Certain words, like people, get old and tired, having lost their vitality and impact. When they do, maybe they, like people, should be retired from active service. Perhaps a prime candidate for this verbal retirement might be the word "sin." As long as humans exist, we will never be able to retire the concept of sin because it definitely exists! None of us are perfect; we all sin on occasion. And certainly, sin affects all of us, both when we sin and when others sin.

The word itself, however, is so commonly used that it has become debased, distorted, and abused. In this condition, it carries little emotional and intellectual force. To some people, it has become like "The sky is falling!" of Chicken Little fame. To unbelievers, "sin" is almost a joke—they even compose songs containing light references to it.

"Crime" has a far greater effect on us because it is more visible and often has a more immediate impact. Crime forces us to seek security so that it does not touch us in a painful way. Thus, we install locks—maybe several—on our doors and stay away from certain areas and types of people. Crime makes us feel apprehensive and suspicious, and most of us take steps to warn others of the dangers.

Though the overwhelming majority of crimes are also sins, not all of them are. Mankind has established such things as "Blue Laws," the breaking of which are crimes but would not necessarily be sins in God's eyes. Even so, God wants us to live within the laws of the land as much as we can (I Peter 2:13-17).

Largely, the world only recognizes the most obvious of sins. Because carnal people live by sight, not faith, and the effects of sin are not always immediately discernible, they do not understand the negative fruit that also results from the less obvious ones.

Consider the example of Adam and Eve. "And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, ‘Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die'" (Genesis 2:16-17). As man counts days, Adam did not die until 960 years later! During that huge expanse of time, a carnal human being living by sight would have great difficulty making the connection between sin—the cause—and death—the effect (Romans 6:23).

Though God commands us not to eat certain animals, fish, and birds (Leviticus 11; Deuteronomy 14), the person who lives by sight rationalizes that these are merely ceremonial laws. At least part of the reason for God's command, however, seems to be that the detrimental effects of eating unclean meats are not immediately apparent. Problems resulting from a steady diet of forbidden flesh may not show up for 40 or 50 years or even until the next generation. If one chooses to ignore God's gracious command and persists in eating things He has not designed as food, sin eats away at his physical and spiritual vitality.

Sin has titanic and often unrealized effects. Knowing this should cause us to guard ourselves against it even more strongly than we do against crime.

How the Bible Views Sin

The apostle Paul writes in Romans 3:23, "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." Later, he adds, "Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned" (Romans 5:12). Sin is universal, and perhaps this is a reason why the term is so frequently ignored. So many are sinning so frequently that it is a way of life! It has become acceptable because everybody is doing it!

Sin is not like a disease that some contract and others escape. Some may self-righteously think they are better than others because of outward appearance—living by sight—but we have all been soiled by it. "There is none righteous, no, not one," Paul writes in Romans 3:10. Perfection is gone. Because of sin, we have all come short of the glory of God.

The phrase in Romans 5:12, "And thus death spread to all men" can be translated into more modern English as, "When death entered the race, it went throughout." It means death indiscriminately affected all because all sinned. It almost seems as though sin is like an amoebic blob whose tentacles reach out to encompass all in its path, absorbing and sweeping everything to its death.

In Galatians 3:22, Paul adds another picture to the Bible's teaching of the universality of sin. "But the Scripture has confined all under sin, that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe." "The Scripture" is the Old Testament, depicted as man's jailer, condemning and confining him because he has sinned. This shows the uselessness of trying to be justified by lawkeeping. How can one expect the very thing that declares him to be guilty and condemns him to death also to pronounce him innocent? We would no more expect our nation's law to declare a murderer guilty and acquit him at the same time!

Sin's Dominion

All—the immoral, the ethical, the religious, the self-righteous, the atheist, the agnostic, the king, the commoner, the businessman, the housewife, the young, and the old—are caught within the Scripture's web of confinement due to sin. "Man" in the Greek Scriptures is huph hamartian, man under sin. This means he is under the power of, in subjection to, under the control of, or dependent upon, sin. Sin holds humans under its authority, just as a child is under his parents or an army is under its commander. It is viewed as a living, active, forceful, and dynamic power with man under its sway.

Paul refers to sin's power to rule in Romans 5:21: ". . . sin reigned in death." The apostle personifies sin with a nature that is depraved and holding sway. In Romans 6:13-14, this becomes abundantly clear:

And do not present your members as instruments of unrighteousness to sin, but present yourselves to God as being alive from the dead and your members as instruments of righteousness to God. For sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are not under law but under grace.

Sin is seen as an intangible entity whose movements we cannot literally see. But, as sin uses the members of our body to exercise its dominion, we can recognize it at work.

In the next chapter, Paul expands this concept of sin's dominion to sobering proportions:

For sin, taking occasion by the commandment, deceived me, and by it killed me. But now, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. (Romans 7:11, 17, 23)

Paul imagines sin as beguiling, enticing, and deceitful. We can almost visualize it as Satan himself, and it is certainly satanic in origin. He sees two authorities—the divine nature and the sinful nature—passionately opposed to each other, and man is forced to choose between them.

The apostle sees sin as a living and malignant power that at one time had complete reign over us. Even after a person is converted, sin still struggles mightily to retain its former dominion. The unconverted are POWs to such an extent that sin dwells in them without resistance from the Spirit of God. Talk about being brainwashed! So basic and pervasive is sin's grip that it is not merely an external power, but it has wormed its way into every fiber of our being. John 8:34 says, "Whoever commits sin is a slave of sin."

