is to, in some sense, be erroneous. That if you are a human being, you are gonna screw up. That uh failure, error, even sin is bound up with the nature of humanity. Now, when I put it that way, do you agree?

SPEAKER_10 2:36

Yes. Well.

SPEAKER_03 2:38

Yes, yes, yes. Well, well, give me the well, give me the qualification.

SPEAKER_10 2:49

And sin is unnatural, unnatural to the regenerate human being. Unnatural.

SPEAKER_03 2:59

I would take away regenerate. Sin is unnatural. Full stop, is what I would say. Because Jesus.

SPEAKER_07 3:08

My thing is like if it's part of human nature, that doesn't absolve you from responsibility.

SPEAKER_03 3:13

Sure. Uh Jesus, uh partly human or fully human? Fully human. Fully human. Did Jesus sin? No. Did Jesus fail? No. Did Jesus err in any way? No. Alright, so it cannot be the case that sin and error are inherent to human nature. Somebody mentioned Adam. Adam was created in original knowledge, righteous, and holiness. Adam was created upright, Adam was created without sin. But what happened? The fall. Now the only human nature that we participate in is a fallen human nature. So to err is human in the sense that we're all fallen. And we're all gonna err, we're all gonna sin, we're all gonna fail. So this week we are talking about that. We're talking about sin. We're talking about how sin enters the human race. And over the next couple weeks we'll be talking about sin, original sin, total depravity, that sort of thing. But to just recap quickly, last week we talked about the special act of providence that God entered into or with the covenant of life or the covenant of works, this covenant with God that God made with Adam in the garden, where he basically had two paths set before him. Walk the path of obedience and enjoy the blessing of the covenant. Enjoy eternal life with God forever. Walk the path of disobedience, and in the day that you eat of it, you will surely die. And we, today, you know, last week we talked about the two paths, as kind of what was held out to him. We talked about Jesus as the last Adam who walks the path of obedience in our place and for our sake, so that if we are in Christ by way of the covenant of grace, then we are reckoned as having kept the covenant of works even through him, and we get the blessing, we get eternal life. This week we talk about what happened in the walking of the other path. So there are really three questions and answers from the shorter catechism that we're looking at today. Questions 13 through 15. 13, did our first parents continue in the estate wherein they were created? Answer, our first parents, being left to the freedom of their own will, fell from the estate wherein they were created by sinning against God. 14. What is sin? Sin is any want of conformity unto or transgression of the law of God. 15. What was the sin whereby our first parents fell from the estate wherein they were created? Answer. The sin whereby our first parents fell from the estate wherein they were created was their eating the forbidden fruit. So, starting back with question 13, there's a precondition here, there's a presupposition, and that is the freedom of their will. Our first parents being left to the freedom of their own will, fell from the estate wherein they were created by sinning against God. So Adam was created with an original state of liberty. His will was not constrained by some outside force. Adam or God could not, or maybe we could say chose not, to force their obedience, Adam and Eve. But at the same time, God could not force their obedience, Satan could not force their disobedience. This is maybe the only time in history when human beings, set Jesus aside for a second, this is maybe the only time in history when human beings truly had free will. Because there was no outside constraint and there was no internal fallen nature to push them in the wrong way. They could have done the right thing, they could have done the wrong thing. God had given them the power to do good or to do evil. I mentioned this a couple weeks ago, but Augustine talked about this in terms of the fourfold state of man, and Puritan Thomas Boston talked about it later. But there's the first state, that original innocence, uh pase picare, able to sin. Then there's the state that comes after the fall, where we're non-passe non-picare, not able not to sin. Because of our fallen nature, we're just sinning all the time. The third state after redemption is passe non-picare, where through regeneration and the power of the Holy Spirit, forgiveness in Christ, the grace of God, we're actually placed in a position where we are able not to sin. We are actually able to obey from the heart because God has done a work of internal renovation. He's given us a new heart in place of the heart of stone. He's placed his spirit within us, he's written his law upon our hearts, and we can actually walk in obedience. Not perfect obedience, but true, real obedience. And the fourth state is non-passe picare, where this is the state of glory. This is us in the intermediate state at the right hand of God with Jesus. This is us in the new heavens and new earth and our resurrected and glorified bodies, where we are no longer able to sin. I'd say we couldn't sin if we wanted to, but part of the beauty of it is that we won't want to. We will be constitutionally incapable of sinning in the new heavens in the earth. So going back to that state after the fall, the state of not being able not to sin, that doesn't mean that liberty goes away. A lot of times you'll talk to newly reformed folks or cage stage Calvinists who think that the glory of Calvinism, the great discovery that it gives us into the Bible, is that there is no such thing as free will. Then they grow up a little bit and they read the Confession of Faith and see that we have a whole chapter on free will, because there very much is something known as free will. Right? The reason we are constrained and not able to use our will in order to turn toward the good, to turn toward God and to merit salvation, is because our wills are corrupted, our wills are in bondage. Martin Luther wrote in his book, The Bondage of the Will, against Erasmus, who is a Roman Catholic scholastic who thought we had free will in a very libertine sense and that we could choose the good or choose the bad, whatever. But the biblical reality is the reason we don't choose the good is because we don't want it. Our hearts are corrupt, they're tarnished. Isaiah 64, 6, we have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment. Romans 3 12, all have turned aside. Together they have become worthless. No one does good, not even one. Romans 8, 5 through 8 describes the deep dynamic that keeps us from doing the good. It says, For those who live according to the flesh, set their minds on the things of the flesh. But those who live according to the spirit set their minds in the things of the spirit. For to set the mind of the flesh is death, but to set the mind of the spirit is life and peace. For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God's law. Indeed it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God. So, Ruby.

