“Sin: It’s Not What You Think It Is | How We’ve Gotten Sin Wrong” Ep#47

The word "sin" is one of the most deeply misunderstood and weaponized concepts in modern culture, usually leaving people trapped between a rigid, legalistic checklist of guilt and a watered-down idea of personal growth. But the truth isn't found in the middle of those two camps—it's something far deeper, older, and more beautiful. In this episode of Spiritual Hot Sauce, Chris Jones strips away centuries of translation layers, moving from street Greek down to the radical roots of ancient Hebrew covenant language. By breaking down the psychology of our internal "hypervigilance" and mapping out a new way to look at faith via a spiritual number line, we look at how Jesus actually defined the concept—and how moving past "zero" unlocks the true, messy, responsible life of external love.

Transcript

Chris Jones 0:00

Sin, this foundational idea, has evolved over time. One side sees it primarily as breaking God's law, very legal, focused on guilt and punishment. The other side sees it as simply missing the mark, more about personal growth and brokenness. Here's the strange thing. The truth isn't somewhere in the middle. It's something deeper and more beautiful than both of these things. So today we're asking, what is sin? Where did it come from? And most importantly, how should we understand it? Welcome. I'm Chris Jones, and this is Spiritual Hot Sauce. First of all, there is so much to this subject, there's no way I'm going to be able to cover it all. And I'm going to try my best to give us an accurate picture of how I perceive it, of how I understand it, and hopefully give you some food for thought to help you in your faith and how you understand it. But I think a good place to start is here. Why do we misunderstand this word sin? How did we get to this point where we have such a convoluted idea and a fracture within the faith over it? So here's what we need to understand. The New Testament is written in what's called Aramaic or Koine Greek, which means street Greek. And to understand what street Greek means is it comes from the term Hellenism. Hellenism is when Greece would come in, take over, and to get you to assimilate, they would take part of your culture and part of their culture, kind of mesh them together, and in doing so, they would help you assimilate into their ideology. So when we read the word sin in the New Testament, the word that comes from in the Greek is harmatia. Harmatia in classical Greek means to miss the mark or misstep. Conceptually, this definition leans more into an intellectual or individual sense of error. Now, this is where the divide happens. From a progressive standpoint, if you unlatch that word from the Old Testament and you just look at the Greek, it's easy to see where we would define it as a misstep leading to brokenness. Now, from the fundamentalist standpoint, if you see it through the lenses of the Old Testament, Mosaic law or the mitzvah, you would see it as crime and punishment, justice. It's an infraction of the law and there's punishment. It's legal. Now, here's where it gets strange. Because we're talking about a street Greek, Koine Greek, where it's a meshed up language, a first century Hebrew would not have heard either one of those definitions when they heard the word harmatia. That word harmatia was used to replace the word chata. Now in ancient Hebrew, chata also means to miss the mark or misstep, but not in the same way that harmatia does. In order for us to understand this, we have to understand Mosaic law, the whole intent behind it. Mosaic law wasn't about punishment. Mosaic law was about correction. It was about through covenant with God, it corrected and helped maintain a very healthy and thriving community. Chata means missing the mark, but specifically in relationship, not just personal failure. Something that disrupts the community and the covenant with God. So there was no punishment for this. You was just expected to go make amends, make it right if you had wronged somebody, do what you had to do to make them whole again. Go to the temple, offer a sacrifice, make amends with God, not in avoiding punishment or as a punishment, but as in reconsecrating yourself back into the community and making it healthy or whole again. So when you read sin in the New Testament, this is what it means. It means chata. Now there's another word. It's a vone. Now, avone is always translated as iniquity. It means to be bent, to be warped, or crooked. Now, the core concept of this is it's a character flaw. It's like where Jesus talks about the thorns. It's you make choices that's poor and it hurts you and it causes you to suffer. Now, there's no punishment for this. They believe that a bone was punishment because your choices and behavior would bring such suffering to you that eventually it would break you and break your pride. But it was the breaking of your pride that would cause you to let go. And by letting go of control and giving in, you were dying to your will of choice. It would straighten your character back out, and you would be reintroduced back into the community. Now, there's one more word, and it's pesha, and it means to revolt or break treaty. It's always translated as transgression. Now, it is a failure of loyalty. It is to consciously betray the relationship with God, covenant, and community. Pesha is not a mistake or a character flaw. It is intentional. It's an act of treason. Now, if it was found that you was guilty of pesha, you'd be taken to the gates of the city and stoned, or you'd be banished forever. Now, interestingly enough, through the process of tashuva leading up to the atonement, you could find forgiveness. Didn't mean that you wouldn't be stoned, but you could find forgiveness. And sometimes you'd be forgiven and even assimilated back into the community, but the stigma would be attached. There's a whole lot more to it. But it wasn't just an automatic stoning. Now, tashuva was the Hebrew word for repentance. And if you want to learn more