The Doctrine of Sin

INTRODUCTION

Well, tonight is a kind of extension of the topic we addressed last month, which was the doctrine of man. Because from a biblical perspective, there’s no way to talk about man without also talking about sin. Really, when you think about it, the challenges to the doctrine of man represented by issues like transgenderism, abortion, racism—the things we talked about last time—they really are expressions of how the reality of sin manifests itself.

In other words, man has a problem. And you cannot and will not EVER understand yourself or the world around you until you understand who YOU are as a human being—that was last month—and what your ultimately PROBLEM is.

Sin is a reality for all of us. We’ve never seen a world without sin in it. There are 1,189 chapters in the Bible. Only four of them relate to a world without sin—the first two chapters Genesis and the last two chapters of Revelation.

That means the doctrine of sin is perhaps the most relevant doctrine to us in our time. It explains our reality. And all the competing worldviews of the culture are attempts to re-explain reality in a way that doesn’t HAVE to account for sin.

Illustration: To give you an illustration of this, I think it would be helpful to give you a little overview of modern behavioral psychology. Not to oversimplify the matter, but you could think about behavioral psychology as a study in secular hamartiology—or a secular doctrine of sin. In other words, it’s a secular way of trying to figure out what accounts for people’s misbehavior.

For example, take the first major form of psychoanalysis, developed by the infamous Sigmund Freud. Now, remember that we talked about Freud last time. In Freud’s analysis, man is basically an instinctual animal. He is driven by a powerful, unconscious sexual instinct. The problem is that this unconscious instinct—which he termed the “id,” was in constant conflict with the established systems—culture, society, religion, parents. They all forced upon the individual an expectation of certain behavior norms that forced the person to suppress these instinctual desires. Freud coined these forces the “superego.” So what was left after all of this was simply the “ego”—man’s filtered, repressed self.

Man’s problem, then, was not in him but in the society around him. He feels guilty because of a set of cultural standards set placed upon him.

In the decades following, men like Alfred Alder, Eric Erikson, and Carl Jung built upon and modified Freud’s theories. But whereas Freud thought of man as a sexually-driven animal, Jung and Alder and Erikson viewed man as a socially-governed animal. Man’s problem—the thing that makes him misbehave—is that he has imprinted upon his psyche from childhood a sense of helplessness and weakness. In short, he feels inferior to others, and his behavior is the result of his striving to gain a sense of self-worth and self-realization.

We could then move to another materialistic view, that of Behaviorism, which was championed by B.F. Skinner. Here, man is once again an animal. He starts out his life with a neutral relationship with the environment around him. But when he interacts with that environment, he begins to encounter stimuli which reinforce certain behaviors. Sometimes the consequences of these behaviors are good, and so he repeats those behaviors. Sometimes the consequences are bad, so he avoids those. It’s kind of like a lab rat learning to eat the food that doesn’t have the jolt of electricity attached to it.

So what man’s problem? Nothing. Man doesn’t have the problem. He’s just an animal. It’s his environment that causes the problem. Thus, if you restructure the environment you can essentially solve man’s problem.

Now, what ties all three of these competing theories together is the overall assumption that man is basically an animal—that makes him amoral, right? He’s just a product of evolutionary biology. And like all animals, there are certain forces which drive behavior. For Freud, it was sex. For Alder and Jung, it was childhood fragility. For Skinner, it was environmental interaction. And all the blame for man’s problems and man’s behavior is placed squarely on other things. It’s society and culture. It’s man’s environment. But it certainly isn’t man.

Now, we move from those kind of materialistic theories to some more contemporary concepts. Albert Ellis was the developer of what’s known as Relation-Emotive Therapy, and what this theory holds is something I’m sure you’re all familiar with because it’s basically what Robert Schuller and Normal Vincent Piele espoused with the “power of positive thinking.”

The basic idea here is that man is basically good. He is loaded with unlimited inner potential. So what’s the problem? He doesn’t believe in himself. He’s a victim of flawed, irrational beliefs. He’s not to blame. He just needs to changing his thinking! He needs to eliminate self-doubt.

Now, there’s many others we could talk about here in the world of behavior psychology, but you get the picture. The common thread throughout all of these theories, regardless of the differences there are—is a refusal to suggest that man is at all to blame for his problems or his behavior. And if he does have a hand in anything, it’s just that he doesn’t think the way he should, and doesn’t believe in himself.