SPEAKER_10 10:22

I have known some incredibly morally good Muslims. And the thing when I and it is very tempting for us Christians to think about all the commandments except the first one. All these I've kept from my youth, he did not keep the first one. Because that is where our self wants to retain a little bit of God for itself. And that means we're not keeping the first one. So when I think about my glorified self, I think I'm loving you the way that you deserve to be loved, without any hesitation, any holding back, any little reservation of me left, and I am so looking forward to that. Yeah. That is that is easy. And it's pride, basically. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 11:19

Yeah, yeah, it's the it's the gateway sin. Uh you can't really break the other ones without breaking that one. And um Ruby brings up something that's important to acknowledge, and something that can sometimes offer, act as a kind of defeater when we think about the pervasive effects of sin in the heart. It's like we Christians, we say everybody is sinful and corrupt unless they come to faith in Jesus and get forgiven and yada yada yada. How come we know so many Muslims and atheists and Buddhists and Jews and all the things that are better people than Christians? They're better at loving their neighbors, they have better marriages, they have better families, yada, yada, yada. Right? And I bet we can all look in our lives at unbelievers who, externally at least, are like really decent, good people, like people we look up to, people who influence us, people who love us, who uh serve their communities well, all these sorts of things. And it's important when we think about this to realize that the goodness or the rightness of an act, it really consists of three three components. The act itself, the reason for the act, and the motivation behind the act. Right? So we have to do the right thing for the right reason, ordered toward the right end. So, you know, I can give to the poor. It's the right thing. But why am I doing it? Am I doing it because I want to look good and build my reputation? Not the right reason. Am I doing it to bring glory to myself or glory to God? Glory to myself, not the right motivation. But if we have the spirit within, if we've been forgiven in Christ, if we've been made new, then we can do the right thing. We can give freely. We can do it for the right reason, because God has told us to do this and to reflect the abundance that we have received in Christ by this means, and we can do it for the glory of God, in conformity with Scripture. If you don't have all those things lining up, if you're not checking all those boxes, then sin is still driving the train. It is still infecting everything you're doing and keeping you from living in a way that pleases God. This is why Paul talks about this distinction between the flesh and the spirit. It's here in Romans 8, it's all over Galatians, it's in his other letters. When he talks about flesh and spirit, that's it's it's a human dichotomy, right? To be in the flesh is to be me apart from the grace of God. It's me living in my own sinful state, the old man, he calls it elsewhere. Whereas the life of the spirit is the new life in Christ, it's the new man that's marked, and there's still vestiges of the flesh. There are all these lingering corruptions and all these incursions that hold us back from being who we are in Christ or who we want to be in Christ. And that's why we're commanded in Colossians 3, put off the old, put on the new. Because even though the old man is dead, and Paul tells us in Romans 5 to consider the old man dead, not just sick, but dead. Sid is dead in us. And yet we're still called to engage in the fight as though the enemy were still alive and making incursions against us. And so we go to war, we put off the old, we put on the new, we walk in the spirit. And sometimes we're going to look better than our neighbors, sometimes we're going to look worse than our neighbors. But we understand that there's a deep reality going on here that through all of this we are being conformed to the image of Christ in a way that our unbelieving neighbors are not. And when we get to glory, Hebrews tells us that without holiness, no one will see the Lord. So these people that we see, these righteous Muslims, may have a record a mile long of all of the good and wonderful things they've done. Paul had a record like that too in Philippians 3. And he counted it all as loss, trash, rubbish, crap, even, worthless when compared with knowing Christ and receiving a righteousness that comes from him and not my own ethical action. So that's that's it's kind of an excursus, but it's it's really important that we that we reckon with that as we think about the way sin works in the world. So that's Roy.

