What is Sin?
Published by Stanley Pouw in 2018 · 18 November 2018
Genesis 3 deals with a serpent in the Garden, and temptation, and forbidden fruit, and a woman who was deceived, and a man who followed her in violating God’s Word and God’s command. Then, we learn about a curse and the price that had to be paid for that disobedience. Genesis 3 is an accurate historical record of what actually happened in the Garden.
Certainly it is true that if you don’t understand this chapter, you don’t understand the rest of the Bible. You cannot understand the solution to the problem unless you understand the problem. You will never be able to understand God’s remedy for this world if you don’t understand the disease under which this world lives and functions. This explains absolutely everything about our universe and about life in that universe.
It explains everything about why things are the way they are, why we are the way we are, and what God is doing in history, and why He is saving some. Genesis 3 explains the human dilemma. All the problems of the universe have their origin in the events of this historic account: physical problems, spiritual problems, moral problems, social problems, economic problems, political problems, and all the other problems in the universe.
Genesis 3 is the foundation of a true and accurate world view. And without this foundation, everything is misdiagnosed and hopelessly incurable. When God completed the original creation, everything was very good. But now, everything in our world is very bad. God’s perfect creation was very good because there was no disorder, there was no pain, there was no disease, there was no decline, and there was no death.
However, our physical world around us is decaying and disintegrating and there is death. That’s the law of entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, which says that matter continually tends to break down toward disorder. The physical world is breaking down. This is frightening to people when we look at the celestial world, and the likelihood that another planet will destroy us.
And we watch in the national world, just the history of civilization, and we see the cycle of rise and fall and rise and fall. We look in the animal world and there is this incessant process of struggle and death. We look in the human world and every human relationship is a struggle. As soon as life is conceived in the womb, he/she begins to live and at the same time he or she gets closer to dying.
And in the spiritual and moral world, everyone finds it easier to do wrong. In fact, it’s really impossible to do righteous things. Even when you do right humanly, you generally do it to feel better about yourself which is an ill-conceived motive. It’s much easier to do evil than good. Hatred and crime and war, perversion, wickedness, those things just come with life.
Evolutionists are clueless about this, because they’re living under the self-deception that man is getting better the longer he lives. Evolution believes that man starts from simplicity and mutates upward into complexity. That he starts at a base level morally and he moves up to a higher and higher level morally. But the truth about man is a refutation of this theory of evolution.
Because man isn’t getting better; he’s getting worse. If you study human history basically there hasn’t been really any change. Men are morally no better than they were in the past. But the advancements that have come by science through the centuries, have only enabled man to escalate his corruption. So what happened? Let us learn what happened in Genesis 3.
Genesis 3:1-7, “Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman, “Has God indeed said, ‘You shall not eat of every tree of the garden’?” 2 And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat the fruit of the trees of the garden; 3 but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die.”
“4 Then the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. 5 For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” 6 So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate. She also gave to her husband with her, and he ate. “
“7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves coverings.” What’s death? No such thing existed. That’s how Genesis 3 opens and the word “sin” doesn’t appear in the third chapter. But this is where it entered into our world. When Adam and Eve disobeyed God, everything went from being very good to being very bad.
In Romans 5:12 it says, “Therefore just as through one man,” that’s Adam, “sin entered into the world and death through sin and so death spread to all men because all sinned.” There is the New Testament commentary on this event. When Adam sinned, we were all there. We have all come from Adam and Eve, and so we inherit what theologians call original sin.
At the end of Genesis 2, the man and his wife were naked and not ashamed. There wasn’t anything to be ashamed about because there was no sin. There were no evil thoughts. But you come to the end of Genesis 3: 7, the eyes of both of them were opened and they knew they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loin coverings.
All of a sudden, there was shame. Why? For the first time in their existence, they had wicked thoughts. This is the great indicator from their viewpoint that they had sinned. And the indicator from God’s viewpoint comes when He says in verse 16 to the woman, “I’ll multiply your pain in childbirth. In pain, you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be for your husband, he shall rule over you.”
Genesis 3:17-18, “Then to Adam He said, “Because you have heeded the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree of which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat of it’: “Cursed is the ground for your sake; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life. 18 Both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you, and you shall eat the herb of the field.”
Verse 19, “In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for dust you are, and to dust you shall return.” Now, when God curses them, those curses really are physical. There is a curse on the woman’s pain in childbearing and on her conflict in marriage. The curse on Adam is that he has to cultivate the ground, fighting thorns and thistles, and he’s going to ultimately die.
But those things don’t say anything about the moral change that took place. First of all, Adam and Eve felt shame and shame is a function of guilt, and guilt is a function of sin, and somehow they had thoughts of wickedness and were so embarrassed by those that they sewed together some leaves to cover themselves. They brought forth two sons in Genesis 4; one of them murdered the other one.