God admonishes Cain about sin in Genesis 4:6-7:

So the LORD said to Cain, "Why are you angry? And why has your countenance fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not well, sin lies at the door. And its desire is for you, but you should rule over it."

Because God had not accepted his offering or because He had accepted Abel's, Cain grew angry and depressed. God tells him that if he changes his ways, he will indeed be accepted. But if he does not change, sin—pictured as a slave crouched just outside the door of his heart, awaiting the bidding of its master—would spring to action. He describes sin's persistent nearness; it is always ready to extend its dominance by increasing iniquity. Sin strives to pile iniquity upon iniquity, even as one lie usually produces another to keep a façade of deception from crumbling.

God's warning is clear. Repent of sin at once, or it has a powerful tendency to grow and thoroughly dominate the individual who does nothing to stop it. This thought is reinforced in the final sentence of verse 7: "And its desire is for you, but you should rule over it."

In paraphrasing God's words, James G. Murphy in Barnes' Notes, gives an insightful comment:

Thy case will be no longer a heedless ignorance, and consequent dereliction of duty, but a willful overmastering of all that comes by sin, and an unavoidable going on from sin to sin, from inward to outward sin, or, in specific terms, from wrath to murder, and from disappointment to defiance, and so from unrighteousness to ungodliness. This is an awful picture of his fatal end, if he do not instantly retreat. ("Genesis," p. 151)

In modern terms, God is saying, "Practice makes perfect." Sin's desire is so persistent and its appeal so subtle that, if it is not consciously stopped, one will become a master—a "pro," as we would say today—at sinning. It becomes a way of life. Jeremiah 4:22 makes this principle even clearer. "For My people are foolish; they have not known Me. They are silly children and they have no understanding. They are wise to do evil, but to do good they have no knowledge."

Did not God's warning prove true in Cain's life? We cannot afford to ignore sin's pervasive influence.

Sin Defined

It is easy for us to think of sin only in terms of I John 3:4, "Whoever commits sin also commits lawlessness, and sin is lawlessness." This verse, however, is a good place to begin. Sin is directly connected to breaking laws. "Law," especially in the Old Testament, frequently means the broader term "instruction." Thus, we have more to consider as sin than just the breaking of a specific law. However, sin is not a complicated concept.

Numerous terms in both the Old and New Testaments describe sin, but collectively they all give the same sense: to deviate from a way, path, or law; to fail to live up to a standard. We find two of these words, translated as "trespasses" and "sins," in Ephesians 2:1: "And you He has made alive who were dead in trespasses and sins."

Trespasses, from the Greek paraptoma, means "to go off a path, fall, or slip aside." When it is applied to moral and ethical issues, it means to deviate from the right way, to wander. Sins, the Greek hamartia, is generally associated with military usage and means to "miss the mark." It indicates failing to make a bull's-eye. In moral and ethical contexts, it means to fail in one's purpose, to go wrong, or to fail to live according to an accepted standard or ideal. Sin is the failure to be what we ought to be and could be.

The Hebrew equivalents of Greek hamartia and paraptoma are chata and asham, respectively. In Hebrew, asham comes closest to meaning the actual breaking of a law; in Greek, it is anomos. Both of these will sometimes be translated "iniquity" or "lawlessness." (See E. W. Bullinger, The Companion Bible, appendices 44 and 128.)

When we understand the terms God inspired to describe sin, we can easily see why sin is so universal. Because the robber, murderer, drunkard, rapist, and child abuser are so obviously evil, we readily agree that they are sinners. In our hearts, we consider ourselves to be respectable citizens since we do none of these things. These terms, though, bring us face to face with the reality of sin: that it is not always obvious. Sin is not confined to external conduct. Sometimes it is buried within one's heart and cleverly concealed from all but the most discerning.

The ministry has not invented sin; it is part of the territory Christianity covers. Christianity is a way of life from God that reaches into every facet of life. The central idea of sin is failure. We sin when we fail to live up to the standards of this way of life that God established and revealed through His prophets, apostles, and Jesus Christ, the Chief Revelator.

As such, sin reaches into marital relationships, childrearing, cleanliness, clothing, hospitality, health, employment—even how we drive our automobiles. It involves itself in the entire gamut of human attitudes, such as pride, envy, anger, hatred, greed, jealousy, resentment, depression, and bitterness. In the New Testament, biblical writers always use hamartia in a moral and ethical sense, whether describing commission, omission, thought, feeling, word, or deed.

The standard of which we so frequently fall short is stated clearly in Ephesians 4:13: "Till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ." Connect this with Romans 3:23: "All have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God." "The glory of God" in this context is the way He lives. Hamartia, sin, is to fall short of the ideal, to miss the mark in the way we live. Combined with sin's definition in I John 3:4, hamartia ties what we might consider minor, unimportant, and secondary issues directly to the law of God.

The Bible views sin broadly. In essence, it is any attitude, motivation, thought, speech, action, or inaction that does not reach the perfect righteousness of the Son of God, Jesus Christ. It is no wonder that Scripture says with such authority that "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God"! In this world dominated by Satan's attitudes and self-serving human nature, sin is as common as the air we breathe.

But just because it is ubiquitous does not mean it is either permanent or unassailable. God's purpose is not just to defeat sin but also to eradicate it in those He calls into His church and, ultimately, in every human who has ever lived! For this reason, He calls on His chosen people to recognize their own sins and, over the course of a lifetime, overcome them and grow in the righteous character of the Perfect Man, our Savior Jesus Christ. With this as our goal, as the author of Hebrews writes, "[L]et us go on to perfection" (Hebrews 6:1).