Hamartiology (Sin)

Question 04105 Before a person can receive the gospel, something must happen to them. The good news of forgiveness is only recognisable as good news to someone who knows they ...

Question 6021 The hardened heart is one of Scripture's most sobering images. From Pharaoh's repeated resistance to Moses through to the stern warnings of Hebrews, the biblical writers return again ...

Question 6022 The conscience is one of God's remarkable gifts to human beings: an internal moral faculty that registers the difference between right and wrong and alerts the person to ...

Question 6023 The teaching about generational curses has become widespread in charismatic and Pentecostal circles, typically claiming that sins committed by ancestors create spiritual bondages that pass through family lines ...

Question 6024 This question is related to the question of generational curses but is distinct from it. The previous question asked whether ancestral sins create binding spiritual mechanisms. This one ...

Question 6025 Scripture consistently holds individuals accountable for their own choices before God, but it also speaks of communities sinning as communities, of groups bearing collective responsibility for shared patterns ...

Question 11083 Gluttony is perhaps the most consistently ignored sin in contemporary evangelical culture. Behaviours that would draw immediate pastoral concern in relation to other appetites are routinely overlooked when ...

Question 11082 This question is framed as though it must be one or the other, and most of the energy in contemporary discourse goes into arguing for the disease model ...

Question 6029 Pride occupies a unique place in the catalogue of human sin. The Christian tradition has long regarded it not merely as one sin among others but as the ...

Question 06032 When Jesus addressed lust in the Sermon on the Mount, He was not introducing a new standard. He was revealing the standard that had always been there, the ...

Question 11084 This question carries significant pastoral weight, because many conscientious believers are tormented by thoughts that arrive without invitation, thoughts that horrify them precisely because of how out of ...

Question 06030 Envy and jealousy are two of the most uncomfortable emotions to admit to, perhaps because they expose something we would rather keep hidden: a deeply personal resentment of ...

Question 06031 Anger is one of the most contested emotional territories in Christian life. Some believers are taught that any expression of anger is sinful and unspiritual, a failure of ...

Question 11085 Many believers wake troubled by the contents of a dream, carrying a sense of guilt or shame about what their sleeping mind produced. The question of whether dreams ...

Question 07070 Apostasy is a word that Christian communities use with varying degrees of precision. Sometimes it is applied loosely to any serious moral failure or extended period of spiritual ...

Question 6042 When a Christian fails morally, are they in the same position as someone who has deliberately turned their back on God and done evil with full intent? Every ...

Question 02014 The phrase "God hates the sin but loves the sinner" has become so familiar in Christian circles that most people assume it must be in the Bible somewhere ...

Question 6040 Few questions press harder on faith than this one. A faithful believer loses a child to cancer while a corrupt businessman retires in comfort. A woman who has ...

Question 6041 Churches are generally clear about what sins are unacceptable: sexual immorality, drunkenness, theft, violence. These are named, condemned, and, when they surface, addressed. But there is another category ...

Question 6044 Paul's language of the "old man" and the "new man" appears at key points in his letters, and it is easy to read past it without understanding the ...

Question 6049 This question troubles new Christians and experienced ones alike. If Christ has truly dealt with sin, if we are new creations, if the Spirit now lives within us, ...

Question 06057 The connection between sin and suffering is one of the oldest questions in Scripture. Job's friends were convinced they knew the answer: suffering is punishment, so suffering on ...

Question 06058 This question deserves a direct answer: no, not all suffering is the result of personal sin. That may seem obvious when stated plainly, but in practice the assumption ...

Question 06060 John Owen's seventeenth-century treatise on mortification of sin remains one of the most searching pieces of practical theology in the English language. But the concept did not originate ...

Question 06061 Every honest believer knows what it is to return to the same sin again and again. Not the single stumble but the repeated pattern, the familiar failure that ...

Question 06062 The category of secret sin is as old as the fall itself. Adam and Eve, having disobeyed God, hid themselves among the trees of the garden (Genesis 3:8) ...

Question 06063 There is a difference between a person who stumbles into sin through weakness or momentary failure of judgement, and a person who looks at what they know to ...

Question 11090 Few pastoral questions produce more confusion, guilt, and genuine suffering than this one. The Christian who has wrestled with an addictive or compulsive pattern of sin — whether ...

Question 06066 This question touches one of the deepest fault lines in all of theology — the relationship between God's purposes and the existence of evil in His creation. Scripture ...

Question 06065 The relationship between temptation and sin is one of the most practically important questions in Christian theology, precisely because every believer is tempted and every believer needs to ...