Summary: These theories are nothing more than attempts to explain reality without having to account for sin. They start with a wrong view of man, they refuse to account for the existence and reality of sin, and thus everything they offer, then, as a solution for man’s problems will NEVER work because they have the problem wrong.

The only way to offer people hope in the gospel is if you help them understand the real problem they face. You cannot embrace Christ as savior if you don’t recognize what you’re being saved from, and that makes the doctrine of sin extremely important to get right.

DEFINING SIN

So that brings us to the biblical doctrine of sin, and the first thing we have to do is understand what sin is. The Bible talks about sin using a lot of different words, and each one of them offers a unique angle for understanding. The word for “sin” in Hebrew is chatah, and in Greek it’s hamartia, and they both carry the idea of missing the mark. But there’s other terms used: rebellion, transgression, unrighteousness, lawlessness, disobedience, ungodliness, wickedness, ignorance, wandering. These are all biblical words to describe sin, which means that sin is a multifaceted concept in the Bible.

But what’s at its core? What is the root issue? Well, theologians have debated this question for centuries. Augustine linked sin with the root issue of pride, and it’s become quite a popular view among theologians today. So has the idea that sin as unbelief, taken from Paul’s words in Romans 14:23—“Whatever is not of faith is sin.” Some have suggested that sin is at it’s core a lack of peace in the heart. Other have offered things like selfishness, or idolatry.

And you know what? All these suggests are core concepts in the discussion of sin, but I don’t think they really get to the heart of the matter. If we want to understand sin, we have to approach is theocentrically—that is, from a God-ward perspective.

Turn in your Bibles to the Book of Isaiah for a moment. In Isaiah 14:14, we find this statement made about the king of Babylon:

Isa 14:13-14 13 You said in your heart, I will ascend to heaven; above the stars of God I will set my throne on high; I will sit on the mount of assembly in the far reaches of the north; 14 I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.

Now, that was a prophetic statement made about a human king, but there’s an insidious force behind this kind that looms in the background. This description could just as easily be descriptive of Satan as it could be of a wicked ruler, and that’s exactly what’s going on. The king of Babylon is simply exemplifying the behavior first witnessed in Satan.

Now, turn back to Genesis 3, and look at the language used in verse 4 and 5:

Gen 3:4-5 4 But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. 5 for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

Do you notice the similarities between the statements made in Isaiah 14 and Genesis 3? Both deal ultimately with a desire to usurp God—to be like God and thus to destroy the distinction between the Creator and the creature.

Ultimately, the heart of sin is the violation of the creature/Creator relationship, where the creature attempts to come out from under the authority of the Creator.

Or to put it more formally, we could say it this way:

“Sin is any lack of conformity to God’s will in attitude, thought, or action, whether committed actively or passively. The center of all sin is autonomy, which is the replacing of God with self. Always closely associated with sin are its products—pride, selfishness, idolatry, and lack of peace” (MacArthur & Mayhue, 454).

Application: This is critical to understand, because as you struggle with sins in your life, and you’re getting frustrated with how you just can’t seem to gain control over this sin, it could very well be that you’re not getting to the root of the issue. We so often associate sin with behavior, when in reality, the behavior—while sinful—is not the root cause of it.

You have to dig down deeper than the behavior. You have to go to the heart. You have to ask yourself, “What is it I’m worshipping? What is my idol? And in the end, while there may be many idols in our hearts, there is only one throne, and either God sits on that throne or we do. And sin is our attempt to kick God off of that throne and take his place. And out of that coup against God comes pride, selfishness, idolatry, and all the outward behaviors and attitudes of sin.

TRACING SIN

So now that we’ve defined sin, lets trace it. Where did sin come from? And to construct a timeline for sin’s origin, we need to go back and look at Genesis 1. Here, we see God in his act of creation. Over a course of six days, God creates the earth and the heavens. He forms the earth in the habitable planet. He fills it with plants and birds and animals. He fills the heavens with lights to illuminate. And then he creates man to cap it all off, and we explored that last time.

And the final statement made by the narrative at the end of that creative week is this: “And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.” In other words, the world was just the way it should be.

Now, that statement—“very good”—cannot be a description of the world we live in. There is nothing “very good” about our world. It is a damaged world. It is a lost and fallen world. It is a world filled with disease and death and strife. This is not the world as it should be.