SPEAKER_00 15:45

Because I know it's a it is on question 16, but it's nothing that gets me as component. The person looks at a newborn child, says, Oh, look at the little angel, like if they are without sin. Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_03 16:01

Yeah. Yeah, I was talking to someone the other day, and um she had been hanging out with some Christians at work, and there's like this big conflict in their work friend group because one Christian mom had the audacity to say to another Christian mom, it's like, well, yeah, your your kid's misbehaving because they're sinning. And the the mother was like, How dare you call my child a sinner? I was just hearing the story, like, this is like Christianity 101. I mean, of course they are, right? Of course they are.

SPEAKER_10 16:40

All you have to do to realize to realize the reality of original sin is work in a daycare center. Yeah. And look around some two-year-olds and watch them fighting and pushing and shoving and biting, but spitting and whatnot.

SPEAKER_03 16:57

Yeah, but even it's you know, that sounds like a harsh thing, but you know, if I say that my kid is exempt from all this kind of stuff, that they're not a sinner, and well, guess what? I just took away the one prerequisite for salvation. What did Jesus say to the scribes and Pharisees when they started, you know, giving them grief about hanging out with sinners? I came for sinners. Clearly, you guys aren't sinners, so I guess you just don't need me. My kids need Jesus. Just like I need Jesus. And that changes the game in terms of how you discipline and how you raise them. You're not just doing behavior modification, you're not just bribing them into being a nice, compliant little human being. You're actually going before the throne on their behalf and pleading the blood of Christ, and you're you're trying to school them in the ways of grace again and again and again. It's like, what's going on in your heart? Why did you just hit your sister? Like, where did that come from? Let's talk about that, right? Alright, sin. What is sin? Sin is any want of conformity unto or transgression of the law of God. That's what question 14 says. If we look at, which is a good summary, but if we look at scripture, there are actually lots of words for sin. And these different words and different contexts help us to get a flavor or an understanding for all the ways in which sin is an offense against God. So the handout I've given you gives you those words and ways from the Old Testament and the New Testament. And quickly we can look at each one. So would someone please read the first one, Hata? From Leviticus 4, 13 through 14.

SPEAKER_00 18:42

Hattah to miss the mark. Leviticus 4, 13 through 14. If the whole congregation of Israel sins unintentionally and the thing is hidden from the eyes of the assembly, they do any one of the things that by the Lord's commandment ought not to be done. They realize their guilt. When the sin which they have committed becomes known, the assembly shall offer a bull from the herd for a sin offering and bring it in front of the tent of meeting.

SPEAKER_03 19:11

Thanks, Roy. So the wordies for sin here is the word hata. And like you said, it's to miss the mark. And the idea is you got a target downrange, you're aiming at the center, and you know, you miss it, right? And you can do that because you were trying to hit the target and you're just, you know, your pull was wrong. Or it could happen because you were ignorant of the target and you're just firing downrange, which is a no-no, don't do that. And what it shows here in the law in Leviticus 4 is that sin is sin, right? And in either case, like even if you're trying to do the right thing, but you do the wrong thing, it's still sin. You still miss the mark. It's still the kind of thing that needs to be atoned for. But there is a recognition in the law that there is a difference, right? It's one thing to try to do the right thing and to kind of screw up along the way. It's another thing to sin with a high hand, which I'll talk about in Numbers, where it's like, I know the right thing, but I'm not doing it. That's the wrong thing, and I want to do the wrong thing. And God's moral economy, even though all sin is sin, and all sin requires the blood of Christ, in God's moral economy, some sins are worse than others' sins. And that sin with a high hand is worse than the sin of missing the mark. Alright, the next one is Avon. It's iniquity, guilt, perversion, a willful choice that twists us morally, that that distorts us in our hearts. Someone want to read that one, Isaiah 59, 2 through 7.

SPEAKER_09 20:46

But your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God, and your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he does not hear. For your hands are defiled with blood, and your fingers with iniquity. Your lips have spoken a lie, your tongue mutters wickedness. No one enters justly, no one goes to law honestly. They rely on empty pleas, they speak lies, they conceive mischief, and give birth to iniquity.

SPEAKER_03 21:23

So this, and that's that's a great place to stop. Thank you, Wendy. So this is the kind of sin where it's not just, you know, we're not what we might otherwise consider an innocent mistake. Now, this is willful, this is a twisting, that's a it's in the terms of a perversion of justice, right? We're perverting what is right that creates a perversion within us, and then it radiates outward to the community because this is God chastising his people for their iniquity. They're getting themselves all twisted up and ruining things. The next one is Pesha.

