The Doctrine of Sin

By Larry Dixon [1]

Larry Dixon is a graduate of Emmaus Bible College and is Professor of Church History and Theology at Columbia Biblical Seminary and School of Missions in Columbia, South Carolina. He attends Woodland Hills Community Church in Columbia. This is chapter six in a series of articles entitled Back to the Basics: A Fairly Serious Survey of the Fundamentals of the Faith.

“This Side of Calvin”

By Phyllis McGinley

The Reverend Dr. Harcourt, folk agree,
Nodding their heads in solid satisfaction,
Is just the man for this community.
Tall, young, urbane, but capable of action,
He pleases where he serves. He marshals out
The younger crowd, lacks trace of clerical unction,
Cheers the Kiwanis and the Eagle Scout,
Is popular at every public function,
And in the pulpit eloquently speaks
On divers matters with both wit and clarity:
Art, Education, God, the Early Greeks,
Psychiatry, Saint Paul, true Christian charity,
Vestry repairs that shortly must begin—
All things but Sin. He seldom mentions Sin.

“From the actions of humankind it seems to me as if this particular planet of ours must be the insane asylum for some other world.” (George Bernard Shaw) 

Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love; according to your great compassion blot out my transgressions. Wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin (Psalm 51:1–2, NIV).

Section One: Sin’s Origin, Consequences, And Biblical Descriptions

I understand that the Holland, Michigan, Evening Sentinel had an ad which read: “Wanted—Man or woman for part-time cleaning. Must be able to recognize dirt.” In our culture which is saturated with euphemisms, can we recognize dirt? How should we define sin? How can it best be identified? And what can be done about it?

The preacher Stephen Brown once commented: “Sin is not what you want to do but can’t; it is what you should not do because it will hurt you and it will hurt you bad.” In our contemporary world where many think that prostitution is a “victimless” crime, where one person’s iniquity is another person’s indulgence, where moral issues seem to be decided by the most recent opinion poll, and where technology is used only to answer the question of what we can do (not why or if some things should be done), we desperately need to understand what sin is, and why it is so lethal. As G.K. Chesterton makes so eloquently clear in his jewel Orthodoxy, sin is “a fact as practical as potatoes.” [2] He also writes: “Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.” [3]

The Origin Of Sin

We begin with a question to which there is no complete answer, it seems to me, in Scripture. How did sin invade God’s good creation? We have the Genesis account detailing the enticement of the serpent and the rebellion of Adam and Eve which we will look at momentarily, but nowhere are we told by God why. Why did God allow such an intruder? And when we consider that God created as He did, allowing the possibility of sin, we are astounded to realize that He knew such a creation would cost the life of His own Son. Slain “before the foundation of the world” (Rev. 13:8), the Son of God would provide the only possible remedy for the infectious disease known as sin.

As we will notice in our discussion of the origin of Satan (in our future section on Angelology), scholars are divided on the question as to whether Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28 refer to Satan’s “fall” from heaven. Assuming for the moment that they do, it would appear that pride led this mighty archangel to rebel against God and to be cast out of heaven. And it seems reasonable that his demotion took place before the creation (or at least the fall) of the First Family.

Texts such as Romans 5 indicate that Adam and Eve did not begin their existence with a sin nature, that is, a proclivity to evil. When the Creator said that they could not eat of that one tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the stage was set for the serpent (who is identified in Revelation 12:9 and 20:2 as the devil) to tempt them to disobey God. Note the steps in his enticement in Genesis 3:

1. he causes them to doubt the word of god (verse 1: “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”). His preliminary challenge calls into question the goodness of God, a theme he comes back to later.
2. he attempts to make god look restrictive and miserly (verse 1: “You must not eat from any tree in the garden?”). Isn’t it just like the Evil One to make one prohibition from God look like a complete curtailment of all freedom?
3. he directly contradicts the clear word of god (verse 4: “You will not surely die”). The Hebrew expression is “Dying you will not die!” In fact, Satan later promises that it would be in such “dying” (i.e. disobeying God) that they would really live!
4. he causes them to question the goodness of god (verse 5: “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil”). His message is clear: “God is holding out on you! He knows something that He does not want you to know! He is jealously guarding his ‘turf.’ Don’t you want to be like God?” [There is also the enticement to dissatisfaction with their being what God intended them to be: human individuals, made not to be rival deities, but to be in God’s image.]

