What does the Bible say about sin?

Where its treatment of sin is concerned, the Bible shows us an array of images in both testaments: sin is the missing of a target, a wandering from the path, a straying from the fold. Sin is a hard heart and a stiff neck. It's both the overstepping of a line and also the failure to reach it — that is, it's both transgression and shortcoming. Sin is a beast crouching at the door. In sin people attack or evade or neglect their divine calling. These and other images suggest deviance: one of the most centrally biblical things you can say about sin is that even when it is familiar, sin is never normal. Sin is disruption of created shalom and then resistance to divine restoration of it.

• Genesis 3:6-7, the original sin
• Psalm 1:1, happy are those who do not take the path that sinners tread
• Psalm 51:1-4, prayer of confession
• Mark 7:20-23, things that defile a person
• John 3:20, exposing deeds
• Romans 1:18-19, wrath of God revealed
• Romans 3:23-24, all have sinned
• Romans 5:19, by one man's obedience may will be made righteous
• Romans 6:23, the wages of sin is death
• Galatians 6:8, "if you sow to your own flesh, you will reap corruption from the flesh"
• Colossians 3:5, put to death whatever is earthly in you
• 1 John 1:8-9, if we confess our sins
• 1 John 2:1-2, Jesus Christ is the atoning sacrifice for our sins

Sermon ideas about sin

In many churches today, it seems that our sins do not exist. The topic rarely surfaces. Preachers may make much of God's grace and mercy, but congregants don't know what these things are for. To learn about human wrongdoing, congregants have to watch TV or go to the movies. People in Hollywood usually don't go to church, so they haven't yet learned to ignore the topic of human wrongdoing like so many churches do. For the church to speak of grace without speaking about sin is to trivialize the cross of Jesus Christ — to skate past all the struggling by good people down the ages to accept, forgive, and rehabilitate sinners, including themselves — and therefore to cheapen the grace of God that always comes to us with blood on it. What had we thought the ripping and writhing on Golgotha were all about?

At the outset of the New Testament, four gospels describe the pains God has taken to defeat sin and its wages. The very shape of the gospels tells us how much these pains matter. The gospels, after all, are shaped as passion narratives with long introductions. Accordingly, Christians have often measured sin, in part, by the passion needed to atone for it. The ripping and writhing of death on a cross, the bizarre metaphysical maneuver of using death to defeat death, the extraordinary centering of the Christian religion on the degrading and killing of its God — these things tell us that human brokenness is desperately difficult to fix, even for God; that it is the longest-running of all emergencies; and that while annoyances, regrets, and miseries trouble us in all the old familiar ways, none of them matters as much as sin.

Breaking shalom

Like other evils, human sin breaks shalom and, at least for that reason, grieves God. But unlike other evils, sin perverts what is specially and highly human about us. Sin distorts our character, a central feature of our very humanity. Sin corrupts powerful human capacities — thought, emotion, speech, and act — so that they become centers of attack upon God and others, or else centers of defection or of neglect. It's bad enough if we sin against others involuntarily, by boorish insensitivity to their feelings, for example, or by an alienating form of complacency. We may not want these character flaws; in fact we may not even know that we have them. But if our victims know that we have hurt them deliberately, their attitude toward us is not merely rueful, as it normally would be if we harmed them by accident. Their attitude is not just sorrowful, as it normally is when nature catches people in its great machinery. Instead our victims face us indignantly. They know we have violated them with something deeply and peculiarly personal. We have willingly hurt them. We have done it on purpose.

It's marvelous to know, then, that God wants shalom and will pay any price to get it back. Human sin is stubborn, but not as stubborn as the grace of God and not half so persistent, not half so ready to suffer to win its way.