SPEAKER_10 21:57

Before you go on, Augustine, when he was a little boy, stole his neighbors' pears just because he wanted to and because it was fun.

SPEAKER_03 22:05

Yep. He didn't even want the pears.

SPEAKER_10 22:07

He didn't want the pears, he just wanted to do the stealing because there was kind of per perverse enjoyment of let's be bad.

SPEAKER_01 22:19

Yeah.

unknown 22:20

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 22:21

When I was uh reading through Genesis, I got like super stoked because the first time the word sin, it's written in the Bible, comes from the mouth of God. It's kind of like a trivia thing, but I got super stoked. Genesis 4 6. So Cain was very angry and his face fell. The Lord said to Cain, Why are you angry and why has your face fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is contrary to you, but you must rule over it. I jumped up, grabbed my phone, was like, is that the first time, you know? And one of the things that struck me that helped me to fight sin, its desire is contrary to you, right? Like, when you you have that temptation, but when you know that that's the enemy, when you know that it is contrary to your best interest, um you it it helped, at least it helps me to get angry at it, push back on it, reject it. But um, I thought it was good since we're talking about sin the first time that is the word is used. Yeah. So anyway.

SPEAKER_03 23:34

Yeah, it's you know, sin, it's this in some senses it's like a rival power. Think of Paul in Romans 7. On the one side, he knows the law, it's holy, it's just, it's good, he wants to keep it. Uh, and yet there's another law in his members, right? That wants to break it. It's like you were saying with Augustine with the pears, it's the kid with the, you know, don't touch sign. What's the kid gonna do? The kid's gonna touch. There's something, right? And it's, you know, it's it's all these different things kind of conspiring to where it does help to think of sin as an enemy, that you that you're constantly and intentionally pushing back against it. Even though you know the truth, you know the core truth that the sin is dead. Jesus put it to death, and yet something in you remains to be fully sanctified, and so you still go to war with it.

SPEAKER_04 24:31

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 24:32

Alright, next one on the list is Pesha, which has to do with rebellion or a violation of trust. Can someone read those verses for us?

SPEAKER_10 24:43

I guess I'm next on this on this bench. Uh Pesha, rebellion, violation of trust. 1 Kings 12, 19. So Israel has been in rebellion against the house of David to this day. Israel. Oh, I thought Isaiah 1, 2, hear, O heaven, said give ear, O earth. For the Lord has spoken, children I have reared up and brought up, but they have rebelled against me.

SPEAKER_03 25:13

So Pesha helps us to think about sin in the terms of broken allegiance. Right? The way you can think, one way to think about these different words we're looking at is we're we're just giving the different aspects and vantage points of sin in order to better understand what this multi-headed hydra is. So, you know, sin as a mistake, sin as a perversion, and now sin as a rebellion against God who is the lawbreaker. Right? So it's not just that we violate some universal standard that exists out there impersonally. It's not like we just violate the law of gravity or something like that. So we violate the law of God. Sin is an act of rebellion against the king of heaven. That's what sin is.

SPEAKER_10 26:03

Is this where the metaphor of adultery comes in, like you adulters, uh, the unfaithful's uh wife?

SPEAKER_03 26:13

Yeah, I you know, I haven't done a word study to see if this is the word that's used in conduction in conjunction with adultery, but conceptually, it very much overlaps. I wouldn't be surprised if that was the word that's being used a lot in those contexts. Alright, next one is not pesha or resha, which has to do with wickedness or wrongdoing. And in the Greek translation of the Old Testament, this word is translated anomia, which literally means lawlessness. Someone want to read that one?

SPEAKER_05 26:48

1 Samuel 24, 13 through 14. As the proverb of the ancient says, Out of the wicked comes wickedness, but my hand shall not be against you. After whom has the king of Israel come out? After whom do you pursue? After a dead dog, after a flea?

SPEAKER_03 27:10

So lawlessness, wickedness, wrongdoing. It's as it sounds, right? It's it's the kind of sin, it's the aspect of sin in which we act as though there is no constraint, and that we're just free to do whatever it is we want to do. We let our freak flag fly, or we just go buck wild, right? Sin is just whatever. I'd say you act like an animal, we act like animals, but that would be unfair against the animals. The animals act according to their nature. We act against our nature. That's what sin does. Last one from the Old Testament, Ra, evil. Can someone read those?

SPEAKER_04 28:04

Judges 2, 11, and the people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, and served the Judges 3, 12, and the people of Israel again did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, and over and the three of Moab against Israel, because they had done what was evil in the sight of the Lord.

