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“What Is Sin, Really? Missing the Mark or Something Deeper?”Ep#47 · Spiritual Hot Sauce

0:00
Chris Jones: Sin, this foundational idea, has evolved over time.
0:04
Chris Jones: One side sees it primarily as breaking God's law, very legal, focused on guilt and punishment.
0:11
Chris Jones: The other side sees it as simply missing the mark, more about personal growth and brokenness.
0:16
Chris Jones: Here's the strange thing.
0:18
Chris Jones: The truth isn't somewhere in the middle.
0:21
Chris Jones: It's something deeper and more beautiful than both of these things.
0:25
Chris Jones: So today we're asking, what is sin?
0:28
Chris Jones: Where did it come from?
0:29
Chris Jones: And most importantly, how should we understand it?
0:33
Chris Jones: Welcome.
0:34
Chris Jones: I'm Chris Jones, and this is Spiritual Hot Sauce.
0:41
Chris Jones: First of all, there is so much to this subject, there's no way I'm going to be able to cover it all.
0:47
Chris Jones: And I'm going to try my best to give us an accurate picture of how I perceive it, of how I understand it, and hopefully give you some food for thought to help you in your faith and how you understand it.
1:00
Chris Jones: But I think a good place to start is here.
1:02
Chris Jones: Why do we misunderstand this word sin?
1:05
Chris Jones: How did we get to this point where we have such a convoluted idea and a fracture within the faith over it?
1:11
Chris Jones: So here's what we need to understand.
1:13
Chris Jones: The New Testament is written in what's called Aramaic or Koine Greek, which means street Greek.
1:20
Chris Jones: And to understand what street Greek means is it comes from the term Hellenism.
1:24
Chris Jones: Hellenism is when Greece would come in, take over, and to get you to assimilate, they would take part of your culture and part of their culture, kind of mesh them together, and in doing so, they would help you assimilate into their ideology.
1:39
Chris Jones: So when we read the word sin in the New Testament, the word that comes from in the Greek is harmatia.
1:46
Chris Jones: Harmatia in classical Greek means to miss the mark or misstep.
1:51
Chris Jones: Conceptually, this definition leans more into an intellectual or individual sense of error.
1:58
Chris Jones: Now, this is where the divide happens.
2:00
Chris Jones: From a progressive standpoint, if you unlatch that word from the Old Testament and you just look at the Greek, it's easy to see where we would define it as a misstep leading to brokenness.
2:13
Chris Jones: Now, from the fundamentalist standpoint, if you see it through the lenses of the Old Testament, Mosaic law or the mitzvah, you would see it as crime and punishment, justice.
2:23
Chris Jones: It's an infraction of the law and there's punishment.
2:26
Chris Jones: It's legal.
2:27
Chris Jones: Now, here's where it gets strange.
2:29
Chris Jones: Because we're talking about a street Greek, Koine Greek, where it's a meshed up language, a first century Hebrew would not have heard either one of those definitions when they heard the word harmatia.
2:41
Chris Jones: That word harmatia was used to replace the word chata.
2:46
Chris Jones: Now in ancient Hebrew, chata also means to miss the mark or misstep, but not in the same way that harmatia does.
2:54
Chris Jones: In order for us to understand this, we have to understand Mosaic law, the whole intent behind it.
3:00
Chris Jones: Mosaic law wasn't about punishment.
3:03
Chris Jones: Mosaic law was about correction.
3:05
Chris Jones: It was about through covenant with God, it corrected and helped maintain a very healthy and thriving community.
3:12
Chris Jones: Chata means missing the mark, but specifically in relationship, not just personal failure.
3:20
Chris Jones: Something that disrupts the community and the covenant with God.
3:24
Chris Jones: So there was no punishment for this.
3:26
Chris Jones: You was just expected to go make amends, make it right if you had wronged somebody, do what you had to do to make them whole again.
3:33
Chris Jones: Go to the temple, offer a sacrifice, make amends with God, not in avoiding punishment or as a punishment, but as in reconsecrating yourself back into the community and making it healthy or whole again.
