What Is Sin

Understanding sin is fundamental to being a Christian. Yet there are different opinions about what exactly sin is. In this post, I will share what many Christians believe (either in theory or in practice), which is what I also used to believe. Then I will share how I changed my views on the subject and a little bit of how that happened.

Growing up, we had a very specific understanding of sin. It was based on a literal interpretation of 1 John 3:4, KJV: “Whosoever committeth sin transgresseth also the law: for sin is the transgression of the law.” The law was the Ten Commandments, and transgression was anything that went against them. It was defined as behavior, and had to be repented of and confessed in order to be forgiven.

In this paradigm, people might teach that the heart is important, but in practice, behavior is what really matters. The heart only matters because “out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.” If someone made a mistake, their motives didn’t matter in practice. For some things that makes sense. We don’t care what grand motive a kid may have had when they started a fire that burned half the house down. But when kids break rules in order to do something nice for someone—like trying to cook a meal before they are old enough to use the stove—their motive should be taken into account when deciding on consequences.

When sin is defined by behavior, because behavior is visible and external, it can be measured and judged. This allows people and churches to set arbitrary standards that would tell people whether they were sinning or not. It also allowed people to (think they can) determine the state of someone’s heart and judge a person’s heart based on their behaviors.

Even things that were not spelled out in the Bible could be counted as sin, because “to him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin” (James 4:17). These could be things related to diet, dress, or anything the group thought had some Biblical basis behind it.

For example, if the group decided that dairy was unhealthy, that it defiled the body temple, thus shortening life, then eating it would be a sin. And even if they didn’t explicitly say that it was a sin to eat dairy, those who were vegans were held in higher regard, and the vegans looked down on those who “compromised” in their diet. Or maybe a group reads Paul and Peter and decides that jewelry is a sin to wear. I remember judging whether a visitor were a church member or not by whether or not they were wearing jewelry. And if they were a church member, I assumed they hadn’t been taught right, and thus would judge the pastor who baptized them.

Another example: If a man lusts after a woman in his heart, it is a sin (see Matthew 5:27–28). For this reason, women were taught to dress modestly so as to prevent men from lusting. By extension, certain revealing clothing styles would have been considered sinful, because they would trigger a man to lust, and making someone sin was just as bad as doing the sin oneself.

People who couldn’t meet the expectations of the group often ended up rebelling and leaving. If they didn’t, they would struggle with guilt, and find themselves judge people who were doing worse than themselves to assuage their guilt. It created a very toxic environment, because in reality, no one could truly achieve the moral perfection that was preached as the goal. If someone was struggling, then God’s ability to bring victory was preached to them. This seems good on the surface, but in reality, it was very discouraging for those who failed to meet the artificial standard.

To make matters worse, people would break relationship with others because of their perceived sins. If a person was in sin, they would be ostracized by the “holier” person. This made the church unappealing to most people. Outreach tended to attract people who already leaned toward things like conspiracy theories rather than people who cared about people.

I watched groups like this split apart. Relationships were broken, because people exalted morality and rules above relationships.

To be honest, I firmly believed that God wants people to be morally pure. I believe that moral purity was the standard. “Higher than the highest human thought can reach is God’s ideal for His children,” 1 I had been told, and that ideal was a moral standard. Behavior in the form of actions, thoughts, and sometimes even feelings, was how one reached the standard. One had to do the right actions, think the right thoughts, and even ignore one’s feelings if they didn’t line up with some arbitrary standard.

I no longer believe this. The shift from this mindset to where I am now did not happen overnight. It happened in a little tiny steps—listening as someone shed new light on a Bible verse, reading a book, or hearing someone’s story.

For example, I mentioned modesty as one of the moral imperatives of conservative religious teaching. I remember reading about a friend of mine’s experience. She was wearing an ankle length skirt, and a dear saint pulled her to one side and pointed out that the skirt draped a little too closely around her rear end. It wasn’t modest enough, she was told, and she should cover it up and not wear it again. She meekly acknowledged the wisdom of the woman, and I think put on a coat that would cover the area in question.

This teenage girl’s heart was in the right place. She wanted to serve God, and she wanted to be a good Christian. She had no desire to be rebellious. But she internalized a message that there was something wrong with her. There was something wrong with her body, and she needed to cover it up. And not just cover it with fabric, but disguise its shape. It was a subtle form of body shaming that she experienced, made even more devastating because it was tied to religion.

I’m still friends with this woman. Today, she is no longer a Christian. And she is much happier now than she ever was in the church. And I don’t blame her one bit. She was told she was in sin. Today, I would say the “dear old saint” was the one who was sinning by body shaming an honest-hearted young lady.

I was indoctrinated to believe the same ideologies about modest dress as this young lady was. My heart was also in the right place back in my teens. I had no desire to be rebellious, either. I dressed very conservatively, and I don’t think anyone ever called me out for anything I wore. I never personally experienced body shaming, nor did I think there was something wrong with me.