SPEAKER_03 28:24

So this is, you know, ra is kind of like the the bucket term for evil. You pour all kinds of different things into it. So that also helps us when we think about sin. Sin is just wall. Sin is just evil. And all the connotations of that word that you can summon to your mind, that's sin. So that's the old covenant, and that's the witness that it bears to the reality of sin. Now we have the New Testament with a slew of words of its own. The first one, it kind of corresponds to that word evil, Ra'ah. It's uh hamartia, which is the generic wide-ranging word, covers rebellion, corruption, violation, trespassing, disobedience. See it in Romans 5, 12 through 13. Who wants to read that one?

SPEAKER_08 29:17

Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sin. 13. For sin indeed was in the world before the law was given. But sin is not counted where there is no law.

SPEAKER_03 29:38

Thanks, Georgia. So corresponding against again to Ra'ah, it's sin, evil, right? Hamartia. Anomiya. Again, that's literally lawlessness. It corresponds to Resha. 1 John 3 4. Everyone who makes a practice of sinning also practices lawlessness. Sin is lawlessness. And in 1 John 3, it's interesting, there's a there's a tinge of the demonic there. Uh to act lawless is to act as though you are free of God's constraints, which is how the demons act. This is the great tragedy of the demons, where they think they're free of God's constraints, but at no point are they free of God's constraints. Even right now, Satan is like a dog on a leash. It's like the situation with Job, where he's going to and fro, up and down, throughout the earth, and he sees the righteous, and for some reason he's admitted into the heavenly court or the angels, and he starts accusing Job and, you know, trying to make a deal with God. Let me take everything away from him, and he'll curse you to your face. Alright, well, what does that presuppose about Satan? He has to ask permission for whatever he's going to do. So, you know, this taps into our sense of the problem of evil and God's control, his sovereignty, the things that we talked about when we talk about providence over the past few weeks. But the fact of the matter is that, you know, the devil made me do it. Uh, the devil can't do anything unless God gives him the say so. And as much as that might raise interesting philosophical and theological conundrum for us to work out, it ought to be a deep comfort to us. Because there is no trial that befalls us that does not first come through the hand of God, even if the devil is the one who's inflicting it against us. So that's sin is anomia. The next one is parabasis. And this has to do with transgression or stepping over the boundaries, in some ways, like Pesha. There's a line and we step over it. Romans 5.14, death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come. So the argument there is to say that Adam stepped over a very specific, predetermined, predefined line. God said, Don't do this, Adam did it, and sin entered the world through him. And you might be crafty and say, well, you know, that rule no longer applies to us because we're not in the garden. And Paul's like, no, no, no, no, no. That was the prototypical sin, right? Or the archetypal sin from which every other sin flows. So, yeah, we might not break the same exact rule in terms of the form of the thing, but the matter of the thing, the substance of the thing, we're still breaking God's rules. Next one, uh, paroptoma. Very similar in some senses to that willful crossing of a boundary, but it also adds a habitual sense to it. Romans 5, 15, the free gift is not like the trespass, for if many died through one man's trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for many. The next one is adiqia, which is unrighteousness. And that's, you know, the word dikayas in Greek means righteous or just, upright, things like that. And when you put an A on the front of a word, it's an alpha privative. So it basically reverses the word. So if dikaias is righteousness, then a dikaias is unrighteousness. So sin is described as unrighteousness. Uh, Romans 3, 5. If our unrighteousness serves to show the righteousness of God, what shall we say? That God is unrighteous to inflict wrath on us. I speak in a demon way. So again, talking about sin, all these other things that sin is. Sin is evil, sin is uh willful trespass, it's a stepping over the line, it's a habitual wrongdoing, it's it's crossing over the line, all these things. Sin is unrighteousness. Sin breaks our relationship with God. Sin renders us judicially guilty in the heavenly courtroom. Sin corrupts us. Sin does all of those things. It's unrighteousness. And the last term really gets at the um the comprehensive way in which sin turns us away from God. It's asebeia, impiety, godliness. Usibeia means godliness, right? It means piety. You take that U at the beginning, the EU, and you turn it to an A, and you get that same dynamic I just talked about. It's the opposite of godliness. Romans 1.18. The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. So that's sin. So there's a lot there. There are a lot of vantage points, a lot of aspects, a lot of flavors to sin that are communicated to us in Scripture. Let's take just a minute to reflect on that. Anything new to you here? Anything that helps to highlight some of what sin is and how it has manifested itself in your life? Or anything that helps you in your battle against sin?