Question 06071 This question is one of the more practically pressing ones in Christian sexual ethics, and it is one Scripture does not answer directly. The word masturbation does not ...

Question 06072 This is one of those pastoral questions where a great deal of unnecessary guilt and confusion has accumulated because the distinction between two very different things has been ...

Question 06069 The question of whether some sins are worse than others touches something most people intuitively sense but find difficult to reason through biblically. Instinctively, most people feel that ...

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 09024 Few pastoral situations are more delicate or more important than the question of what the church should do when a member sins publicly. Get it wrong in one ...

Question 06067 The practice of confession sits at the intersection of theology and daily Christian experience. Most believers know they should confess sin to God, but questions arise about whether ...

Question 08084 The Bible presents Satan as genuinely active in relation to human sin: not a mere symbol of moral evil but a personal, intelligent adversary with specific strategies and ...

Question 6018 Paul's second letter to the Corinthians contains one of the most practically searching distinctions in the New Testament. Writing about the response of the Corinthian church to a ...

Question 6019 Jeremiah 17:9 is one of the most searching verses in the Old Testament: "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?" It ...

Question 6015 The word "world" appears hundreds of times across the New Testament, and it does not always mean the same thing. Reading it as if it did produces significant ...

Question 6017 The question sounds almost too obvious to need answering. But the tendency to attribute one's sin to the devil's influence, to external circumstances, or to factors beyond one's ...

Question 6013 The phrase "besetting sin" is part of the common vocabulary of Christian conversation, yet it comes from a single verse in Hebrews and carries a meaning that is ...

Question 6014 Temptation is one of the universal experiences of the Christian life, and it raises a genuine question about God's purposes. If He is perfectly good and desires our ...

Question 6012 Most people have heard of the seven deadly sins: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth. They have been woven into Western culture for centuries, appearing in ...

Question 7009 Near the end of his first epistle, the apostle John writes something that has puzzled believers for centuries: "If anyone sees his brother committing a sin not leading ...

Question 2078 The account of Cain and Abel in Genesis 4 is one of the earliest and most studied passages in Scripture, and yet the reason God accepted one offering ...

Question 06076 The question of what Paul's thorn actually was has occupied readers for centuries, partly because Paul is deliberately vague and partly because the passage sits within one of ...

Question 6001 It is one of the most fundamental questions we can ask, and yet so many struggle to define it clearly. What exactly is sin? The world around us ...

Question 6002 If God is good and created everything, then where did sin come from? This question has puzzled believers and sceptics alike for centuries. It touches on some of ...

Question 6003 When God warned Adam about the forbidden tree, He said, "In the day that you eat of it you shall surely die" (Genesis 2:17). Adam and Eve ate, ...

Question 6004 Scripture uses several different words to describe our moral failure before God, and each one sheds light on a different aspect of what we have done wrong. When ...

Question 6005 You have probably heard it said that "all sins are equal in God's eyes." It sounds humble and is often used to prevent us from looking down on ...

Question 6006 Why do we sin? Is it simply a matter of bad choices, poor upbringing, or environmental factors? Or is there something deeper, something fundamentally wrong with us at ...

Question 6007 Once we become Christians, is it possible to reach a point where we no longer sin? Some have taught a doctrine of "entire sanctification" or "Christian perfection," claiming ...

Question 6008 Confession is one of those words that Christians use frequently but do not always understand clearly. We know we are supposed to confess our sins, but what exactly ...

Question 6009 Every genuine Christian wants to overcome sin. We hate the way it dishonours God, damages our relationships, and disrupts our peace. But how? We have tried willpower and ...

Question 6010 In Psalm 19, David prays, "Keep back your servant also from presumptuous sins; let them not have dominion over me!" (Psalm 19:13). This suggests there is a category ...

Question 06073 Can we be genuinely guilty before God for something we did not know was wrong? The question touches on the relationship between moral knowledge, intention, and accountability, and ...

Question 11068 Few questions in Christian living carry more confusion than the one about anger. Some believers conclude that any experience of anger is a failure of sanctification, and they ...

Question 06074 The doctrine of original sin addresses one of the most basic questions in human experience: why do all people sin, and why is the world in the condition ...

Question 05035 The question of whether human beings are born sinners goes to the heart of what we are and what we need. It is not an abstract theological puzzle; ...

Question 06075 "Total depravity" is a term that has generated enormous confusion, largely because the word "total" sounds as if it means human beings are incapable of any good at ...

Question 6000 Hamartiology is the theological study of sin. The term comes from the Greek word ἁμαρτία (hamartia), meaning "sin" or "missing the mark," combined with λόγος (logos), meaning "word" ...