about that, episode 22, repentance from a different perspective, go back and listen to it. I go deep into what it is and how it's practiced and what it means. And it's different than what we think of repentance, just like what we're talking about here. Now, one of the things that was considered pesha was adultery. In most of our cultures today, that's a weird thing because adultery is like hats a misstep and people do it. But in a community that is based around covenant with God and them seeing marriage as a covenant between one another and God, to break that is treasonous. And both people that was involved in that was guilty of Pesha, if there was two people that witnessed it. Now, the reason why I brought up adultery specifically is because when Jesus gives his message of Sermon on the Mount, he brings it up. And he says that if in your heart, now again, heart, as I've said before, in the Greek is cardia, and cardia means your center, your will, your essence, it's how you choose. It's you. In the definition, emotions aren't in there. It's what is in your center of who you are and how you choose that internally what's going on, if you are lusting, then you've already committed adultery. Now, I don't think Jesus is doubling down on it and saying, hey, listen, even if you can refrain from doing it, guess what? You're still guilty and you're still in trouble. You should still be stoned or excommunicated from everybody else. That's not what Jesus is saying at all. He is not doubling down on it. Jesus is pointing to the fruit that comes from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. He is showing how you define right and wrong is the problem. Because remember, the tree of knowledge of good and evil represents us putting our throne above everyone else's, and we're like God, because that was the lie the serpent told Eve, that you'll be like God, and you can choose good and evil, what's right and wrong. And inevitably, our choices through defining right and wrong in that way always leads to our suffering. And Jesus is pointing to this. Let me give you an example of what I think he's talking about. But think about when you went to preschool or elementary school, wherever it is that you started. Think about the first things that they taught you. It wasn't colors, it wasn't numbers, it wasn't letters, it wasn't how to read, or they they taught you rules. They taught you to stay in your seat, don't talk unless it's talk time or raise your hand first, not to run, not to take from other people, not to yell and hit other people. They taught you the rules. But when you teach rules in that way of refrain from, of don't do, psychology says there's two things that can come out of that. Number one, you internally see the limits, and then you go up to the limits. You navigate it, as my mom used to say, you just see what you can get by with. The other thing that can come out of that is we are constantly scanning our psyche for that thing we're not to do. And then we create a hypervigilance in that. And by doing that, sometimes we create that. So when you create this in people in their psyche as they're growing up, that internally there is breaking the rules and consequences, punishment, that leads to a big space and where you can decide what's right for you and wrong for you. Now, psychology tells us that those kinds of conditions is what creates the place where psychological demons grow. I call it the dark place. That's what Jesus is pointing to, that in your cardiac, if you are just living and refrain, it's these things that begin to grow because these are the things you focused on. James says in James chapter one, if you allow these things to entice you, like lust, that once you bring that into your heart, your cardiac, in the dark place, it starts to grow. And then once it grows and becomes big enough, it will conceive and you'll give birth to that behavior. Now, once that behavior is out in the world, starts to grow and it matures, it brings what it brings. And it's death. Not necessarily physical death, but it's talking about death of all of the beautiful things in your life. Adultery has consequences. You lose the people you love. You hurt the people you love. Your children are going to be estranged from you. Now you're hurting them. Everything that's good in your life, you're going to lose. That's what he's talking about. But it's that condition that's created, that dark place that helps these kind of things grow. Now we're all probably hearing these are the things, Chris, that we get forgiveness for, even if there's consequences for our actions. There is a lens for that. But I'm specifically talking about the lens that Jesus is talking about on Sermon on the Mount. To help us understand, here's what I want you to do. In your mind's eye or on a piece of paper, however you want to do it, I want you to think of a zero. And then to the left of zero, I want you to think of negative one, negative two, negative three, negative four, and negative five. Now to the right of the zero, I want you to think of or write positive one, positive two, positive three, positive four, and positive five. We've created three zones. We've got the negative zone, we've got the zero neutral zone, and then we've got the positive zone. Now keep in mind we're talking about Mosaic law. We're talking about the mitzvah and how we see the Old Testament. So in that regard, we would say the negative zone, like a negative five, is all out pesha. You just don't care. You're like the Good Samaritan story, you're the robbers. But now you're scaling up until you get to zero. And zero is neutral, which means you're not hurting anybody. You're refraining from doing wrong. You're observing the covenant with God and one another in community. This is the sealing of the law. This is what Paul meant when he said that the law was a curse. He was saying the law could only condemn you and correct you. It can only get you to zero. And remember, Jesus says, I didn't come to abolish the law, but I came to complete it or fulfill