When Adam and Eve gave birth to Cain, he was born a sinner. We don’t know how long they enjoyed Eden in its glory. But once they fell, they were changed, and they passed on their sin to every human being that ever lived because they have all come from Adam and Eve. When Adam sinned, he brought death on himself and everybody else. We all inherit this death force.
We not only inherit death; we also inherit sin because we were all there in Adam. That’s original sin. The Fall not only affected man’s moral life and therefore every area of relationship, but it affected the ground, it also affected the physical universe. And Romans 8:22 says the whole creation groans under this curse. Disintegration, death, and all of that in the entire universe goes right back to Genesis 3.
Psychologists reject sin because they want to exalt man, and they want to eliminate God. So, because they reject sin, they have no explanation for why man is the way he is. They misdiagnose him totally, so they offer really no help. And what do we do? We come up with harsher penalties, the, three-strike law: three felonies in a row and you go to jail for life.
Our culture has declared war not only on sin, but also anything defined as sin. Everything is just a lifestyle choice; nothing is a sin. So, our culture has declared war on sin and consequently declared war on guilt. The very idea of guilt is considered medieval, obsolete, and certainly unhealthful. If you feel guilty about certain things, do them and just keep doing them till you don’t feel guilty anymore.
We have so much of that in our society, passing blame on others. And when children are disobedient, they say they’re hyperactive or they have attention deficit syndrome, or whatever other syndrome they could invent so they could sell people the drugs they want to sell them. And when somebody commits moral sin, they say they’re addicted to sex, and then they’re recovering sex addicts.
And they say, remember, you’ will never really recover, so don’t feel bad if you slip up here and there. Everything wrong with mankind is described as some kind of an illness. That’s just the way the world chooses to avoid the issue. All the politicians, all the moralists, and all the university people are trying to fix society, and it can’t ever be done by these people because they don’t ever deal with the reality of what is in the heart.
It is interesting what the Jewish scholars and commentators of Judaism think about Genesis 3. Judaism has always rejected the existence of sinful depravity in man inherited from Adam. They believe that what Adam did, was because he chose to do it. There is no depravity that passes down. That’s how they maintain salvation by righteousness because they don’t have a doctrine of human depravity.
They understand Adam’s sin as affecting Adam, and the rest of us all have the same choices, either to obey God or disobey God. True, the idea that the sin of Adam had brought death on all mankind is not unknown in Jewish teaching, but the reference is invariably to physical death. And is not to be confused with the spiritual death from which in Christian doctrine none can be saved except through faith in the risen Savior.
They understand the message of Christianity, but they want to cut it off at the front end. They want to deny original sin so that they can deny that men are in a condition which requires Jesus Christ to be their Savior. And they believe that, they teach: “Man can therefore achieve his own redemption by his own penitence.” Jews don’t need a Savior to be saved. But that is not what the Scripture teaches.
Scripture clearly indicates this is where evil began. And it is the New Testament that is most definitive. Christian Scientists tell us that sin is an illusion. It’s not. The liberals tell us that sin is merely finiteness; to be human is to err. And the dualistic philosophers tell us that sin is the flesh as opposed to the spirit, which is pure. Now, those are all wrong. We will get a biblical understanding of sin in our study.
Let me give you a definition of sin at this point. Sin is any personal lack of conformity to the moral character of God. Then, sin is a disposition of the heart, it is a bent. It thinks evil, it speaks evil, it acts evil, and it omits good. Let me give you those four because those are the four ways in which you sin: you sin by thinking evil, speaking evil, and acting evil, or omitting good.
Now, before we look at the seven verses, I want you to have an understanding of the theology of sin, because this is essential for our understanding. 1 John 3:4 says, “Sin is the transgression of the law of God.” It’s living as if there was no law of God. Romans 14:23, “Whatsoever is not of faith is sin.” 1 John 5:17, “All unrighteousness is sin.”
So, when you do something that goes against real trust and faith in God; that is sin. When you know to do right and don’t do it, that is sin. When you know something pleases God, something that God has commanded, and you don’t do it; that is also sin. All unrighteousness is sin. All sin is lawlessness. And sin is any violation of God’s moral character or His law.
Where is God’s law revealed? In Scripture. Our standard for morality was established by the Bible. Our view of crime, our view of justice all came out of the Bible. Once there were certain behaviors that were considered to be against the law. But that’s changing rapidly. It’s changing in the sexual realm, in homosexuality, in the world of abortion, and euthanasia and many other forms.
Our society sinks deeper and deeper into sin, and distances itself consistently and completely from the Word of God. All we have left is tradition, and tradition will be overthrown by vote, it will be overthrown by when the people want to overthrow it. How do we tell our society about a Savior who will save them from sin when their definition of sin is basically non-existent?
In Romans 1:21, Paul says, “That the wrath of God is revealed from heaven because when they knew God, they didn’t glorify Him as God. Neither were thankful.” It is God who has given wisdom to us. It’s God who gave us the capacity to care for each other and have relationships. God surrounds us sinners with mercy, so trust Him. Let us pray…