What Is Sin?

This may seem like a really dumb question, but asking it is necessary to begin to re-program the mind and understand the universe.

All the problems in people’s lives comes from a simple misunderstanding of Sin. They believe some things are sin when they aren’t, and they believe other things are not sin when they are. They believe they are sinning when they are actually totally free, and they believe they are free when they are actually sinning.

But how can you tell when you are sinning, and when you are not? Don’t you just read the Bible, and it tells you? Sort of… but you have to understand the Bible first, you have to actually understand the gospel (and most Christians don’t, believe me), and you have to know how it applies to you.

A lot of people believe that sin is anything that falls short of the perfection that God Himself represents. In that case, we can’t do anything right! Nobody is perfect, so nobody is sinless. But what is ‘perfection’? Is perfection being all-knowing and all-powerful? Because if it is, then even Jesus wasn’t perfect! Jesus didn’t know everything about God. Not at first, not when he was living in Nazareth anyway, and the Bible says it very plainly: “the child continued to grow and become strong, increasing in wisdom; and the grace of God was upon him.” If he had to grow in wisdom, that means he didn’t have access to it all right then.

Also, later in Yeshua’s life we can see that he didn’t always know everything. Some things surprised him, like the woman with the issue of blood in Matthew 9:20 — she touched his tassels (tzit-tzit) and when she did she drew spiritual power out of him and got healed, but Jesus himself hadn’t healed her! It was the Spirit of God who healed her, through him, but his will was not involved. We see him quite startled as he turns around and demands to know who touched him, even though time is short, and he is supposed to be running off to a man’s house to save a dying girl. He doesn’t leave the scene until he finds out who touched him, and then blesses her.

Jesus was and is human, so he has to learn like we have to learn. Now the fact that he is also the incarnation of God should tell you something about the human race, shouldn’t it? We are, after all, in the exact image of God… maybe more so than we ever understood. But that is going to be revealed to us later. For when we see him as He is, we shall be like Him…

So if being sinless, which Jesus was, doesn’t have anything to do with being all-knowing or all-powerful, what is sin? Because if you are not all-knowing, and if you still have to learn things, then it is inevitable that you are going to be constantly making mistakes of some kind or another. You will do a project, and only later find out you could have done it in a much easier way. You will teach someone something, then later find out you didn’t know half of what you should have known, so you will have to go teach them again.

Did Jesus deal with this? Yes. Was he sinning? No.

Sinlessness is not the state of being perfect. They are actually two different things. “Perfect” means “whole”, and it implies that there is nothing more that can be added to it. Now we see Jesus being called “perfect” by his apostles; and since their word is scripture, that means it’s true. How can Jesus have been perfect — lacking nothing — if he still had to learn and grow and change?

This is the coolest miracle of being human. This is what the demons do NOT understand about us. We can both learn, and at the same time, be perfect and lacking nothing… because we have the Holy Spirit within us and HE has everything. We just have access to everything He has, so technically we can be both learning (gaining insight from the Spirit) and perfect (lacking nothing because the Spirit has it all) at the same time. Cool, huh.

Sin, put simply, is doing anything God said not to do. Willful sin is knowing what God said, and purposefully disobeying. You disobey by either not doing it, or doing what He told you not to do.

You have to actually know what God said before you can disobey, so that means people who don’t know the rules are not willfully sinning. On the other hand, if you do anything that God said was wrong, anything that breaks covenant, you will end up being hit with the consequences of your sin, even if you didn’t know you had sinned. This is why people’s lives fall apart and they haven’t the foggiest clue why. They really don’t know they are messing up.

Now believers in Messiah Yeshua can avoid the consequences of accidental sin by just letting God cover it. That was what the death was for, after all. You didn’t know you had broken the rules, so God will cover that for you. Yeshua died so you don’t have to suffer the consequences. That is grace.

And if God tells you to do something, but you purposefully disobey or do the opposite, the sacrifice of the Son also covers that — but ONLY IF YOU REPENT. If you do not admit that you were wrong and actively fix it by returning and doing what God told you to do, then you don’t get covered by grace. You are a putz. So many who say they obey Yeshua refuse to do what He said, then pretend like God forgot and they forgot and everyone forgot. Not so. Until you do it, that thing will be hanging over your life like a sword.

So if we aren’t responsible for the sins we don’t know about, why learn the rules? This is where mainstream Christianity lives, right here: we don’t have to become educated because if you learn the Law, you will have to obey the Law, and it’s just easier to be ignorant. In fact, most people misinterpret Paul’s teaching this way, such as Romans 4:15, a perfect example: “Because the Law (Torah) brings wrath; but where there is no law, there is no violation.” And Romans 5:13 is another good one: “for until the law sin was in the world, but sin was not imputed when there was no law.” Thus they assume it’s better to be without the law.

That is like a kid who refused to ever get a job; because where there is no job, there is no responsibility. Way to go, kid! You got it made, now!

Of course, there is a little clause in the Bible that states that if it is wrong to your own conscience, then it is sin to you. So if you know you should be doing something, and you don’t do it, you are sinning right there. If you keep ignoring it, you are also unrepentant, and that gets dangerous really fast. People lose their lives this way, all the time.

