By Rev Thomas Whitelaw, M. A., D.D., Kilmarnock, Ayrshire, Scotland.
Holy Scripture undertakes no demonstration of the reality of sin. In all its statements concerning sin, sin is presupposed as a fact which can neither be controverted nor denied, neither challenged nor obscured. It is true that some reasoners, through false philosophy and materialistic science, refuse to admit the existence of sin, but their endeavors to explain it away by their respective theories is sufficient proof that sin is no figment of the imagination but a solid reality. Others who are not thinkers may sink so far beneath the power of sin as to lose all sense of its actuality, their moral and spiritual natures becoming so hardened and fossilized as to be “past feeling,” in which case conviction of sin is no more possible, or at least so deteriorated and unimpressible that only a tremendous upheaval within their souls, occasioned perhaps by severe affliction, but brought about by the inward operation of the Spirit of God, will break up the hard crust of moral numbness and religious torpor in which their spirits are encased. A third class of persons, by simply declining to think about sin, may come in course of time to conclude that whether sin be a reality or not, it does not stand in any relation to them and does not concern them - in which case once more they are merely deceiving themselves. The truth is that it is extremely doubtful whether any intelligent person whose moral intuitions have not been completely destroyed and whose mental perceptions have not been largely blunted by indulgence in wickedness, can successfully persuade himself, at least permanently, that sin is a myth, an illusion of the mind, a creature of the imagination, and not a grim reality. Most men know that sin is in themselves a fact of consciousness they cannot deny, and in others a fact of observation they cannot overlook. As Chesterton expresses it, the fact of sin any one may see in the street: the Bible assumes that any man will discover it who looks into his own heart.
Accordingly the Bible devotes its efforts to imparting to mankind reliable knowledge about the nature universality, the origin and culpability, but also and especially about the removableness of sin; and to set forth these in succession will be the object of the present paper.
I. THE NATURE OF SIN
It scarcely requires stating that modern ideas about sin receive no countenance from Scripture, which never speaks about sin as “good in the making,” as “the shadow cast by man’s immaturity,” as “a necessity determined by heredity and environment,” as “a stage in the upward development of a finite being,” as a “taint adhering to man’s corporeal frame,” as a “physical disease,” “a mental infirmity,” “a
f the constitutional weakness,” and least of all “as a figment of the imperfectly enlightened, or theologically perverted, imagination,” but always as the free act of an intelligent, moral and responsible being asserting himself against the will of his Maker, the supreme Ruler of the universe. That will the Bible takes for granted every person may learn, either from the law written on his own heart (Rom. 1:15); or from the revelation furnished by God to mankind, first to the Hebrew Church in the Old Testament Scriptures, and afterwards to the Christian Church and through it to the whole world in the New Testament Gospels and Epistles. Hence, sin is usually described in the Sacred Volume by terms that indicate with perfect clearness its relation to the Divine will or law, and leaves no uncertainty as to its essential character.
In the Old Testament (Ex. 34:5, 6; Psa. 32:1, 2) three words are used to supply a full definition of sin. (1) “Transgression” (pesha’h) or a falling away from God and therefore a violation of His commandments; with which exposition John agrees when he says that “sin is a transgression of the law” (1 John 3:4), and Paul when he writes (Rom. 4:15), “Where no law is, there is no transgression.” (2) “Sin” (charaah) or a missing of the mark, a coming short of one’s duty, a failure to do what one ought, for which reason the term is fittingly applied to sins of omission; with which again John agrees when he states (1 John 5:17) that “all unrighteousness [or defect in righteousness] is sin,” or Paul when he affirms (Rom. 3:23), that “all have sinned and come short of the glory of God,” and Christ when He charges the Scribes and Pharisees with “leaving undone the things they ought to have done” (Matt. 23:23; Luke 11:42). (3) “Iniquity” (‘avon) or a turning aside from the straight path, curving like an arrow, hence perversity, depravity and inequality - a conception which finds an echo in the words of a later psalmist (78:5) who complained that Israel had “turned aside from Jehovah like a deceitful bow,” and in those of the prophet Isaiah (53:6) who confessed that “all we like sheep have gone astray, and have turned every one unto his own way,” and in those of his countryman Hosea (7:16) who lamented that Israel “like a deceitful bow had returned, but not to the Most High.” The words employed in the New Testament to designate sin are not much, if at all, different in meaning - hamartia, a failure, fall, a false step, a blunder; and anomia, or lawlessness. Hence the Biblical conception of sin may be fairly summed up in the words of the Westminster Confession: “Sin is any want of conformity unto or transgression of the law of God;” or in those of Melancthon: “Pecatum recte definiture ‘avopia, seu discrepantia a lege Deil, h. e. defectus naturae et actionum pugnans cum lege Dei.”