So that means that whenever sin first entered the world, it could NOT have been before the conclusion of the creation week.

Now, when we turn over to Genesis 3, and we see the events that unfold with the fall of man into sin, there’s also a sense that we get from this narrative that even though this is the first time manhas sinned, this isn’t the first time sin has been committed. The presence of the serpent—smoothly talking to Eve, getting her to doubt God’s goodness and desire her own autonomy—there’s the distinct sense that this serpent has already sinned.

Which means that the origins of sin are not with Adam, nor with Eve, but with Satan. At some point in the intervening time between Genesis 1:31 and Genesis 3, the first sin of the universe took place—the first act of rebellion and grasp for autonomy occurred. And Ezekiel 28:13-15 describe that event.

Now, this passage is, at first reading, a prophetic oracle about a human king, in this case the king of Tyre. But just like Isaiah 14, the language clearly suggests a more insidious power and influence behind this human—that somehow the prophet is going beyond the man to describe the demonic presence that exemplifies the behavior.

Ezek 28:12-14 You were the signet of perfection, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty. 13You were in Eden, the garden of God; every precious stone was your covering…. 14You were an anointed guardian cherub. I placed you; you were on the holy mountain of God; in the midst of the stones of fire you walked. 15 You were blameless in your ways from the day you were created, till unrighteousness was found in you.

So what this indicates is that sin finds its origins in Satan. He is a created being—an angel—shortly after he was created he developed a desire to usurp God and gain ascendency. We learn from other passages that he rebelled against God and was thrown out of heaven, although we know from Job 1 that he still has access to heaven. He became at that point the god of this world—the prince of the power of the air—and undoubtedly, directly after he was expelled from God’s presence, he came to earth to lay an assault against God’s own representatives.

Trans: So the question, then, is why, if Satan is the originator of sin—the first creature to rebel against God—why does the ultimate blame and guilt for sin fall on man and not on him? Why is the “Fall into sin” start with Adam and not with Satan? Why does the curse come when Adam sins and not when Satan sins?

Now, there’s a couple of reasons why this is the case, and the first one we talked about it last week: Man is the only creature God has made in his own image. He made man to be like God. Angels can’t make that claim.

But the second reason—and the primary one at that—for why man is held responsible for the fall of this world is that God has purposed and determined to deal with man as a collective whole. Now, this is such an important concept that you can’t understand this world or God’s plan for redeeming this world without understanding how God has determined to deal with man.

SPREADING SIN

Theologians sometimes talk about Adam’s sin as Original Sin. The doctrine of original sin is how we explain why each and every one of us is a sinner, and why each and every one of us stands condemned before God. Now, before we start to talk about this doctrine in detail, let’s start with the primary passage upon which it is based—Rom 5.

Rom 5:12 Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned…

Now, notice first the statement made here: “sin came into the world through one man.” That’s the concept of original sin. Notice that Paul doesn’t place the blame with Satan, even though Satan was the first sinner. But it was through the one man—the first man—that sin came into the world.

Next, notice the consequences of that event: “and death through sin.” So Adam’s sin introduced sin into the world, and that one act of sin brought death into the world.

Now, notice what happened next: “and so death spread to all men.” What this means is that Adam’s sin wasn’t just isolated to himself. His sin came with consequences, and those consequences reached his descendants.

But lest we think that Adam is solely to blame for the fact that death spread to all of us, Paul makes this next statement. The reason death spread to all men was “because all sinned.” This is the most important statement of this verse, and, consequentially, the most debated.

What does that mean, “all sinned?” Does it mean, death spread because each one of us individually have sinned at some point in our lives and so death spread to all of us because of the individuals choices we make?

That was the view of the theologian Pelagius. He argued that the reason people sin is because they’ve been given a bad example. Adam set a bad example in his disobedience. But at their core, men and women are morally neutral. They have no sin nature. There’s no direct transmission of sin from Adam to us. We are all born in the same kind of condition that Adam was in before the fall—morally neutral, with the capacity to sin or to not sin.

And so Pelagius and the theology he developed called Pelagianism, taught that man had the capacity and freedom to decide not to sin. He was under no constraint or bondage. The reason why any man stands condemned is because he chooses to sin. But there’s always a choice.

