Hamartiology (Sin)

Question 6011. Does God cause suffering, or does He only allow it? I have stood at enough hospital beds and gravesides to know this is never an academic question. How ...

Question 04200. Conviction of sin is the doorway every one of us has to walk through before the gospel can mean anything at all, because good news only sounds like ...

Question 6021. To harden your heart, in biblical language, is to make yourself progressively less responsive to God. It is not usually a decision anyone announces. It is the cumulative ...

Question 6022. Paul warns Timothy about teachers with a seared conscience, and the image he chooses is a surgical one. He is describing a moral sense that has been burned ...

Question 6024. The sins of parents do affect their children, and anyone who has done pastoral work for a fortnight knows it. What Scripture will not allow is the conclusion ...

Question 6025. Corporate sin is the biblical recognition that groups, not only individuals, can be guilty before God. Nations, cities and churches are addressed and judged as bodies throughout Scripture, ...

Question 11083 The sin of gluttony is the one item on the traditional list of deadly sins that the modern church has quietly dropped. We preach against drunkenness, greed and ...

Question 11082 The disease model of addiction has become the default explanation in medicine, in the media and increasingly in the church. Addiction, we are told, is a chronic brain ...

Question 6029. The sin of pride is the one the Bible singles out for direct divine opposition. God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble, and that sentence ...

Question 6032. The sin of lust is one of the areas where believers most often feel defeated, and part of the defeat is caused by a misunderstanding. A great many ...

Question 11084 Intrusive thoughts are among the most distressing things Christians experience and among the least talked about. A blasphemous sentence arrives unbidden in the middle of prayer. A violent ...

Question 6030. Envy and jealousy get used interchangeably in ordinary speech, and Scripture is more careful than we are. One of them is always sinful. The other can be a ...

Question 6031. Not all anger is sinful anger, and any teaching that starts by treating the emotion itself as a fault will lose the argument with Scripture very quickly. God ...

Question 11085 Sinful dreams trouble sincere Christians far more often than anyone admits from a pulpit. A believer wakes with the residue of something adulterous, violent or blasphemous still vivid, ...

Question 7070. Biblical apostasy is a word we reach for quickly and understand slowly. I have heard it applied to a friend who stopped attending church, to a denomination that ...

Question 6042. The difference between weakness and wickedness is one of the most useful distinctions in pastoral work, and one of the most frequently missed. Two people commit what looks ...

Question 2014. Does God hate sinners, or does He only hate sin? It is one of those questions that sounds like a technicality until someone asks it through tears, usually ...

Question 6040. Why the wicked prosper while decent people are ground down is not a question invented by modern sceptics. It is asked, at length and with considerable heat, by ...

Question 6041. A respectable sin is one that a Christian community has quietly stopped treating as sin. It is not a biblical category, and that is precisely the problem, because ...

Question 6044. When Paul speaks of the old man he is not describing a sinister lodger who lives in the believer's spare room. He is describing the person you used ...

Question 6049. Christians still sin after conversion, and the honest recognition of that fact is one of the more important things a new believer can be told early. Nobody is ...

Question 6057. The relationship between sin and suffering is one of the first questions people ask me when life caves in, and it is usually asked in a whisper. Something ...

Question 6058. Is all suffering a result of personal sin? No, and Scripture says so with unusual force. This is one of the few questions where the Bible hands us ...

Question 6060. The mortification of sin is Paul's blunt name for the daily work of putting sin to death, and it is the least fashionable idea in modern Christian vocabulary ...

Question 6061. Habitual sin is sin that has stopped being an event and become a pattern. It is no longer the thing you did on a bad Tuesday. It is ...

Question 6062. Secret sin is the sin nobody knows about except you and God. It has no witnesses, no consequences that anyone can trace, and no cost that shows up ...

Question 6063. Wilful sin is sin committed with open eyes. Not the sin that overtakes you, not the sin you regret before you have finished it, but the sin you ...

Question 11090 Habitual sin is the pastoral problem that will not go away. Almost every believer has something that keeps returning, and almost every pastor has sat with someone who ...

Question 6065. Temptation and sin are not the same thing, and confusing them has done enormous damage to sensitive Christians. Many believers spend years apologising to God for being tempted, ...

Question 6071. Scripture defines sexual sin with considerable care, and masturbation is never named among the things it defines. That silence is the first fact any honest answer has to ...

Question 6072. Lust and attraction are not the same thing, and a great many sincere Christians have been tormented by the assumption that they are. Noticing that someone is beautiful ...

Question 6069. Are there degrees of sin? Yes and no, and both halves of that answer need holding at once or you will end up in one of two ditches ...

Question 06070 The Old Testament does not use a single word for sin. It uses a rich vocabulary of overlapping terms that together paint a more complete picture of what ...

Question 6067. Confession of sin to God is always sufficient for forgiveness. There is no human intermediary, no priest, no queue and no waiting period. That needs saying first and ...

Question 09024. Few subjects make a congregation more uncomfortable than church discipline. The phrase conjures images of Puritan stocks, cold hearted committees and people driven out of fellowship over trivia, ...

Question 08084 Satan's role in human sin is one of those subjects where we tend to overshoot in one direction or the other. Some Christians blame the devil for everything ...

Question 6018. Paul says that godly sorrow produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death. That is a startling sentence, because it means two ...

Question 6019. Jeremiah 17:9 says the heart is deceitful above all things, and the doctrine of the deceitful heart has been used to prove a great deal that Jeremiah never ...

Question 6015. Ask what the Bible means by the world and the answer is that it means three different things, and the one that causes all the trouble is the ...

Question 6017. It is tempting to blame the devil for our sins, and the temptation is almost as old as sin itself. Adam blamed the woman and by implication the ...

Question 6013. A besetting sin is the sin that knows your address: the particular temptation that returns again and again long after other struggles have faded, the one you have ...

Question 6014. The question behind the question is usually this: if God allows temptation, and He could stop it, does that make Him complicit in my failure? I have been ...

Question 6012. The seven deadly sins are among the most famous religious ideas in the world: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth. They appear in Dante, in medieval ...

Question 07009. The sin unto death in 1 John 5:16-17 is one of those phrases that people trip over at the very end of a letter otherwise full of comfort, ...

Question 2078. Abel's offering is where the whole tragic story of Cain and Abel turns, and the question people bring to me most often is simply why. Cain and Abel ...

Question 6076. Paul's thorn in the flesh is one of the great unanswered questions of the New Testament, and I have come to think the silence is deliberate. We are ...

Question 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 ...

Question 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 ...

Question 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 ...

Question 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 ...

Question 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 ...

Question 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 ...

Question 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 ...

Question 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 ...

Question 6009. Overcoming sin is the daily concern of every genuine believer, and the honest ones will tell you how the usual methods have gone: willpower failed, resolutions broke, promises ...

Question 6010. Presumptuous sins are singled out in one of David’s best-known prayers, and the singling out is deliberate: "Keep back your servant also from presumptuous sins; let them not ...

Question 6073. Unintentional sin is a genuine biblical category, and the answer to whether we are responsible for it is yes, with a very large mercy attached. Scripture is clear ...

Question 11068. Feeling angry troubles conscientious Christians more than almost any other emotion, partly because we have been taught that gentleness is a fruit of the Spirit and have concluded ...

Question 6074. Original sin is the doctrine that describes what happened to the human race through Adam's fall and what every one of us has inherited as a result. It ...

Question 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 ...

Question 6075. Total depravity is one of the most misunderstood terms in Christian theology, and a good deal of the misunderstanding is caused by the word total. The doctrine does ...

Question 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, ...