As you grow up spiritually, you will be taught more and more by God, and the more you learn the more responsibility to DO what you learned you will have. If you never want to have increasing responsibility, you will also never grow. You will never have power. You will never be trusted with real spiritual gifts. In short, YOU WILL BE LAME.

With God, there is more than just a stick, there is also a carrot. We learn the rules because those who learn the rules have greater power, greater authority, greater trust from God, and become the leaders over everyone else.

God looks at it this way: if you learn the rules (the Torah) and you follow it, even if you don’t follow it perfect, you are more responsible and trustworthy than some lazy guy who refuses to learn the rules at all because he doesn’t want to work for anything. It’s not a matter of who gets saved, or whether you are “saved by works” or whatever; this has nothing to do with salvation. This is about responsibility, rank, and promotion.

Why do all the Christians I know of skate by, content to just ‘be saved’ and squeak in the door of Heaven, lacking all fruit in their lives and all accomplishment? These people are lazy. They are very, very dangerously similar to the wicked servant in Matthew 25! The “talents” in this parable represent money, some kind of power, some kind of wealth or responsibility. Could they also represent the most powerful thing in the universe, the Law of God?

What if we will be judged on whether or not we wrapped the Law up in a cloth and buried it, rather than doing anything with it, because we knew God was a demanding taskmaster? Why would a servant call his good master a hard taskmaster unless the servant falsely believed the good master really wanted to just work him to death with a bunch of chores he couldn’t do?

Does that sound like all the Christians who whine, “the Law is too difficult for us to follow”?

I’ve been following the Law for a while now, and I have to say, it’s easy! It’s a lot simpler than driving a car. There are less rules to remember than traffic laws. Christians complain, “there are over six hundred laws in the Old Testament!” Actually, no. First, that list of 613 laws was made by a man who is called Maimonaides now, and he was a putz. He listed several of them twice and broke a single law into two, and such, trying to be thorough but it is clear he didn’t have the Spirit of God and so he made a huge mess of it.

But even if there are six hundred some laws in the Torah, do you realize there are over a thousand in the New Testament? A thousand new commands, that is MORE than the old testament, and yet you don’t hear Christians complaining about how many there are there! Maybe it’s because none of the Christians actually follow any of them.

Second, most of those old testament laws pertain to the Temple, and how to do things in the Temple, and we don’t have a temple so they don’t really apply to us; unless you understand that the Assembly is the Temple and get very interpretive. But I’ll leave that to the mystics.

The rest of the laws in the Old Testament have to do with defining what is really sick: like humans having sex with animals. Since we don’t usually deal with this kind of behavior, that leaves us even less laws we have to remember and follow every day (unless you are one of those people who are actually tempted to have sex with animals, in which case you should remember that one).

What it comes down to is about five laws: First, following Shabbat. Second, following the Festivals. Third, following the proper diet. Fourth, a few touches to your clothes. Fifth, not having marital relations while a woman is having her period, and for seven days after she stops.

Each one of these basic, simple, and very easy to follow programs has massive amounts of benefits attached.

Eating the diet described in the Torah is very, very healthy; you will cut down on your fat intake and cholesterol by mounds, because most cholesterol is found in the bits of animals that the Bible says “do not eat”. God didn’t make unhealthy food for us: the stuff He said is okay to eat is the healthiest stuff on the planet to eat.

Following the Festivals is ten times more fun than following the pagan holidays, because they also load your spirit with peace, power, and a closeness to God that you cannot get any other way. Christmas is only special because God honors it and puts a dab of His Spirit on it: people honor Yeshua that day, so He honors them. But believe me, the amount of spiritual joy and power being put into Christmas is nothing compared to a good Rosh HaShana, or Passover! Christmas is the poor-man’s Sukkot.

And for couples trying to get pregnant, following the ‘seven days’ rule after menstruation actually increases fertility. For those couples who are having difficulties with lust, this also teaches you discipline and you will enjoy your married happy times together a lot more. And for women who are having a hard time being ‘turned on’ by her husband, this will definitely kick-start your engine: frankly, women were not built to be touched more than half a month at a time! We were built to follow Torah: that is how we were designed, and disobeying the ‘seven days’ rule is why men go out of control with lust and women become frigid.

Five rules. Do you think you could possibly follow just five rules, if God also gave you huge amounts of spiritual power to do them? If God got so excited that you wanted to do them that He poured out upon you a spirit of grace like you have never felt? Do you think that is too hard?

Forgive my sarcasm, but I’m just fed up with lazy believers.

Unintentional sin is taken care of by Yeshua. Sin for us is not what we do by mistake, because we didn’t know: sin for us is not doing what God told us to do.

If God is telling you to go get a job and you sit there doing nothing, you are sinning and it will not go well for you until you repent. But if you are scared and afraid that everything you touch might be a sin (I honestly ran across a teenager who was terrified because they didn’t know if chewing bubble-gum was a sin), then you are plain nuts. If you don’t know if it’s a sin or not, assume it’s not and get a life. Move on. Be happy, forget about it. But if you know in your spirit that God wants you to stop some nasty thing, or start some good thing and you ignore Him, you’re in deep trouble.

Stop fooling yourself. The things of God are easy, or they wouldn’t be from God.