The Bible takes sin with dead seriousness. It does not flinch in describing its nature as being entirely, totally, and absolutely detrimental to one's well-being. The Bible does not allow even one iota of good in it, except for maybe a momentary passing pleasure or sense of exhilaration or relief that it sometimes provides. The Bible's writers uniformly, from Genesis through Revelation, speak of it in terms of heinousness and tragedy. It is spoken of as something that one must turn away from whatever the cost. The Bible really only has two subjects: sin and salvation. The writers perceive sin within its big picture of why God created mankind in the first place. They did not picture sin as merely a minor momentary act, but as a major impediment to achieving God's purpose for creating us. Sin impedes proper worship. Sin, in whatever context it appears, whether in Old Testament or New, is viewed by the Bible as failure. It is suffering defeat in life's overall purpose. Sin is viewed as creating estrangement from God. Sin destroys relationships. Despite human reasoning to the contrary, whether the relationship is with fellow humans or God, sin always works to produce separation. It never makes things better. It never heals. That is one of the major lessons of the entirety of the Bible and God teaches us this right from the very beginning. Death is the ultimate in separation. This is what sin does. It creates separation, estrangement from God. Sin is always close, beckoning for us to follow it. Overcoming sin is a formidable task, but it is not a hopeless one. All sin brings death. However, God shows that for purposes of judgment, the sin committed, the manner or the way or the attitude in which a sin is committed, makes a difference in His judgment of us. The most common Hebrew word translated sin is Strong's 2398, hata. Transliterated it is khaw-taw. What does the word hata mean? It means to miss. It means nothing is out of order, nothing is out of the way that it should be. Everything is aligned according to a standard. We generally say that this word means to miss the mark, to not live up to the standard. Anytime that word appears in a context involving moral and ethical issues, the verbal root demands that it become translated as sin. A sin is a deviation from what is right. Sin is a deviation from a moral standard. Those moral standards are given in God's Word, by God's example, and sometimes indirect commands. This is a slightly different form of the same Hebrew term, but it indicates ignorance. This is a cognate of hata, but it indicates ignorance. It indicates wandering. It indicates straying is involved in the cause of missing the mark. Often the context will reveal it. These sins are inadvertent, unintended missing of the mark, done without willfulness, and therefore it redefines the deviation. God is helping us to understand that He does not judge every sin exactly the same way. He takes into consideration factors that are involved in the commitment of that sin, and He does that out of mercy. Every sin brings on death, but God in His judgment takes into consideration the circumstances of the sin. What we are looking at right now are sins of weakness. God adjusts His judgment and He counts it as a sin of weakness, a sin of straying. Sins though they were just sins of ignorance, though they were sins of weakness, though they strayed they had devastating effects. It was like the poison of a cobra, pretty deadly. A sin of weakness, though it may be judged mercifully by God by comparison to willful sin, can nonetheless have devastating results. It may be careless. It may be brought on by laziness. It may be brought on by indifference. But it is a result of not really thinking things through and so guilt is still there. There is another level of sin that is devastating to the judgment of the sinner. These are presumptuous sins and they are normally committed by those who know better, but th

Now, unlike the Pharisees who were shown achieving a measure of righteousness through a combination of ritual and ignoring (and avoiding) sinners Jesus focused His life on doing positive acts of justice and righteousness in peoples' behalf. It was at this point in the sermon last week that I had you turn to Amos the 5th chapter, where God shows that we are to let justice roll down as waters and righteousness like a mighty river. Now recall that justice is the external act; and righteousness is the internal standard that is in alignment with God, which guides our conscience and motivates the outward acts. There in Amos the 5th chapter, God is calling for the Israelites to make positive steps to do good, proceeding continuously like the waves of the ocean and a mighty river moving a turbine in order to produce even more power. Connect this all to Jesus. He went around doing good. He followed the advice that was given in Amos 5. His acts were continuously coming forth from Him; positive acts of what the Old Testament called justice external acts of goodness that were being motivated by, aligned with, and guiding Him; that is, the Standard of righteousness. If you do that (if we do this), brethren, it is getting very difficult to sin. It is hard to sin when you are doing the right thing. That is God's approach. His approach is a positive one (not negative), even though negative is a part of it which is, we have to avoid doing sin. But the way to avoid doing sin is to do good. That was the major difference between Jesus and the Pharisees. In James the 4th chapter is another verse that we used last week, and we are going to spend a little bit more time this week on it than we did last week. Verse 17 is a conclusion to a paragraph that involves the setting of one's