That said, I was not innocent or untainted. I was told that men were visually stimulated, so I would study the clothing of other women, looking for potential flaws that might be tempting to men. If I found something, I would judge the person wearing the outfit—almost always just in my head, though; I don’t think most people knew what I was thinking. I cared too much about people to be that rude. But it definitely had an effect on me. It made me a very judgmental person. The fact that I was able to hold to modesty standards so much better than all those other people also fueled my own sense of superiority.

These are the fruits of a morality-based Christian ethic. If we believe that God is more concerned about our behavior than about how we love people, there are two general paths people take. One result is that we will eventually despair of ever reaching the goal, and often give up on religion altogether, because they cannot see how they can reach the standards. Some of them contemplate suicide. The other path leads them to become a judgmental Pharisee. I experienced the latter for myself. Although most of the depression I experienced when my children were young was due to the lack of social connections, as well as the marriage problems in my marriage, I have no doubt that at least some of it was fueled by the cognitive dissonance of believing that I needed to be perfect and not being able to achieve said perfection. I thought seriously about giving up on God and religion for a brief period of time, but decided that if God really did exist, then I couldn’t afford to do it.

So instead of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, I was forced to find an alternative. I had to figure out how Christianity really worked, as opposed to how I had been taught that it worked—because it wasn’t working.

I went back to 1 John 3:4 and dived in to try to understand what it really meant, instead of just what I had been taught it meant.

One thing that I discovered is that “transgression of the law” is an interpretation of one Greek word, rather than a translation. That word is anomia, meaning without law. Nomos is the word for law, and the prefix a- means “without”; so the word literally means without law, or lawless. This explains other translations that say simply, “Sin is lawlessness.“ 2

One of the founders of my church, whose writings are highly respected by most of our church, had a famous quote that was frequently quoted by the conservatives of our church to reinforce the behavior-based definition of the sin. It says, “Our only definition of sin is that given in the word of God; it is ‘the transgression of the law.’ ”

In my study of what sin is, I decided to look up the quote. And I was incredulous when I’ve read the context. I discovered that the oft-quoted words were only half of a sentence! Talk about taking something out of context! Here is the whole sentence:

Our only definition of sin is that given in the word of God; it is “the transgression of the law”; it is the outworking of a at war with the great law of love which is the foundation of the divine government. 3

It would take years for my understanding to develop, but even then I realized that love is different than behavior. And sin is the outworking of a principle, meaning it is not rooted in specific behaviors. We might call it the symptom of a disease, not the disease itself. And it was at war with, or opposed to, the great law of love.

Of course, this made me think about what Jesus said about love. he loving God and loving our neighbor as the first and second commandments, and said that the whole law and the prophets were upheld by these two laws. See Matthew 22:37–40.

Think about the logic of love for a minute. You can legislate behavior, but can you legislate love? Suppose that a man breaks into your house, sticks a gun to your head, and demand you to make him a cup of coffee, bake him some chocolate chip cookies, and then give him a blanket to wear while you wash his clothes. You could do those things regardless of how you feel about him. Even if you don’t have coffee or cookie dough in your house, you could probably convince him to let you buy some.

Now, suppose that this man, after he has drunk the coffee, eaten the cookies, and changed back into his clean clothes, once more sticks the gun to your head and demands, “Now you must love me.” You can say that you love him, and you can even demonstrate loving behaviors, but do you really love him? Can you really generate love in your heart for this person who is pointing a gun at your head? And wouldn’t you be looking for every opportunity to escape or call the cops?

The answer is obvious. And love cannot be legislated any more than it forced. When God says we should love the Lord our God with all our heart, we call it a law, because that is the word the gospel writers used for what Jesus said. The problem is, the Greeks had a much different understanding of what law was than the Hebrews did.

Greek laws were similar to modern laws, and the New Testament was written in Greek. Also, New Testament writers likely read the Septuagint, which is the Greek translation of the Old Testament, so they would have had the Greek word for law in their minds when discussing Torah. Laws are interpreted based on the letter more often than on the spirit—and the spirit of the law must be spelled out, or lawyers will find an exception, a loophole, that will allow their client to avoid the penalty of their crime, save money on taxes, whatever benefit they can derive. By the same token, some people who were well-meaning are punished because the letter of the law is followed without taking the motives of the person into account. A good judge will endeavor to apply the spirit of the law, and a good lawyer will always try to find a way around it.

In Hebrew thought, the law was not like our laws today. Hebrew law was not the end-all-be-all, but the beginning. It was never meant to be interpreted as an arbitrary rule, but rather as the starting point for discussion, a place from which to draw principles that would need to be applied by a wise man or a group.

