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…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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 good news to someone who already knows they need it. Nobody arrives at that awareness by clever argument alone, and nobody talks themselves into it…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 06059 The statement in Matthew 5:29–30 has unsettled readers since it was first spoken, which is probably part of the point. “If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away. For it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 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 all. The biblical truth the phrase is trying to express is both more precise and more important than that caricature suggests – and it is…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 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 with Owen. It is rooted in the apostle Paul’s instruction to “put to death therefore what is earthly in you” (Colossians 3:5), and it names…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 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 reasserts itself regardless of how many times it has been confessed and resolved against. Scripture is remarkably honest about this reality, and understanding what habitual…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 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). The desire to conceal wrongdoing is one of the most instinctive expressions of a guilty conscience, and it has operated in every human life since…