will making plans to do 'this and that'. Basically, what it is saying is that omitting to do good (when it is in our power to do so) is sin. In doing some further study on this, one commentator remarked, on this verse, that that statement can be shortened into a very brief English sentence. It is the equivalent of saying, You have been warned. It is also like saying, Now that I have pointed out the matter to you, you have no excuse. Put yourself in James' place, writing this to those people to whom he was writing. It would be the same in English as saying, Now that I have pointed out the matter to you, you have no excuse but to do this. Knowing what we should do obligates us to do it. If we do not do it, it is sin. Now, the Interpreter's Commentary had this to say on this verse: Let that sink in. Now, foolishness is a term used broadly in the Bible to cover everything from being silly, to violent crimes against men, and sins against God. Being silly is sin even as murder, lying, and idolatry. (The only difference is that the violence may not be there.) This verse says that even the thinking (my Bible has a marginal reference: or, the planning) of foolishness is sin. This puts this into the same category as the teaching that Jesus gave there in Matthew 5, where the lust, you see, the thinking about adultery (or about murder) is sin. Well, 'the planning of' or 'the thinking about' foolishness is also sin. We are going to go to Ecclesiastes the 2nd chapter. It is useless. Is vanity sin? Yes, it is. So he reached a conclusion in verse 2. If it does not do any good, why do it? Now remember, all of these things are written with the Kingdom of God in mind and they are advice to God's children about how to conduct their life. In other words, he did not quite let himself get drunk, but he let himself get to feeling good. So the spirit, as it were, was elevated, and he had a bit of a high on. There is, in Proverbs 15, an interesting connection made to this. Are you aware of the way that the Proverbs are written? Two of the ways that they are written are as synonymous (as it is called) and antithetic. Synonymous means that two phrases will be linked together because they compare with

The Bible is unequivocal in its warnings and denunciations against sin from beginning to end. The writers perceived sin within the big picture of why God created mankind in the first place. They do not picture sin as a minor, momentary act but as a major impediment to achieving God's purpose for creating us. In whatever context it appears throughout Scripture, sin is viewed as failure as succumbing, not overcoming. Each time we sin, we suffer a defeat in life's overall purpose. Sin creates estrangement from God. Sin always works to produce separation. A continuing life of sin destroys any hope of oneness. It never makes matters better; it never heals. Lasting success and sound relationships are never achieved through sin. Sin destroys life. In all its forms, sin is marked as mankind's enemy. It must be defeated to God's satisfaction for Him to accept us. If not, our relationship with Him will not be continued for eternity. Because sin is an ever-present reality of life, it is essential that we have sufficient knowledge to recognize it before its fiery darts strike us down. Overcoming sin is indeed a formidable task, but not a hopeless one. The word offended is translated from chata', and sin is translated from a cognate. Chata' appears as sins, but it is modified by the Hebrew shegagah, which means inadvertently, unintentionally, unwittingly, or by mistake. It can also indicate that wandering or straying is involved. These suggest weakness as the cause of missing the standard. The descriptor defines the sin more specifically, helping us to understand that God's judgment includes more than the bare fact that a law was broken. It more clearly delineates the deviation. The people sinned through ignorance, wandering, and other weaknesses. Even so, it in no way tempered the effect of them as minor. The sins wreaked destructive results, even though they were committed by simple carelessness, laziness, indifference, or not considering the end. Another level of sin is devastating, to say the least, to the judgment of the sinner. Presumptuous sins are normally committed by those who know better but willfully commit them anyway. The Hebrew word describing these sins, pesha', is translated as transgress, transgressions, transgressors, or transgressed many times. The word contains a sense of expansion, of breaking away, or of continuousness, thus leading to its meaning to revolt or rebel. God's charge indicates a sin so bold, so vicious, so in-your-face, and so continuous in its revolting attitude that it cannot be passed over on the basis of ignorance or inadvertence. Of special note in this level of sin is its continuous nature. In other words, the sinner is not really fighting it. It is not so much a lack of the availability of true knowledge as it is a lackadaisical, careless, it really does not matter all that much, any way is as good as any other, sin is not really all that bad approach. However, our pride influences us to be deceitful and sneaky and to take advantage of those weaker than ourselves. However, these sins are just as much deviations from God's standards as the violent and vicious sins of the Gentiles. Sin is sin is sin. God nowhere says, This level of sin is passable; sin will always be failure. The wages of sin is death. The continuous nature of these pesha' sins strongly indicates that they will not be repented of. Sin comes in many levels of intensity. Sin must be overcome, and character in the image of God's must be created through cooperation with the Creator.