Now, Pelagius’ teachings were fully rejected by Augustine, and eventually the church went on to condemn Pelagius’s teachings as heresy. It’s absolutely clear that there has not been a person who has lived on this planet, apart from the Lord Jesus Christ, who wasn’t by nature a sinner. Obviously, some kind of sin nature has been transmitted to us from Adam. And it’s this sin nature that gives us a natural benttoward sin. We have this sin nature from birth. The Puritans understood this. The Puritan Cotton Mather famously referred to babies as “vipers in diapers.”

But even this understanding of sin as a nature inherited from Adam isn’t enough. Yes, it’s true. But it’s incomplete. Listen to what Paul says a few verses later in Romans 5:

Romans 5:18–19 “18 So then as through one transgression there resulted condemnation to all men, even so through one act of righteousness there resulted justification of life to all men. 19 For as through the one man’s disobedience the many were appointed sinners, even so through the obedience of the One the many will be appointed righteous.”

Notice what Paul says here. It’s not just that all “sinned” and so are under condemnation. It’s more than that. He says that the one man’s sin led to condemnation for all men. That’s something completely different. You know what it’s saying? It’s saying that God holds you accountable for Adam’s sin. It’s the “one trespass” that condemned you—condemned me—condemned all of us. The “one trespass.”

How can this be? How can God hold us accountable for another man’s sin?

Well, some say that the reason we’re all guilty for Adam’s sin is because we were physically present in Adam when he sinned. This is the idea of Realism. It’s like we were all present in Adam in seed form, participating in his sin when he committed it.

The problem with that view is that if it’s true, then it only accounts for our sin in Adam. But notice how Paul in Romans 5:18-19 keeps making a parallel comparison between Adam and Christ—the one trespass versus the one act of righteousness; one man’s disobedience versus one man’s obedience. We might have all been in Adam when he sinned, but we weren’t all in Christ when he obeyed. If we were, then it would mean universal salvation for all, but we know that’s not the case.

The reason why God can hold us accountable for Adam’s sin—why we stand condemned for a sin none of us actually participated in—is because God has determined to deal with humanity as a collective whole through a representative. This is what’s known as Representative Headship, or in older theologies it’s called Federal Headship.

When Adam committed that first act of rebellion against God, he was acting as a representative of the entire human race. All of humanity—you and me—we were all united in Adam as our representative. So when Adam sinned, God counted his sin as our sin. He imputed—there’s an important theological term—he imputed Adam’s sin to us. He reckoned Adam’s sin as if it were our own. And so in the one man’s trespass, all men stand condemned.

Now you say, “Why would God do that?” After all, that seems like a rather unjust way to deal with people. I don’t particularly like that God condemns me for something I didn’t have any part of.

Well, I would argue that not only is this idea of representative headship a good thing, but it’s actually the best thing God could have done for us. God determined that Adam would be a federal head, and that Adam would stand for the race. And by virtue of that divine plan, God inflicted upon Adam the penalties of sin, holding the whole race accountable. But by virtue of that same plan, it was possible for God to deal with men by another mediator; the last Adam, the Lord Jesus Christ.

The reason why Paul can say in Romans 8:1, “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ” is because of federal headship. That’s what “in Christ” means. We are “in him” as our federal head, and God has in his wonderful grace made it possible for men who fell in the first Adam to have life in the last Adam.

EXTENDING SIN

There’s one final issue with sin we need to address here. The consequences of sin are numerous and obvious. Sin has affected us in countless ways. We experience our own personal guilt and shame and fear because of sin. And what’s more, there’s the relationship affects sin has. We see it in our marriages, our families, our friends, and certainly in our society. And then, of course, there’s our relationship with God. We’re objects of God’s wrath, facing eternal punishment, and at constant enmity with God. These are all the consequences of sin.

But there’s a question that lies underneath all of that. It’s one thing to say, “Yes, I’m a sinner.” It’s one thing to say, “Yes, I know that I’ve inherited a sin nature from Adam.” It’s one thing to say, “Yes, I know I stand condemned for what Adam did as my representative head.”

But how “sinful” am I? How much has sin really affected me? Well, here’s the bad news. The Bible teaches, for one, that every human being is a sinner. “All have sinned,” Paul says, “and fall short of God’s glory” (Rom. 3:23). That much is clear. I’ve never met a non-sinner, have you? Right, no one has.

