What Is "Sin"?

One of the reasons I am putting these posts on X (among other places) is that I want to take advantage of its automatic translations to spread the message around the world.

However, when it comes time to discuss Christian terminology, it causes a problem, because the very word I want to discuss is going to be translated as well. If you are reading this in something other than English, Christians who speak your language may well have other terms they use and I have no idea if the translation will match their usage or not.

I'll also be addressing misconceptions about the terms that I know exist in English. The misconceptions may not exist in your language, but certainly the correct definition will apply.

Today I want to define "sin". Spelling that in a way that I hope will pass through translation somehow, those are the English letters S, I, N.

In a culture that understands the concept of sin, you can squeeze the main message of the Bible into "You are a sinner and you need Jesus to fix the resulting problems", and some sort of meaning will be successfully transferred from the speaker to the listener. In a culture that has no idea what the meaning of the word is, whether because it lost it or it never had it, that sentence does nothing.

Sometimes I wonder which more people could correctly describe, the concept of "sin" in the bible, or the nature of the primary monster of the Final Fantasy X video game with the same name. In some countries I'm sure it would be the latter.

The general meaning of the term is that it is an offense against God, or it is an act that has crossed the boundaries as set by God. In this sense is a noun. A lie is a sin. A murder is a sin. You can "have" sin, as a noun, which is the state of having committed a sin.

It can also refer to the state of having one or more sins. A "sinner" is one who has sinned. This person is in a "state of sin".

This is the literal meaning. But to truly understand it requires connecting it to some other elements of Christian theology. I think that isolated from the rest of the context it may sound like it isn't a big deal. So you did something that in God's opinion is bad. Is that really a problem? It certainly isn't a big deal if you do something that in my personal opinion is bad. Who cares what some guy on the internet thinks of your actions?

But God is not just some Guy who has an opinion. It's not even that He is some Guy with an Opinion who is very powerful, so we better make sure to pay attention so He doesn't decide to hurt us. He is Good, in every way. He wants good outcomes for you. His laws lead to goodness. In His infinite understanding of everything from the beginning to the end, he knows what will lead to goodness, and what leads to things that are not goodness.

So the important aspect of the word "sin" is not just that some guy told you not to do X, but you did X, and now he's angry.

The important aspect of "sin" is that every sin is hurt. It hurts you. It hurts others. It hurts God. It hurts the physical world.

It is true that God is angry at sin, but it's not just because he made arbitrary rules and you violated them. His rules are the opposite of arbitrary. They were the rules to avoid hurting God and people, and by breaking them, you have hurt God and people, including yourself as one of the people.

That is why sin is such an important concept in Christianity. A violation of an arbitrary rule can be ignored just as arbitrarily. The hurt that the sin results in can not be ignored. That is not Justice. Your sins must be dealt with precisely because they are not the arbitrary breaking of arbitrary rules, but because from a perspective that takes all of infinite eternity into account, you have done real harm. You have done real harm even from our tiny perspectives.

You and I are sinners, and that is a big problem.