God confronted Adam, Eve, and the Serpent:
To the woman he said, “I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.” To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’ “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.”
Genesis 3:16-19 NIV
None of this is what God had made us for. If we read this as God’s angry reaction to what Adam and Eve had done, it would lead us to the wrong interpretation. Notice that God didn’t curse Adam and Eve for their disobedience. Instead, he pointed out that the earth and their own future had now been cursed by evil because of what they had done. These consequences make sense when seen as intrinsic and unavoidable results of sin and evil, not as an external punishment. God was explaining the reality of their choice to serve a new master, one who didn’t even like them, much less love them.
The earth would no longer offer up our food the way God designed it to. We would have to work for our living. We would experience childbirth in a new and painful way, not the way God designed it. The world was no longer going to be run according to a loving Creator’s design, but by Satan’s design. And he hates us.
The Effects of Sin
God created a good world, filled with beauty, love, joy and enjoyment, pleasure and fun, kindness and generosity. He placed Adam and Eve in a garden that could provide everything they needed. Mankind was given authority and responsibility for its care, but everything remained under God’s wise protection.
Somehow Adam and Eve’s act of disobedience unleashed evil, and opened the door for Satan and his demons to move in and make themselves at home on earth.
And now we find ourselves in a paradoxical mosaic of God’s good world presently spoiled by evil and under the rule of Satan, who resents and despises God. Satan can’t hurt God directly, but he can hurt him indirectly by corrupting mankind.
The result is an enigma – a world of beauty along with ugliness, joy along with sadness. We face impossible contradictions, frustrations, inconsistencies, and absurdities. Human nature encompasses love, compassion, kindness, and generosity, but we can also be petty and self-centered. And human history overflows with injustice, oppression, and cruelty toward the weak, poor, and needy.
In the midst of what looks like it could be a perfect world, we live with frustration, disappointment, pain, and suffering. Entire generations, societies, and nations periodically lose their collective minds, and devote themselves to hatred, destruction, and terror. And it can all be traced back to sin.
The Nature of Sin
How should we understand and describe the nature of sin? What is its essence? Since sin permeates our world and our own experience like a heavy fog, we are trying to understand sin from within a sinful world. As a result, our human logic may not be trustworthy; we should trust what God says in the Bible. The Bible offers several different perspectives that help us build a picture of the nature of sin.
1. Our human sin nature is universal:
…for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,
Romans 3:23 NIV
The LORD saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time.
Genesis 6:5 NIV
2. Sin can originate outside ourselves:
Then the LORD said to Cain, “Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it.”
Genesis 4:6-7 NIV
In verses 1-8 both Cain and Able brought offerings, based on what each produced. The Lord looked with favor on Abel’s gift, but not on Cain’s. What was wrong? The Bible doesn’t say specifically, but we can guess that Cain’s offering was brought out of duty, not gratitude, and didn’t recognize God as the giver of all life. Cain was upset. God warned Cain that sin was crouching just outside his door, wanting to control him.
3. Sin also comes from within us:
He went on: “What comes out of a person is what defiles them. For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come — “
Mark 7:20-21 NIV
A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.
Luke 6:45 NIV
And sin is there from a very early age. No parent has ever needed to teach their young kids how to do the wrong thing.
4. Paul personified sin as an external power that wants to enslave us:
For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body ruled by sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin— because anyone who has died has been set free from sin.
Romans 6:6-7 NIV
When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness.
Romans 6:20 NIV
We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.
Romans 7:14-15 NIV
5. Sin and Satan have established an environment of power and control throughout the world:
For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.
Ephesians 6:12 NIV
We know that we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one.
1 John 5:19 NIV
6. Paul also said that we’re all prisoners of sin, and need to be set free:
But the Scriptures declare that we are all prisoners of sin, so we receive God’s promise of freedom only by believing in Jesus Christ.
Galatians 3:22 NLT
7. But Paul and James tell us sin can be resisted:
Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry.
Colossians 3:5 NIV
Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.
James 4:7 NIV
8. And that God has nailed sin to the cross:
You were dead because of your sins and because your sinful nature was not yet cut away. Then God made you alive with Christ, for he forgave all our sins. He canceled the record of the charges against us and took it away by nailing it to the cross. In this way, he disarmed the spiritual rulers and authorities. He shamed them publicly by his victory over them on the cross.