it. That's a strange thing to say. I mean, let's keep in mind also that Paul talks about this in Galatians, that the law was a tutor or a custodian, kind of a babysitter, until Jesus could get there. And that makes perfect sense because it's like being at a babysitter's. And if you're at a babysitter's or you're babysitting, then what's the objective? It's to simply keep you until mom and dad can get back there and pick you up. So they're just going to keep you from hurting others of getting hurt, and they're just going to keep you basically at zero. Their job isn't to bring you to maturity, basically raise you and bring you to what you need to be. In other words, plus one, plus two, plus three, four, and five. That's not their job. Their job is to just try to keep you out of the negatives. We're told in John chapter one that Jesus is the word of God. He is logos. In other words, embodying God's idea from his heart or his cardiac, that Jesus brought us clarity of what God wants for us. Just like Jesus showed up and said, Hey, dad says, you know, that's kind of how I see it, that he brought us what we didn't have, that we needed to get us past zero, to complete it. Now in Luke chapter eight, Jesus describes this process we're talking about and how this comes about. It's the sower in the word. And Jesus says, I am the word of God, I am the seed. And when you take me into your cardiac, he says the word cardia. This is the same place, the cardiac that he was talking about when he gave his message, Sermon on the Mount, when he was talking about lust and adultery. Remember, it's your center, your essence, it's your will, it's how you choose. Now he tells his disciples that it's in our cardiac, that if you take the word Jesus, as in his commandment in John 13, 34 and 35, where he says, This is my commandment, that you love one another, that you love one another as I have loved you. By this the world will know you're my disciple. A disciple behaves just like the original. In other words, we take his example into your cardiac as a seed, and it begins to grow. He describes a process, not an event. And he talks about all of the things you have to go through. And there's some sacrifice in this to make sure that seed grows and matures and produces what it's supposed to. Now that seed is our faith in what Jesus says. And as it begins to grow, it begins to change us internally in our cardiac, and we become different until you get to the point where you are also bearing the fruit that Jesus bore. What is the fruit that Jesus bore? Feeding the hungry, healing the sick, bringing hope to those who had no hope, bringing love and mercy to those who didn't know it. How to be on the other side of zero, the positive side. There's something in there about retraining our psyche of how we were taught to refrain from that creates that dark place. That by putting this in the dark, it begins to grow as it grows and as it evolves, it begins to retrain our psyche away from internal judgment and toward external love, as in stewardship. Not being a doormat, but being like Jesus and being a good steward. That if you are hungry and you can't feed yourself, then your hunger becomes my hunger. If you're sick and you can't take care of yourself, I'm going to take care of you because your sickness is now my sickness. You're my responsibility, and I am your responsibility when I have need. It's hard to steal from somebody if you're trying to feed them. And now we are completion of the law. We are in positive one, positive two. We are fulfilling it. I mean, this is what Paul says in Galatians 5.13 is that the whole law is fulfilled or completed in one commandment, Leviticus 19, 18, love thy neighbor as thyself, as in stewardship. We become the completion. We become the fulfillment. In other words, the way Jesus fulfills it and completes it isn't just in his sacrifice and resurrection, but it's us. We are the fulfillment of that. Now, as much as we would like to blame religion for this misunderstanding of what sin actually is and what it should mean to all of us, it really isn't religion. I mean, the truth is it falls on society. It falls on the tree of knowledge of good and evil, of how we construct the idea of good and evil, of right and wrong. I've listened to atheists and theists debate one another, both arguing towards where our idea of good came from. Theist says it's God, the atheist says it's from man. Both are wrong. They're both using the wrong definition. They are both arguing for zero, the neutral zone. I mean, if I think of myself, when I talked about school and education, how I was raised, it was very much in refrain. I wasn't taught community in this. I was left to grow the dark place in me like everyone else is, that we're locked in this internal struggle in the dark place with our psychological demons, that it's grown how we were taught to be in society. And then when we get a religion, we bring that idea to the religion and we teach it from that perspective that we're in part. One more thing I want to leave you with. We've got this modern thing of the love as Jesus loved is to condone. What I want to say is the love of Christ neither condemns nor condones, which is why Jesus says, judge not lest you be judged. That's the tree of knowledge of good and evil, of us wanting to be the judge of right and wrong. That's not our place. That we give on need versus deserve, that we don't condone, nor do we condemn. That we just love. As a good steward, not a doormat. There's bonus material to this. In other words, there's more information, more insight. If you would like to hear that bonus material, then email me at spiritualhotsauce at gmail.com. And if you don't want to go on the mailing list, it's really simple. Just say, hey, please don't put me on your mailing list, but I do want to hear the bonus material, and I won't put you on the mailing list. But if you do go on the mailing list, anytime there is bonus material, you will be sent a link so you can hear it. And I'll catch you on the next episode.