The Consequences Of Sin

When God “discovers” what Adam and Eve had done, He seeks them out (they were hiding from God, apparently forgetting that He was omnipresent). He then questions each party to the rebellion. Beginning with the man, God asks, “Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?” (verse 11). Demonstrating his godliness, Adam declares: “Yes, I sinned! But let Eve go! It’s not her fault!” Wrong. Adam whines, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it” (verse 12). Note that the first consequence of sin in Adam’s life is UNGRATEFULNESS! God had noticed Adam’s loneliness back in Genesis 2:18, and He had done something about it. He created Eve to be his counterpart—his completion. And remember that when God presented Eve to Adam, Adam did not say, “No thanks, Lord. I’d really rather be alone.” He said, “wow!” [That’s in the original Hebrew]. Now Adam says, “It’s your fault, God. The problem is the woman you put here with me.”

There are some (like myself) who believe that Adam was to be the loving leader of Eve even before the entrance of sin. Others suggest that Adam’s “headship” is a result of the fall. If the former view is correct, then somehow Adam had abandoned his leadership role. And rather than protecting Eve from the serpent’s attack, he blames her in order to excuse himself.

I understand that Barry Beck of the New York Rangers hockey team gave the following explanation for a brawl during the NHL’s 1997 Stanley Cup playoffs: “We have only one person to blame, and that’s each other.” Adam also did not accept responsibility for his disobedience of God. Sin causes us to become ungrateful to the creator. [4]

When God turns to question Eve (isn’t it amazing that God plays this “pass the buck” game with His creatures?), her excuse for disobeying God is: “The serpent deceived me, and I ate” (verse 13). How would she know she was deceived? Perhaps her answer suggests that sin causes us to refuse responsibility for our choices. The biblical text had already informed us that after her dialogue with the devil (Genesis 3:1–5), “the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it.” (verse 6). Each of those phrases sounds like conscious choices on Eve’s part.

The great writer George Macdonald once said, “Man finds it hard to get what he wants, because he does not want the best; God finds it hard to give, because He would give the best, and man will not take it.” The same could be said of woman.

Please note that God does not question the serpent. God simply pronounces judgment on it, predicting its eventual defeat: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel” (verse 15). Some call this verse the proto-evangelium, the first indication in Scripture that God would provide a means of salvation for the human race.

Other results or consequences of the fall include: psychological effects (the man and woman become ashamed of their nakedness), sociological effects (Adam blaming Eve), spiritual effects (Adam and Eve hiding from God; the enmity between Adam and Eve and the devil; the entrance of death into God’s creation), ecological effects (the ground would now produce thorns and thistles), moral effects (man now “knows” good and evil in a way that God did not intend), etc. It seems most reasonable to say that Adam and Eve’s rebellion against God plunged the entire universe into a fallen state. Therefore, many argue that diseases, “natural” disasters, catastrophes, birth defects, etc. all trace their origin to that pivotal event in the garden.

Biblical Descriptions Of Sin

Before we look at the biblical terms for sin, I must share with you some of my favorite “stupid criminal” stories. Each illustrates the fact that, in its essence, sin is stupid!