SPEAKER_00 35:09

Yes, you uh you define stuff something very well. It's hard to explain otherwise. Um, so the act, the reason, and the motivation. I thought that was really good because it's hard to tell somebody that if they do a good act and they are not a Christian, that they are committing sin versus doing a good act and being a Christian. And so I'll try to explain about where your focus is. This is on man, you're comparing yourself to man, and comparing yourself to God. But I like the way you put it much better. It's also very insidious.

SPEAKER_01 35:48

You you oftentimes, you know, you think of the big sins, right? Theft, adultery, you know, all those things, those are easy to scribe, right? But then there are the other sins that are very insidious. You you don't really know you're doing it. How do you eventually figure it out? And the Holy Spirit convicts you, right? And the Holy Spirit convicts you when you are walking with God. You know, when you're in scripture and prayer, and I feel it in my own life, like keeping the Sabbath holy, and you know, little things that the Lord, our Father, is gentle and loving, and it's totally pride you. And then that Holy Spirit says, Hey, you know, you're sinning here, you're sinning there. Um, and that that sensitivity to sin comes through scripture and prayer and a disciplined life. Um but anyway, that's what I've thought. Question?

SPEAKER_06 36:46

Yeah. Um from Romans 13. So if uh for sin was indeed in the world before the law of given, but sin is not counted where there is no law. I think I know the kind of meaning of that, but I want to make sure I'm right.

SPEAKER_03 37:02

Well, if you'll direct your gaze to my notes, that's literally what's next. We talked about that.

unknown 37:10

That's good. Thank you, Keith. Ruby.

SPEAKER_10 37:13

I there's something not on this sheet that I reflect on a lot, and that is in the Lord's Prayer forgive me my debts, forgive me my trespasses. As I am forgiving, I'm thinking, what do I even owe him? What do I owe you? Well, the fact is, the Lord says, I made you, and I made you to reflect me back at me and around the world. And if you're not doing that, that is the debt you owe me. Because that's why, that's the perfect reason you were made.

SPEAKER_02 37:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_10 37:49

And if you're so I think more in terms of things I'm not doing rather than things that, you know, make a list of all the things.

SPEAKER_03 37:58

Yeah. Yeah, we'll talk in a few minutes about sins of omission and sins of commission. I guess that's important what you're saying, Wendy.

SPEAKER_09 38:08

Um, this studying this always um brings me to the point of being broken. And um I think of David in the psalmist where he was so broken and he asked the Lord to restore the joy of the salvation. So it is sadness, but it uh it's also great joy that he provides us um the salvation from our deepest, darkest sin.

SPEAKER_03 38:43

Yeah. And that's you know what you just described is why we do the confession of sins and assurance of pardon in every worship service. Uh it's really, it's not just a description of the gospel, it's an enactment of the gospel. Because we do need to be reminded. As we come together to confess our sins, we're reminded of all the ways in which we fall short. But we don't do that in order to have a pity party. It's not self-flagellation. We do that because we're humbled into the dirt, and who comes along and picks us up out of the dirt? Jesus. We hear the assurance of pardon to tell us that you know you don't have to clean yourself up and make yourself better. Because Jesus was better and he gave himself for you. And now, because of his blood, all your sins have been cast as far as the east is from the west. And in the assurance of pardon, you hear that declared over you from Scripture, not as a plea, not as a wish, but as just the truth about who you are in Christ. So, I think I prayed earlier. That's that's why one of the many reasons why we want to study and understand what sin is and how it works, because it does give us more of a sense of the depth of the bad news, so that we can appreciate the good news about what God has done for us in Christ.

SPEAKER_10 40:05

Like the sermon you preached the other um couple Sundays ago. I didn't come to for the righteous. Is it that from the book? I didn't come from I didn't come to the water. Is that the guy that was laid down, yeah, let down by his friends? Yeah. If I don't think I need the Lord's forgiveness, then he has nothing to say to me. Yeah. And that's hell. Yeah. When God just ignores me. Yeah. Like I have nothing for you.