3:49
Chris Jones: So when you read sin in the New Testament, this is what it means.
3:52
Chris Jones: It means chata.
3:53
Chris Jones: Now there's another word.
3:55
Chris Jones: It's a vone.
3:57
Chris Jones: Now, avone is always translated as iniquity.
4:00
Chris Jones: It means to be bent, to be warped, or crooked.
4:04
Chris Jones: Now, the core concept of this is it's a character flaw.
4:08
Chris Jones: It's like where Jesus talks about the thorns.
4:11
Chris Jones: It's you make choices that's poor and it hurts you and it causes you to suffer.
4:16
Chris Jones: Now, there's no punishment for this.
4:18
Chris Jones: They believe that a bone was punishment because your choices and behavior would bring such suffering to you that eventually it would break you and break your pride.
4:30
Chris Jones: But it was the breaking of your pride that would cause you to let go.
4:34
Chris Jones: And by letting go of control and giving in, you were dying to your will of choice.
4:41
Chris Jones: It would straighten your character back out, and you would be reintroduced back into the community.
4:46
Chris Jones: Now, there's one more word, and it's pesha, and it means to revolt or break treaty.
4:51
Chris Jones: It's always translated as transgression.
4:54
Chris Jones: Now, it is a failure of loyalty.
4:57
Chris Jones: It is to consciously betray the relationship with God, covenant, and community.
5:02
Chris Jones: Pesha is not a mistake or a character flaw.
5:05
Chris Jones: It is intentional.
5:06
Chris Jones: It's an act of treason.
5:08
Chris Jones: Now, if it was found that you was guilty of pesha, you'd be taken to the gates of the city and stoned, or you'd be banished forever.
5:15
Chris Jones: Now, interestingly enough, through the process of tashuva leading up to the atonement, you could find forgiveness.
5:24
Chris Jones: Didn't mean that you wouldn't be stoned, but you could find forgiveness.
5:28
Chris Jones: And sometimes you'd be forgiven and even assimilated back into the community, but the stigma would be attached.
5:34
Chris Jones: There's a whole lot more to it.
5:36
Chris Jones: But it wasn't just an automatic stoning.
5:38
Chris Jones: Now, tashuva was the Hebrew word for repentance.
5:42
Chris Jones: And if you want to learn more about that, episode 22, repentance from a different perspective, go back and listen to it.
5:48
Chris Jones: I go deep into what it is and how it's practiced and what it means.
5:51
Chris Jones: And it's different than what we think of repentance, just like what we're talking about here.
5:56
Chris Jones: Now, one of the things that was considered pesha was adultery.
5:59
Chris Jones: In most of our cultures today, that's a weird thing because adultery is like hats a misstep and people do it.
6:06
Chris Jones: But in a community that is based around covenant with God and them seeing marriage as a covenant between one another and God, to break that is treasonous.
6:19
Chris Jones: And both people that was involved in that was guilty of Pesha, if there was two people that witnessed it.
6:26
Chris Jones: Now, the reason why I brought up adultery specifically is because when Jesus gives his message of Sermon on the Mount, he brings it up.
6:35
Chris Jones: And he says that if in your heart, now again, heart, as I've said before, in the Greek is cardia, and cardia means your center, your will, your essence, it's how you choose.
6:47
Chris Jones: It's you.
6:48
Chris Jones: In the definition, emotions aren't in there.
6:51
Chris Jones: It's what is in your center of who you are and how you choose that internally what's going on, if you are lusting, then you've already committed adultery.
7:01
Chris Jones: Now, I don't think Jesus is doubling down on it and saying, hey, listen, even if you can refrain from doing it, guess what?
7:08
Chris Jones: You're still guilty and you're still in trouble.
7:11
Chris Jones: You should still be stoned or excommunicated from everybody else.
7:15
Chris Jones: That's not what Jesus is saying at all.
7:17
Chris Jones: He is not doubling down on it.
7:19
Chris Jones: Jesus is pointing to the fruit that comes from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
7:24
Chris Jones: He is showing how you define right and wrong is the problem.