• Kentucky: Two men tried to pull the front off a cash machine by running a chain from the machine to the bumper of their pickup truck. Instead of pulling the front panel off the machine, though, they pulled the bumper off their truck. Scared, they left the scene and drove home. With the chain still attached to the machine. With their bumper still attached to the chain. With their vehicle’s license plate still attached to the bumper.
• South Carolina: A man walked into a local police station, dropped a bag of cocaine on the counter, informed the desk sergeant that it was substandard cut, and asked that the person who sold it to him be arrested immediately.
• Indiana: A man walked up to a cashier at a grocery store and demanded all the money in the register. When the cashier handed him the loot, he fled—leaving his wallet on the counter.
• England: A German “tourist,” supposedly on a golf holiday, shows up at customs with his golf bag. While making idle chatter about golf, the customs official realizes that the tourist does not know what a “handicap” is. The customs official asks the tourist to demonstrate his swing, which he does—backward! A substantial amount of narcotics was found in the golf bag.
• Arizona: A company called “Guns For Hire” stages gunfights for Western movies, etc. One day, they received a call from a forty-seven-year-old woman, who wanted to have her husband killed. She got 4 1/2 years in jail.
• Texas: A man convicted of robbery worked out a deal to pay $9600 in damages rather than serve a prison sentence. For payment, he provided the court a check—a forged check. He got 10 years.
• (Location Unknown): A man went into a drug store, pulled a gun, announced a robbery, and pulled a Hefty-bag face mask over his head—and realized that he’d forgotten to cut eyeholes in the mask.
• (Location Unknown): A man successfully broke into a bank after hours and stole—are you ready for this?—the bank’s video camera. While it was recording. Remotely. (That is, the videotape recorder was located elsewhere in the bank, so he didn’t get the videotape of himself stealing the camera.)
• (Location Unknown): A man successfully broke into a bank’s basement through a street-level window, cutting himself up pretty badly in the process. He then realized that (1) he could not get to the money from where he was, (2) he could not climb back out the window through which he had entered, and (3) he was bleeding pretty badly. So he located a phone and dialed “911” for help….
• Virginia: Two men in a pickup truck went to a new home-site to steal a refrigerator. Banging up walls, floors, etc., they snatched a refrigerator from one of the houses, and loaded it onto the pickup. The truck promptly got stuck in the mud, so these brain surgeons decided that the refrigerator was too heavy. Banging up more walls, floors, etc., they put the refrigerator BACK into the house, and returned to the pickup truck, only to realize that they locked the keys in the truck—so they abandoned it.
• (Location Unknown): A man walked into a Circle-K (a convenience store similar to a 711), put a $20 bill on the counter and asked for change. When the clerk opened the cash drawer, the man pulled a gun and asked for all the cash in the register, which the clerk promptly provided. The man took the cash from the clerk and fled—leaving the $20 bill on the counter. The total amount of cash he got from the drawer? Fifteen dollars.

All of these stories demonstrate the foolishness of sin. Such a short word: sin. What biblical terms stand behind that three-letter noun?

The most common Old Testament term is ḥāṭṭāt (חַטָּאת) and its cognate term ḥēt̠̣ʾ (טְא).5 These terms are translated “sin” (Ex. 32:30) or “iniquity” (Psalm 51:9 says, “Hide your face from my sins and blot out all my iniquity.”). Several hundred uses of these terms are found in the Old Testament, emphasizing the idea of missing the mark.

The term pešaʿ (פֶַּשַׁע) is used of active rebellion or a transgression of god’s will in Proverbs 28:13, “He who conceals his sins does not prosper, but whoever confesses and renounces them finds mercy.”

The term šāḡāh (שָׁגָה) indicates going astray, and is used in Leviticus 4:13 in a context which deals with unintentional sins. ʿāwô̄n (עָוֹן) comes from a verb meaning to twist and speaks of the guilt which sin produces. In 1 Kings 17:18 a widow whose son dies says to Elijah, “What do you have against me, man of God? Did you come to remind me of my sin and kill my son?”