SPEAKER_03 40:39

Yeah. Yeah, that's right. So sin is you know something we talked about earlier. You know, to error as human. No. Uh sin is not some cosmic principle. Uh, it's not that like abides irrespective of creation, it's not some necessity that exists in the world and exists in us. If that's the case, it's not you know, some dualistic worldviews. Kind of treat all of reality as this great cosmic battle of good versus evil. Alright, uh, ancient Mateism, yin yin yang, there's a lot of different worldviews that make this kind of move. But if that's the case, right, if good and evil are ultimate, well then God isn't God. God is subject to these impersonal powers outside of him. And who's to say which is ultimate? If good and evil are ultimate and everything's just a battle of good and evil, it's these two cosmic principles, then on what basis can we say that the new heavens and new earth will be a place in which we can no longer sin? Evil's always in the picture, right? Jesus didn't defeat it on the cross because it's cosmic, it's universal, it's above his pay grade. But biblically speaking, we know that's not the case. Sin and evil are things that entered into the world. They enter in the garden. And as much as we would like to know all of the details about how that happened, or right, what possessed the serpent to do what he did, or Satan to act by way of the serpent, and or any of that, those questions are answered for us. But evil is something that does enter into the world. And what Paul, you know, Keith brought up Romans 5 a minute ago for us. Romans 5, 13. Sin indeed was in the world before the law was given. But sin is not counted where there is no law. That helps us to see that sin, when it entered into the world, it became a universal problem. It is not only a problem for Israel. Because you can imagine Paul responding to Jews, or Paul responding to anyone, and basically saying, well, like, you know, you guys have the law of God, so sin is kind of like your thing. It's you breaking your law, right? You got this arrangement with God, you got this covenant, you got this contract, you broke the terms, that's your deal, you deal with it. But the argument Paul is making in Romans is that, no, it's everybody's problem. Because sin was in the world even before we had the Mosaic Law. And how do we know that sin was in the world before we had the Mosaic Law? Because people died. And what is death? Romans 6.23, death is the wage of sin. So if you have death in the world, you have sin in the world.

unknown 43:33

Right?

SPEAKER_03 43:33

And if you have sin in the world, you have death in the world. And that is a universal problem. That is not just an Israel problem. It affects everyone, everybody. Right? And skipping past a whole bunch of my notes and trying to get real practical about it.

SPEAKER_10 43:49

Could you explain this kind of part of the thing?

SPEAKER_03 43:52

Go ahead. Which part? What's that?

SPEAKER_08 43:57

Could you explain it?

SPEAKER_03 43:58

Yeah, so there's a sense in which there was a law and not a law. Paul's slippery in the way he uses the word law in Romans because he's expecting us to pay really close attention to context. There's time when law refers to the Mosaic Law, and there's time when law refers to the moral abiding wheel of law of God. And if we pull in our discussion of the covenant of works from last year, it's pointing to the fact that there was a law at work in the world even before there was the Mosaic Law, and that law, that baseline law, is the covenant of. Works. It's the expectation that God placed on every human being to follow his will, to follow his rules. And um and again, you don't you don't have sin unless you don't have that law. Right? So that's that's part of the argument that he's making, is that there is a law that transcends the Mosaic law to which every human being is accountable. The law written on the Gentiles' hearts, he talks about in Genesis 2. And their failure to keep that law, our failure to keep that law is sin. And sin brings the wage of death.

SPEAKER_01 45:06

Well, the flood was before the Mosaic Law.

SPEAKER_03 45:08

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 45:10

And the verse that you pointed out a minute ago, James, about the sin we crash at the door.

SPEAKER_01 45:17

For a flood. For a flood. Exactly. Looking to destroy it before. I mean it's the beginning.

SPEAKER_04 45:24

And that came up because Cain didn't follow God's will for the sacrifice.

SPEAKER_03 45:30

So sin is in the world. Sin is a thing that we all have to deal with. Even if we have, if Christ has paid the debt for our sins, we still have to deal with it. We have to deal with it in ourselves due to lingering corruption, and we have to deal with it in the world around us. So, for the last 10 minutes or so, in service of dealing with it, I want to pay attention to that definition of sin in the shorter catechism that says that sin is any want of conformity unto or transgression of the law of God. And what you have there is a different way of stating something that's very familiar to us in ways we think about sin. Sin as sins of omission and sins of commission. So when I talk about sins of omission, what am I talking about? What is a sin of omission? Yeah. Not doing what we should do. So can you think of any sins of omission? Yeah. From your own life or from the life of your neighbors? Sarah. Today's her birthday. Happy birthday, Sarah. You've sinned by omitting that's. Yeah, I've seen that in judicial cases. So I won't go down the rabbit hole, but in the in the BCL, chapter 38-1, we it's let's say you're charged with something or you're accused of something, you have the opportunity to come as your own accuser and basically confess. Alright, so you confess formally before the court. So if you're a member of a church, it's before your session. If you're a teaching elder like me, it's before the Presbyterian. You confess, and then the court deals with you. Whether it's an admonition or it's an excommunication, no, probably not an excommunication, but you know, the court deals with you according to the rules of discipline. Sometimes what people will do is, you know, here's this laundry list of sins and things that they have done wrong. But that's embarrassing, that's painful, they don't want to confess to that. And they get strategic and they realize I can confess to these, and you know, that'll deal with the charges against me, and I won't have to talk about all of this. That is a sin of omission, right? Where you manage the conversation and you say, yeah, I'm gonna cop to this and this, and you just conveniently forget to mention all the other things you've done wrong, because that gives you a kind of sense of repentance and confession and reconciliation, but you you've only dealt with the tip of the iceberg, right? Not with the actual mass underneath. That would be a sin of omission. How about failing to forgive people who've sinned against you? Sound like a sin of omission? How about withholding honor from whom from people to whom honor is due? Like the president of the opposing party, either this year or five years ago. Not repaying debts, failing to live at peace with everyone insofar as it depends on you, failing to glorify God and to enjoy him, failing to love your neighbor as yourself, we can kind of go through the list of all the things that Scripture commands us to do, and we're kind of like, ah, I forgot to do that one, or I chose not to do that one. There are sins of omission all over the place.

