9/18/2023 0 Comments Byword definition hebrew![]() So sin is about more than doing bad things. 4 Or when King Saul is chasing David around the wilderness trying to kill him, he thought he was bringing a criminal to justice, until he realizes he’s the corrupt one. He thinks it’s good, and he’s totally unaware that it’s an epic fail. In his mind, this justified enslaving the Israelites. But there’s more.Ī fascinating thing about sin in the Bible is that most of the time that people are failing, they either don’t know it, or even worse, they think they’re succeeding, like when Pharaoh wants to build Egypt’s economy and protect national security. And so sin is a failure to be truly human. Like when Joseph refuses to sleep with the wife of Potiphar, he says, “How could I sin against God?” 3 In Joseph’s mind, failing to honor a human made in God’s image is a failure to love God. This is why, in the Bible, sin against people is sin against God. And the fact that both kinds of failure are combined shows that failing to honor God is deeply connected to failing to honor people. Half of them identify ways you can fail at loving God, and the other half name ways you can fail at loving people. You can see this idea in the famous code of conduct given to the Israelites, the ten commandments. And so in this way of seeing the world, sin is a failure to love God and others by not treating them with the honor they deserve. But what’s the goal? Well, on page one of the Bible, we learn that every human is an image of God, a sacred being who represents the Creator and is worthy of respect. ![]() So in the Bible, sin is a failure to fulfill a goal. ![]() Khata’ simply means “to fail,” or “miss the goal.” Like when the Israelite tribe of Benjamin trained a small army of slingshot experts, they could sling a stone at a hair and not khata’, that is, fail or miss 1 Or there’s a biblical Proverb that warns against making hasty decisions because you’re likely to khata‘ your way, miss your destination. The most basic meaning of sin isn’t religious at all. Sin translates the Hebrew word khata‘ and the Greek word hamartia. Iniquity describes behavior that’s crooked, while transgression refers to breaking trust, and sin? This is actually the most common of these “bad words” in the Bible. This is really unfortunate because through these words, the biblical authors are offering us a deeply profound diagnosis of human nature. And so the Bible’s perspective on the human condition is often ignored or treated as ancient and backwards. It’s also true that the Bible’s vocabulary about this topic sounds odd to modern people, using words like sin, iniquity, or transgression. Most people assume the Bible has a lot to say about how messed up humans are, and that’s true.
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