In the New Testament the primary term used for sin is hamartia (ἁμαρτία), a word which emphasizes, like the Hebrew term ḥāṭṭāt, missing the mark. Matthew 1:21 speaks of the Christ-child as one who would “save his people from their sins.” The Greek term adikia (ἀδικία) carries the idea of unrighteousness or injustice and is used in 1 Corinthians 6:8 of doing wrong. The idea of lawlessness is communicated by the term anomia (ἀνομία), used by John in his statement that “sin is lawlessness.” (1 John 3:4). We need to be reminded, as someone has said, that sin is not judged by the way we see it, but by the way God sees it. The term parabasis (παράβασις) refers to a breach of the law (Rom. 4:15). godlessness is expressed by the word asebeia (ἀσεβεία) in Titus 2:12 which tells us to “just say no!” to ungodliness. St. Augustine said that “Sin is believing the lie that you are self-created, self-dependent, and self-sustained.” Ptaiō (πταίω) is our final New Testament term and refers to a moral stumbling. It is used in James 2:10 which says, “For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it.” Someone has put the following couplets together to illustrate how sin is—or should be—viewed.

• Man calls it an accident; God calls it an abomination.
• Man calls it a blunder; God calls it blindness.
• Man calls it a defect; God calls it a disease.
• Man calls it a chance; God calls it a choice.
• Man calls it an error; God calls it an enmity.
• Man calls it a fascination; God calls it a fatality.
• Man calls it an infirmity; God calls it an iniquity.
• Man calls it a luxury; God calls it leprosy.
• Man calls it liberty; God calls it lawlessness.
• Man calls it a trifle; God calls it tragedy.
• Man calls it a mistake; God calls it madness.
• Man calls it weakness; God calls it willfulness.

Section Two: Sin’s Universality And Remedy

“Most Christians define sin as the sum total of acts which they themselves do not commit.” (Carl Marney) 

“I’m against sin. I’ll kick it as long as I’ve got a foot, and I’ll fight it as long as I’ve got a fist. I’ll bite it as long as I’ve got a tooth. And when I’m toothless, I’ll gum it ‘till I go home to Glory, and it goes home to perdition.” (The Evangelist Billy Sunday) 

“Without a fundamental change of mind about all sin, a stuttering, stumbling, stalling church can never act redemptively in a sinful world.” (Foy Valentine) 

All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away (Isaiah 64:6).

I understand that there is an old Scottish toast which is still used by Nova Scotians in Canada:

Here’s to you, as good as you are.
And here’s to me, as bad as I am;
As bad as I am, as good as you are,
I’m as good as you are, bad as I am.

In our consideration of the doctrine of sin, the temptation to compare ourselves to other fallible human beings is sometimes virtually irresistible. We saw in our first section that, although we may not have all the answers to every question on the subject, the origin of sin concerns a fallen spirit being (the devil) and an original First Family who chose to disobey God in a real garden. As a result of their rebellion all of creation was plunged into a “fallen” condition.

The Tempter uses the same technique today to entice Christians to doubt the Word of God, to think of God as restrictive and miserly, to directly contradict the truth of God, and to cause believers to question God’s goodness. As a result, sin brings certain consequences, such as ungratefulness and blame-shifting. The Bible does not sugarcoat the evil of sin, but describes it as missing the mark, rebelling against God, transgressing His will, going astray from His truth, and simply doing wrong.

In this section we want to conclude our discussion of sin by dealing with its pervasiveness (universality) and its remedy (redemption).

Sin’s Universality

Every individual (with the exception of Jesus Christ, the Son of God) is a sinner. That condition is demonstrated in Scripture both by the evil things we do and by the good things we fail to do. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” declares Paul in Romans 3:23. We also learn that the good things we do (before becoming believers) are viewed by God as “filthy rags” (Isaiah 64:6). Psalm 53:1–3 says:

The fool hath said in his heart, “There is no God.” Corrupt are they, and have done abominable iniquity: there is none that doeth good. God looked down from heaven upon the children of men, to see if there were any that did understand, that did seek God. Every one of them is gone back: they are altogether become filthy; there is none that doeth good, no, not one (KJV).

The universality of sin, that is, that every human being is a sinner by nature and by choice, is illustrated by the paradoxical statement of M. C. Richards:

Why is it if we are all so well-educated and brilliant and gifted and artistic and idealistic and distinguished in scholarship—that we are so selfish and scheming and dishonest and begrudging and impatient and arrogant and disrespectful of others?