Second, by the very fact that we’re sinners, it means that we are completely incapable of pleasing God on our own. That’s what Pelagius didn’t understand. He thought man had the capacity to choose to obey God and merit God’s favor and that the only reason he didn’t was because he chose to follow Adam’s bad example.

But Pelagius, we said, was entirely wrong. Man isn’t a neutral being. He has, indeed, inherited a sin nature, and therefore man thus stands condemned before God and cannot earn anything. His chance for earning anything slipped away entirely when Adam sinned. Paul said it this way in Romans 8:8—“Those who are in the flesh”—that’s everyone before coming to faith in Christ—“cannot please God.” You cannot please God through anything in yourself.

But here’s the third thing, and this is the one that people find most hard to swallow. It’s not just that all men are sinners, or that we cannot please God by ourselves. It’s worse. Sin has so polluted us that every aspect of us is sinful. Every part of us has been corrupted.

Now, this doesn’t mean we’re as bad as we could be. And it doesn’t mean that we are incapable of doing anythinggood. Think of Matthew 7:11 when Jesus talked about how even people who are evil are capable of giving “good gifts” to their children. Evil people can do things that are good.

So what does this mean? Simply this: It means that sin pervades and permeates down into every component of our personhood. This about it—what are the components that make you a person? Our bodies. Our souls. Our thinking and reasoning ability. Our desires, our affects, our heart. Which one of those has not been affected sin? Our bodies decay and die, and with them we do evil things. Our thinking is depraved. We don’t think rationally. Our affections—what we love and have affection for—is tainted with sin. Our hearts—our control-center—is “evil and desperately wicked,” Jeremiah says (Jer. 17:9). Even our desires are polluted by sin.

Titus 1:15 To the pure, all things are pure, but to the defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure; but both their minds and their consciences are defiled.

John Calvin put it this way: “We are so entirely controlled by the power of sin, that the whole mind, the whole heart, and all our actions are under its influence.”

That’s why in Romans 6, Paul used to analogy of slavery to describe our relationship to sin. In a slave-master relationship, the slave has no choice. He must obey his master. And so we must obey sin. We have no choice.

But lest we think that somehow people are unwilling participants in this slavery, understand this: every part of our human makeup has been corrupted by sin—including our very will. Yes, our will.

Martin Luther wrote a book called the bondage of the will where he talked about sin’s power over our wills. And later, Jonathan Edwards wrote a book called the Freedom of the Will. Now you might assume by the titles that these two books are for the exact opposite positions concerning sin and its effects on our will. But actually both theologians end up arguing the same thing, just from two different angles.

And in the end, I think Edwards makes the most compelling discussion of this issue. What Edwards basically argued was that man’s will is enslaved to sin. But that doesn’t mean his will isn’t free. Even as a sinner, man’s will remains free to choose what it most desires. And yet as a slave to sin, and given to free choice of choosing to obey God or obey sin, man will always FREELY choose sin over God.

BREAKING SIN

Now, that leaves you wondering, “Well what hope is there, then!” How is anyone supposed to obey the gospel if their own will is so bound up in sin they’ll never WANT to obey the gospel?

This really paint a hopeless state for humanity, doesn’t it? Yeah! That’s the point! On their own, people are hopeless! So hopeless that they don’t even desire the salvation God offers.

So how does one get saved? How does one exercise saving faith if they can’t break through their own sinful desires and their own sinful wills?

Remember the question the disciples asked Jesus when the rich young ruler went away? They said, “Then who can be saved?” That’s kind of what we’re asking now, right? Remember what Jesus told them? “What is impossible with man is possible with God” (Luke 18:26-27).

If it was up to us, we wouldn’t be saved. We couldn’t be saved. If it were up to us, we wouldn’t choose to be represented by some head of humanity. Thanks be to God, it’s not up to us, amen? God chose to deal with man by means of a representative head. So we can be found in Christ, our federal head, representing us on the cross, imputing to us his righteousness and our sin to him.

And thanks be to God, he intervenes. He pierces through our hard, stony heart. He’s the first mover—the one who comes to us while we’re in the depths of our depravity. He removes the old heart and replaces it with a new one. He revives our soul. And he changes our very will. The will that once said, “I never want God” is freed from sin so that it can say, truly, “For the first time, I actually WANT God.”