Colossians 2:13-15 NLT
Our human predisposition to sin is universal. Satan and sin have established an environment of both external and internal control that can enslave us, but we have the ability to resist.
Defining Sin
In the Old Testament, the Hebrew word chata is translated sin. In the New Testament, Paul used the Greek word hamartia for sin. Both words have their origin in archery, and they mean “missing the mark”.
The phrase “missing the mark” at first seems like too mild a phrase to describe sin. It feels like it underestimates how badly sin has corrupted God’s creation, and the extent of damage and depravity it has inflicted. Sin has destroyed the integrity of every part of God’s creation. The most troubling pictures of sin are found in events that we all know never should have happened.
“Missing the mark” sounds like how I might fudge a little about how many cookies I just ate; it feels totally inadequate for terrorism, murder, war, slavery, and other atrocities. “Missing the mark” suggests that if we just work a little harder, we can easily overcome sin. It can also imply that we didn’t miss by much, when in many cases, we didn’t bother to take aim at all. The problem of sin isn’t that we don’t always do things perfectly; we do things that should never have been done, or even thought.
The Mark We Missed?
Still, I’m convinced that the Bible’s definition nails the foundational problem with sin, when we consider the mark that we’re missing. So, what is the mark we missed? It has to cover more than minor infractions, more than even our worst moral failures. It has to represent something too big for us to overcome with a little more effort. Paul says that the wages of sin is death, which is a lot worse than saying you missed the bullseye and only scored a 65 on your archery test.
The mark we missed is that we were created to be stewards of God’s creation and to represent him in the world. There is no higher honor in the universe. Joining Satan in his rebellion against God certainly qualifies as missing the mark. It appears that when we walked away from that authority, Satan stepped in and assumed rulership of the world. With that stolen authority, he has corrupted God’s creation, and now rules the world. Here are just two of many confirming verses:
You used to live in sin, just like the rest of the world, obeying the devil – the commander of the powers in the unseen world. He is the spirit at work in the hearts of those who refuse to obey God.
Ephesians 2:2 NLT
Don’t let anyone capture you with empty philosophies and high-sounding nonsense that come from human thinking and from the spiritual powers of this world, rather than from Christ.
Colossians 2:8 NLT
Jesus is the only person who ever lived whom Satan had no power over, because he consistently loved the Father and kept his commands.
I will not say much more to you, for the prince of this world is coming. He has no hold over me, but he comes so that the world may learn that I love the Father and do exactly what my Father has commanded me.
John 14:30-31 NIV
The mark we all continue to miss is to live up to our God-given purpose – to reflect God’s will into the world by loving him and following his commands as Jesus did. When we fail to do that, Satan is happy to reflect his own warped will into the world instead.
Moral Entropy as a Picture of Sin
A practical “picture” may help us grasp the effects of the pervasive presence of sin in our world.
In many ways, sin isn’t just failing to achieve God’s intention. Sin is very often actively oppositional, not just sloppy marksmanship. When we think of sin as the tendency of things to oppose God’s design and move toward the disorder and chaos that results, it feels pretty similar to entropy. Entropy is a term used in Newton’s Second Law of Thermodynamics to measure the degree of disorder in a system. A highly ordered system has low entropy and a chaotic system has high entropy.
The natural tendency of any closed system is to degenerate, to move from order to chaos, unless energy is applied to counteract nature. The timeless example is a teenager’s bedroom, which always tends toward more disorder (higher entropy).
“Moral entropy” could be a valid picture for sin. In the absence of energy applied to maintain order, things naturally fall into disorder. In the same way, when we allow nature to just take its course, sin is the inevitable result. It takes energy and effort to seek God and follow Jesus. Our own nature and the world’s nature are always working against us. Sin is always at our door, waiting to pounce, and it takes personal effort to overcome it.
The concept of moral entropy meshes well with what Jesus said about believers in the Sermon on the Mount.
You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot. You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead, they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.
Matthew 5:13-16
As the salt of the earth, we act as a preservative to keep the world from descending further into chaos, away from God. And as the light of the world, we point the way toward the good design God intended. Christians are supposed to help hold the moral entropy of our world in check.
Just as every physical thing we build will decay, unless we work against physical entropy, everything intangible we build – institutions, governments, families – will tend toward corruption, unless we are constantly working to oppose the moral entropy of sin.