7:29
Chris Jones: Because remember, the tree of knowledge of good and evil represents us putting our throne above everyone else's, and we're like God, because that was the lie the serpent told Eve, that you'll be like God, and you can choose good and evil, what's right and wrong.
7:44
Chris Jones: And inevitably, our choices through defining right and wrong in that way always leads to our suffering.
7:51
Chris Jones: And Jesus is pointing to this.
7:52
Chris Jones: Let me give you an example of what I think he's talking about.
7:56
Chris Jones: But think about when you went to preschool or elementary school, wherever it is that you started.
8:02
Chris Jones: Think about the first things that they taught you.
8:05
Chris Jones: It wasn't colors, it wasn't numbers, it wasn't letters, it wasn't how to read, or they they taught you rules.
8:12
Chris Jones: They taught you to stay in your seat, don't talk unless it's talk time or raise your hand first, not to run, not to take from other people, not to yell and hit other people.
8:24
Chris Jones: They taught you the rules.
8:26
Chris Jones: But when you teach rules in that way of refrain from, of don't do, psychology says there's two things that can come out of that.
8:35
Chris Jones: Number one, you internally see the limits, and then you go up to the limits.
8:41
Chris Jones: You navigate it, as my mom used to say, you just see what you can get by with.
8:46
Chris Jones: The other thing that can come out of that is we are constantly scanning our psyche for that thing we're not to do.
8:53
Chris Jones: And then we create a hypervigilance in that.
8:56
Chris Jones: And by doing that, sometimes we create that.
9:00
Chris Jones: So when you create this in people in their psyche as they're growing up, that internally there is breaking the rules and consequences, punishment, that leads to a big space and where you can decide what's right for you and wrong for you.
9:16
Chris Jones: Now, psychology tells us that those kinds of conditions is what creates the place where psychological demons grow.
9:24
Chris Jones: I call it the dark place.
9:26
Chris Jones: That's what Jesus is pointing to, that in your cardiac, if you are just living and refrain, it's these things that begin to grow because these are the things you focused on.
9:38
Chris Jones: James says in James chapter one, if you allow these things to entice you, like lust, that once you bring that into your heart, your cardiac, in the dark place, it starts to grow.
9:50
Chris Jones: And then once it grows and becomes big enough, it will conceive and you'll give birth to that behavior.
9:58
Chris Jones: Now, once that behavior is out in the world, starts to grow and it matures, it brings what it brings.
10:06
Chris Jones: And it's death.
10:07
Chris Jones: Not necessarily physical death, but it's talking about death of all of the beautiful things in your life.
10:13
Chris Jones: Adultery has consequences.
10:15
Chris Jones: You lose the people you love.
10:17
Chris Jones: You hurt the people you love.
10:19
Chris Jones: Your children are going to be estranged from you.
10:22
Chris Jones: Now you're hurting them.
10:23
Chris Jones: Everything that's good in your life, you're going to lose.
10:27
Chris Jones: That's what he's talking about.
10:29
Chris Jones: But it's that condition that's created, that dark place that helps these kind of things grow.
10:35
Chris Jones: Now we're all probably hearing these are the things, Chris, that we get forgiveness for, even if there's consequences for our actions.
10:41
Chris Jones: There is a lens for that.
10:43
Chris Jones: But I'm specifically talking about the lens that Jesus is talking about on Sermon on the Mount.
10:50
Chris Jones: To help us understand, here's what I want you to do.
10:52
Chris Jones: In your mind's eye or on a piece of paper, however you want to do it, I want you to think of a zero.
10:59
Chris Jones: And then to the left of zero, I want you to think of negative one, negative two, negative three, negative four, and negative five.
11:07
Chris Jones: Now to the right of the zero, I want you to think of or write positive one, positive two, positive three, positive four, and positive five.
11:16
Chris Jones: We've created three zones.
11:17
Chris Jones: We've got the negative zone, we've got the zero neutral zone, and then we've got the positive zone.
11:23
Chris Jones: Now keep in mind we're talking about Mosaic law.
