The doctrine of sin—its origin, nature, consequences, and the different ways Scripture describes human rebellion against God.
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6008. Confession of sin is one of those practices every Christian knows they should maintain and many quietly find confusing. What exactly are we doing when we confess? Is it grovelling? A ritual formula? Informing God of things He somehow missed? And if the cross has already dealt with my sin, why confess at…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 6007. Sinless perfection has been promised by more than one movement in church history: the claim that a Christian can reach a point in this life where sinning stops altogether. Others swing to the opposite corner and treat ongoing sin so casually that holiness hardly seems worth pursuing. Can Christians live without sinning or…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6006. The sin nature is the Bible’s explanation for a fact every honest person has noticed: we do not become sinners by sinning; we sin because something in us leans that way from the start. Why does no parent need to teach a toddler selfishness? Why do my best resolutions bend towards self so…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6005. Are all sins equal in God’s eyes? You have probably heard it claimed; it usually surfaces when someone wants to stop a comparison in its tracks, and it sounds humble. But is it true? Does Scripture really teach that a white lie weighs the same as murder, or a flash of envy the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6004. Sin, transgression and iniquity appear together so often in Scripture that many readers assume they are interchangeable, but each word carries its own weight, and together they diagnose us more thoroughly than any one of them alone. When David poured out Psalm 51 after his fall with Bathsheba, he reached for all three:…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6003. The consequences of sin reach further than most people ever suspect, and understanding them is essential if we are to grasp what the Lord Jesus actually accomplished on the cross. God warned Adam plainly: “in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (Genesis 2:17). Adam ate, and did not…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6002. The origin of sin is one of the deepest questions a believer can ask, because it presses on the character of God Himself. If God is good, and God created everything, where did evil come from? Did He make it? Did it surprise Him? Scripture does not hand us a philosophical treatise, but…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 6001. The nature of sin is the first thing we must get clear if the gospel is ever going to make sense, and yet our culture has almost lost the word. People speak of mistakes, poor choices, unhealthy patterns, or trauma responses, anything but sin. Even Christians can grow vague here. So what exactly…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6000. The doctrine of sin, known formally as hamartiology, is the branch of theology that asks what sin is, where it came from, what it has done to us, and why the answer shapes everything else we believe. The name comes from the Greek hamartia, the New Testament’s most common word for sin, joined…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 5035. Are we born sinners, or do we become sinners later by imitation and bad choices? Stand in any toddler group for an afternoon and you will have empirical data; no one teaches a child to snatch, lie, or scream “mine”. But the question deserves a better answer than anecdote, because what you believe…