Think of the example of the daughters of Zelophehad. Their father was dead, so he could not produce any more children. He had no sons to carry on his name or to inherit his inheritance. The law clearly stated that only male heirs were able to inherit their father‘s land. But these girls took issue with the wording. They argued that since their father had no male errors, they should be able to inherit the land, because it was not fair that their father‘s name should be done away with. They took their grievances to Moses, and Moses went to talk to the Lord about it. And the Lord told Moses that these girls were right. And the law was amended. See Numbers 27:1–11.

This is not the only case of laws being amended. There are a number of instances of changes from the laws in Exodus and Leviticus to the laws in Deuteronomy. For example, in Exodus 21:7, a female slave could not be freed; but in Deuteronomy 15:12, they were afforded the same right to leave after 6 years as men had. Exodus never mentions giving a freed slave anything, but Deuteronomy 15:13–15 requires his master to give him resources with which to begin a new life.

If we look at the laws in Torah (the first 5 books of the Bible, also called the books of the law), we see that there are many things that were very specific to the time and the culture person lived in. For example, there was a law about building a parapet around the edge of a roof, with the explicit intention of preventing someone from falling, and the owner of the building becoming liable for his death or injury. See Deuteronomy 22:8. Today, the odds of someone being up on the roof of the pitched houses that are common today makes the law for a guard railing around the edge obsolete. But if you look closer, you will see that this law is an outworking of the principle of loving our neighbor. We want to be careful that we do not needlessly put people in harm’s way—not just so that we can avoid breaking the law, but because their welfare is important.

It would be difficult for me to trace the whole process of moving from a moral, law-based view of sin, to where I am today. What I can tell you is, I now believe that, at its essence, sin is broken relationship. Love is a relationship word, not a moral one. Failing to love God breaks relationship with God. Failing to love our brother, our neighbor, our friend – even our enemy – results in breaking relationship with those people.

If you think about it, there have been times in history were lying was not considered sinful. In biblical history, we see the example of Rahab, who lied to the city guards about where the spies were. In more recent history, have the example of European citizens lying to Nazi guards about whether they had Jews in their house or not. Telling a lie to protect oneself from the consequences of one’s actions is selfish; telling a lie in order to protect the vulnerable, at the risk of one’s own freedom, and even one’s own life, would be an expression of love toward that person—agape love, God-like love. By contrast, sticking to the letter of the law and telling the unvarnished truth could well result in the death of those very people. How could that be loving?

Romans talks about Gentiles who do not know God, yet do by nature what is in the law. See Romans 2:14–15. I used to focus on the word “law” in that passage, but I now think that the words “by nature“ are very telling. It implies that there was some underlying motive in these people that harkened back to the image of God in their characters. Some Christians will tell you that, by nature, we are absolutely, completely reprobate, meaning there is zero good inside of us. I do not believe this. Rather, I believe that, while it has been distorted, the image of God exists in humanity even to this day, in every single human being. We see it in the toddler who sees his friend bump his head, and goes over to give him a kiss. We see it in the stranger who opens the door for another stranger. We see it in the homeless man who, when given a sudden windfall of extra money, goes and buys a bag of groceries to share with all his friends. We see it in the heroism of a firefighter who risks his life to save a complete stranger.

I believe that this image of God in us has to do with God‘s character, not with His appearance. If there is one thing that we know for certain about God‘s character, it is this: “God is love.” 1 John 4:8. God is not just loving; His essence is love. And not a selfish love that gives only to the deserving, that only blesses those who serve him, as Satan accused God of doing for Job. See Luke 6:35, Matthew 5:44–45, and Job 1:9–11. No, God’s love is agape, meaning that it is selfless, other centered love. 4

Paul said that Christ is the end of the law for righteousness. That word “end” does not mean that the law was done away with, but rather that it was on a trajectory towards something, and that something is Jesus. He is the destination of the law, the culmination of it. Jesus showed us how the law works. It’s not so much about behavior as it is about motive and the state of the heart. It is about loving God and loving people. Doing these things well may mean breaking the letter of the written moral code, but that does not make one a sinner. Not loving others does.

When it comes down to it, God is not interested in our morality, as much as He is interested in us learning to love people well.


How can you love someone well today?

  1. Ellen White, Education, 1903, page 18. ↩︎
  2. For example, the ESV, the NIV, the NKJV, and many other popular versions. ↩︎
  3. Ellen White, The Great Controversy, 1911, page 492. The context of the paragraph (https://egwwritings.org/read?panels=p132.2229&index=0#highlight=132.2229|0 ) is interesting but outside the scope of this article. ↩︎
  4. For a beautiful exposition of this topic of God’s love, get the book An Endless Falling in Love by Ty Gibson. ↩︎

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Lisa Reynoso is a mental health coach who helps people through one-on-one coaching. If this post brought up a lot of feelings, or as you were reading, you thought, “I would love to talk to someone about this,” please use the “Schedule Now” link at the top of this page to schedule a free session.

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