11:26
Chris Jones: We're talking about the mitzvah and how we see the Old Testament.
11:29
Chris Jones: So in that regard, we would say the negative zone, like a negative five, is all out pesha.
11:34
Chris Jones: You just don't care.
11:35
Chris Jones: You're like the Good Samaritan story, you're the robbers.
11:39
Chris Jones: But now you're scaling up until you get to zero.
11:43
Chris Jones: And zero is neutral, which means you're not hurting anybody.
11:46
Chris Jones: You're refraining from doing wrong.
11:48
Chris Jones: You're observing the covenant with God and one another in community.
11:53
Chris Jones: This is the sealing of the law.
11:56
Chris Jones: This is what Paul meant when he said that the law was a curse.
12:00
Chris Jones: He was saying the law could only condemn you and correct you.
12:04
Chris Jones: It can only get you to zero.
12:06
Chris Jones: And remember, Jesus says, I didn't come to abolish the law, but I came to complete it or fulfill it.
12:13
Chris Jones: That's a strange thing to say.
12:15
Chris Jones: I mean, let's keep in mind also that Paul talks about this in Galatians, that the law was a tutor or a custodian, kind of a babysitter, until Jesus could get there.
12:26
Chris Jones: And that makes perfect sense because it's like being at a babysitter's.
12:29
Chris Jones: And if you're at a babysitter's or you're babysitting, then what's the objective?
12:34
Chris Jones: It's to simply keep you until mom and dad can get back there and pick you up.
12:39
Chris Jones: So they're just going to keep you from hurting others of getting hurt, and they're just going to keep you basically at zero.
12:46
Chris Jones: Their job isn't to bring you to maturity, basically raise you and bring you to what you need to be.
12:53
Chris Jones: In other words, plus one, plus two, plus three, four, and five.
12:56
Chris Jones: That's not their job.
12:58
Chris Jones: Their job is to just try to keep you out of the negatives.
13:02
Chris Jones: We're told in John chapter one that Jesus is the word of God.
13:06
Chris Jones: He is logos.
13:08
Chris Jones: In other words, embodying God's idea from his heart or his cardiac, that Jesus brought us clarity of what God wants for us.
13:16
Chris Jones: Just like Jesus showed up and said, Hey, dad says, you know, that's kind of how I see it, that he brought us what we didn't have, that we needed to get us past zero, to complete it.
13:30
Chris Jones: Now in Luke chapter eight, Jesus describes this process we're talking about and how this comes about.
13:37
Chris Jones: It's the sower in the word.
13:39
Chris Jones: And Jesus says, I am the word of God, I am the seed.
13:45
Chris Jones: And when you take me into your cardiac, he says the word cardia.
13:50
Chris Jones: This is the same place, the cardiac that he was talking about when he gave his message, Sermon on the Mount, when he was talking about lust and adultery.
14:00
Chris Jones: Remember, it's your center, your essence, it's your will, it's how you choose.
14:05
Chris Jones: Now he tells his disciples that it's in our cardiac, that if you take the word Jesus, as in his commandment in John 13, 34 and 35, where he says, This is my commandment, that you love one another, that you love one another as I have loved you.
14:23
Chris Jones: By this the world will know you're my disciple.
14:26
Chris Jones: A disciple behaves just like the original.
14:29
Chris Jones: In other words, we take his example into your cardiac as a seed, and it begins to grow.
14:35
Chris Jones: He describes a process, not an event.
14:37
Chris Jones: And he talks about all of the things you have to go through.
14:40
Chris Jones: And there's some sacrifice in this to make sure that seed grows and matures and produces what it's supposed to.
14:47
Chris Jones: Now that seed is our faith in what Jesus says.
14:51
Chris Jones: And as it begins to grow, it begins to change us internally in our cardiac, and we become different until you get to the point where you are also bearing the fruit that Jesus bore.
15:05
Chris Jones: What is the fruit that Jesus bore?
15:07
Chris Jones: Feeding the hungry, healing the sick, bringing hope to those who had no hope, bringing love and mercy to those who didn't know it.