The contradiction of sin makes itself known every day in our hearts as we know what we should do, but often choose to turn away from God’s truth. Our consciences bear witness to us that we know the law of God—we break it!

If, indeed, there are no small sins before a great God, then the universal sinnership of the human race should be plain to all. Part of our twistedness is that we want to blame someone else! I understand that a correspondent with the London Times ended each of his essays on the problems of society with the words, “What’s WRONG with the world?” The Roman Catholic writer G. K. Chesterton wrote him a famous reply, “Dear editor: What’s wrong with the world? I am. Faithfully yours, G. K. Chesterton.”

The preacher Ray Comfort has an unusual way of helping others recognize that they are sinners. He has a machine that can take a penny and impress the Ten Commandments on it. [6] Whenever he feels the Spirit of God leading him to do so, he gives one of those coins to a person. Let’s say he has had some work done on his car. He will give the mechanic one of his pennies and say, “That’s the entire Ten Commandments on the front and back of that penny!” The other person might say, “Wow, thanks! That’s really something!” Comfort will then ask, “Friend, do you think you’ve kept all the Ten Commandments?” Comfort initiates a conversation in which he is able to show the other person that we all have fallen short of God’s holy standards. He has yet to meet someone who believes he has perfectly kept all of the Ten Commandments.

I believe Comfort is really onto something here. Many of us Christians hardly think about the Ten Commandments, much less why they were given. They were given to bring about a knowledge of sin! The Apostle Paul says in Galatians 3 that God’s law cannot impart life, but was given to lead us to Christ that we might be justified by faith! (verses 21ff). When you meet someone who denies that he is a sinner, use the law of God to show him the truth! That’s why it has been given.

As Jesus proclaims in Mark 7, the “heart of the problem is the problem of the heart.” Every human heart is sinful—and to each God offers His services as a heart transplant surgeon!

To change metaphors, someone has asked the question “Have you ever wondered how a worm gets inside an apple?” The “Heaven and Home Hour,” a Christian radio program, reported that the worm does not burrow in from the outside. No, scientists have discovered that the worm comes from the inside! An insect lays an egg in the apple blossom. Some time later, the worm hatches in the heart of the apple, then eats his way out. That’s the reality of sin!

In his book, Who Speaks for God?, Charles Colson tells the story of the Russian believer Alexandre Solzhenitsyn. Kept for years in a Soviet gulag (prison), Solzhenitsyn wrote, “It was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between parties either—but right through every human heart—through all human hearts.” [7]

I believe that Comfort, the Apostle Paul, and Solzhenitsyn are all reminding us of an important aspect of our witnessing to others. We sometimes say that it is the Holy Spirit’s job to convict people of sin, and that certainly appears to be true. But God the Holy Spirit often convicts through our witness! If we are preaching the truth (and that may sometimes involve a vigorous effort to show a person’s sinfulness by using the Word of God), we can trust God to bring conviction. But when we refuse to bring up the issue of sin or God’s holiness, we are not doing our job! Take a look at Peter’s sermon in Acts 2 (verses 14–36), and notice the effect it had on his contemporaries: “When the people heard this [that the One they had crucified was their own Messiah], they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, ‘Brothers, what shall we do?’” (verse 37).

The Remedy To Sin

If every human being is a sinner by nature and by choice, then each needs to be forgiven by a holy and righteous God. Assuming for the time being that Christ died for all, a viewpoint known as general atonement [which will be examined more closely in our chapter on salvation], what is the biblical prescription for dealing with sin?

It seems to me that three terms help us here: conversion, conversions, and exclusion. The first term, conversion, is an initiatory or entrance-kind of event and refers to an individual confessing his or her sin before God, believing the gospel of Christ, and becoming a member of the family of God. The greatest need for those outside God’s forgiven family is to be rescued from God’s wrath. The gospel writer John says in John 3 that “whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God’s wrath remains on him.” (verse 36). Jesus Himself declared earlier in John 3 that the one who does not believe “stands condemned already” (verse 18). This kind of conversion is non-repeatable, it seems to me. A person does not get saved over and over again, but the initial response to the gospel causes one to “cross over from death to life” (John 5:24; cp. 1 John 3:14). He or she moves from the category of being “lost” to the category of being “found.”