SPEAKER_06 49:34

Or that one's really hard.

SPEAKER_03 49:36

Or that one's really hard, and I would rather not do it.

SPEAKER_00 49:39

Yeah, and there's a sense too that if we take away the rule, but like we get higher in society for the presidency, we take away the rule, and then uh we are not committing a sin because if there's no law, then there's no sin. Yeah. But we're comparing ourselves to fellow men to God when we do that.

SPEAKER_03 49:59

Yeah. Alright, second category before we're done. Sins of commission. What is the sin of commission?

SPEAKER_10 50:08

You've actually done it.

SPEAKER_03 50:09

You've actually done it. Omission is not doing the right thing. Commission is doing the wrong thing. So there are lots of sins of commission that we could come up with. Adultery, greed, blasphemy, ambition, lying, drunkenness.

SPEAKER_10 50:25

And in problem of pain, Lewis says mere time does not cancel out this debt. So when you were a little kid, he says, and he talks about this little boy with old wings off the fly. An act of gratuitous cruelty on matching all the time, but this is just torture. This is torturing. And he said that just has to do time as we use it.

SPEAKER_03 50:54

Yeah. Yeah, sin needs to be dealt with. Alright, and that's that's a good place to land our plane this morning. We have sins of omission, sins of commission. We have unintentional sins where we miss the mark, even though we're kind of trying to do the right thing. And then we have high-handed sins where we willfully transgress the law of God. Uh we have corruption, we have perversion, we have moral twisting all over the place. We're a mess. We're an absolute mess. And I say this as, you know, the chief of sinners in this room. But the good news, right? That's the bad news. The good news. We're here to talk about the good news today. We get to focus on the good news again and again. We look at all of this stuff and we consider our own sin through the lens of the gospel. And so, you know, this. I talk about this, but it gets me in trouble sometimes. How many times does the New Testament, if you're in Christ, how many times does the New Testament call you a sinner?

SPEAKER_01 51:54

Zero.

SPEAKER_03 51:55

Zero. Right? And the one time Paul refers to himself as a sinner, the chief of all sinners, like I just quoted, I think he's talking past tense. Right? So that's not to say that we're free of sin in Christ. All the reality that I talked about earlier with the vestiges of corruption, all the fighting against sin. The New Testament has a word for us if we're in Christ. It's not sinner, it's saint. Right? After you do the miracles and you keep all the rules and you get canonized by the church, right? Wrong. We're all saints. In Christ, we're saints. We're forgiven of our sin. It's cast as far as the east is from the west. His blood atones for our sins. So when God looks at us, he does not see our crimson ledger. He sees the perfectly white record of righteousness that we have in Christ. We wear the garments of salvation. And so think about sin. You know, understand it so that you might better do battle with what's going on within you, and so that you have categories to understand what's going on in the world around you. But don't live there because you don't live there anymore. Consider yourself dead to sin. That's not Kenny, that's Paul. Let's pray. Father, thank you that we are dead to sin in Christ. And we say that not so that we would take our sins lightly, or that we would give excuse for them, not that we would live with license, Lord, but that we would live in victory, knowing that the same Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead is dwelling within us to bring us to new life in him. A life that is already ours, a life that is constantly being realized and actualized, and a life that will be given to us in consummation when Jesus comes back in glory. Lord, help us to go to war with the sin that remains. Help us to put off the old man and to put on the new. Help us to be who you've called us to be and walk how you've called us to walk. Lord, we see all of these ways in which our sin turns us away from you, it blinds us to you, it perverts us against you. Thank you, Father, that even though we were walking in darkness, even though we had rebelled against you, even though we were following after the course of the Prince, the power of the air, Lord, you made us alive together with Christ, and you said, No more of that. So, Lord, help us to live as living people in Christ. And help us this morning as we worship you in spirit and truth to glory all the more in the good news about what you have done to forgive us of our sins and to bring us to new life in Christ. It's in his name that we pray. Amen. Amen.