15:16
Chris Jones: How to be on the other side of zero, the positive side.
15:21
Chris Jones: There's something in there about retraining our psyche of how we were taught to refrain from that creates that dark place.
15:27
Chris Jones: That by putting this in the dark, it begins to grow as it grows and as it evolves, it begins to retrain our psyche away from internal judgment and toward external love, as in stewardship.
15:42
Chris Jones: Not being a doormat, but being like Jesus and being a good steward.
15:47
Chris Jones: That if you are hungry and you can't feed yourself, then your hunger becomes my hunger.
15:52
Chris Jones: If you're sick and you can't take care of yourself, I'm going to take care of you because your sickness is now my sickness.
15:58
Chris Jones: You're my responsibility, and I am your responsibility when I have need.
16:02
Chris Jones: It's hard to steal from somebody if you're trying to feed them.
16:06
Chris Jones: And now we are completion of the law.
16:08
Chris Jones: We are in positive one, positive two.
16:11
Chris Jones: We are fulfilling it.
16:12
Chris Jones: I mean, this is what Paul says in Galatians 5.13 is that the whole law is fulfilled or completed in one commandment, Leviticus 19, 18, love thy neighbor as thyself, as in stewardship.
16:26
Chris Jones: We become the completion.
16:27
Chris Jones: We become the fulfillment.
16:29
Chris Jones: In other words, the way Jesus fulfills it and completes it isn't just in his sacrifice and resurrection, but it's us.
16:39
Chris Jones: We are the fulfillment of that.
16:41
Chris Jones: Now, as much as we would like to blame religion for this misunderstanding of what sin actually is and what it should mean to all of us, it really isn't religion.
16:51
Chris Jones: I mean, the truth is it falls on society.
16:54
Chris Jones: It falls on the tree of knowledge of good and evil, of how we construct the idea of good and evil, of right and wrong.
17:00
Chris Jones: I've listened to atheists and theists debate one another, both arguing towards where our idea of good came from.
17:09
Chris Jones: Theist says it's God, the atheist says it's from man.
17:12
Chris Jones: Both are wrong.
17:14
Chris Jones: They're both using the wrong definition.
17:16
Chris Jones: They are both arguing for zero, the neutral zone.
17:20
Chris Jones: I mean, if I think of myself, when I talked about school and education, how I was raised, it was very much in refrain.
17:26
Chris Jones: I wasn't taught community in this.
17:28
Chris Jones: I was left to grow the dark place in me like everyone else is, that we're locked in this internal struggle in the dark place with our psychological demons, that it's grown how we were taught to be in society.
17:43
Chris Jones: And then when we get a religion, we bring that idea to the religion and we teach it from that perspective that we're in part.
17:53
Chris Jones: One more thing I want to leave you with.
17:54
Chris Jones: We've got this modern thing of the love as Jesus loved is to condone.
18:01
Chris Jones: What I want to say is the love of Christ neither condemns nor condones, which is why Jesus says, judge not lest you be judged.
18:10
Chris Jones: That's the tree of knowledge of good and evil, of us wanting to be the judge of right and wrong.
18:15
Chris Jones: That's not our place.
18:17
Chris Jones: That we give on need versus deserve, that we don't condone, nor do we condemn.
18:25
Chris Jones: That we just love.
18:26
Chris Jones: As a good steward, not a doormat.
18:31
Chris Jones: There's bonus material to this.
18:33
Chris Jones: In other words, there's more information, more insight.
18:36
Chris Jones: If you would like to hear that bonus material, then email me at spiritualhotsauce at gmail.com.
18:41
Chris Jones: And if you don't want to go on the mailing list, it's really simple.
18:44
Chris Jones: Just say, hey, please don't put me on your mailing list, but I do want to hear the bonus material, and I won't put you on the mailing list.
18:52
Chris Jones: But if you do go on the mailing list, anytime there is bonus material, you will be sent a link so you can hear it.
18:58
Chris Jones: And I'll catch you on the next episode.