Although they probably meant well, certain preachers declared a few years ago that God does not hear the prayers of the unsaved (one preacher actually specified “the Jews”). I believe what they intended by that volatile declaration was the idea that the prayer God most wants to hear from an unsaved person is “God, be merciful to me, the sinner!” (Luke 18:13, NASB). The prayer for salvation (what I am terming conversion here) is awaited by God so that He may deal with the sin of those who are outside of Christ.

When I use the term conversions, I am referring to the question of how the children of God are to deal with sin in their own lives. There is to be one initial conversion, followed by many conversions! This may sound contradictory to what I said earlier, that a person cannot be saved over and over again. What I mean here is that the believer is to live a life which involves many acts of turning away from sin, so that he or she can become more like Christ. One is born into a family once (conversion), but there are many opportunities to “make things right,” “come clean,” “apologize,” “admit one’s wrong,” etc. (conversions) in that family. As we will see in our chapter on salvation, elements such as confession, repentance, and faith are all involved in both coming into the family of God as well as growing up in the family of God.

There are two ways by which the Evil One seeks to bring down the believer in Christ in regard to this issue of sin. One method is that he encourages us to fixate on whatever sin we have committed so that we see only our sin and not God’s forgiveness. As the Accuser, Satan majors in pointing out our sin so that we will become discouraged and not claim the promise of a verse like I John 1:9: “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just, and will forgive us our sins, and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”

The other way of the Evil One is help us lose our focus on what it is that is hindering our fellowship with and usefulness to God. If fixation is his technique in the first, then vagueness is his strategy in the second. As Screwtape writes to Wormwood in Lewis’s Screwtape Letters:

We do not have to contend with the explicit repentance of a definite, fully recognised, sin, but only with his vague, though uneasy, feeling that he hasn’t been doing very well lately. [8]

We are not to be vague about sin, but to confess it, forsake it, and thank God for forgiving us because of it! You may already know that the word “confess” literally means to say the same thing as God about our sin. We call sin by its proper name—and that involves a turning away from—a conversion—in order that we may grow in holiness.

The third remedy to sin will sound strange. What about those who never turn to Christ in faith (conversion), and therefore never turn away from specific sins (conversions) in order to walk in holiness? In short, what happens to those who spurn God’s love and His redemptive work in Christ? There is only one answer, and that is exclusion. Exclusion may not seem like a remedy (to the lost person), but the removal and confinement of unbelievers away from the good kingdom of God is God’s plan to separate evil from the New Heavens and Earth and is clearly taught by Jesus. For example, we read that Jesus will say to those on that day, “I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!” (Matt. 7:23). He later says that there will be some who “will be thrown outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matt. 8:12). The wicked are compared to weeds which God “will throw...into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matt. 13:42) and bad fish who are separated from the righteous and are thrown into the fiery furnace (Matt. 13:50). In the parable of the wedding banquet, the unclothed guests (symbolizing lack of salvation, it seems) will be thrown “outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matt. 22:13). The wicked will be “assigned...a place with the hypocrites, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” (Matt. 24:51). And Matthew 25 clearly indicates two and only two destinies: eternal life for the “sheep” (verse 34) and eternal punishment for the “goats” (verses 41 and 46).

If we believe that sin must either be pardoned or punished, for all who reject God’s pardon through Christ, only punishment remains. And part of that punishment involves exclusion from God’s kingdom, God’s favor, God’s people, and God’s fellowship.

Let me conclude this section with an illustration someone gave me about a man who did not deal with his sin in the way prescribed by the Word of God:

He wore his boots when it rained. He brushed his teeth twice a day with a nationally advertised toothpaste. The doctors examined him twice a year. He slept with the windows open. He stuck to a diet with plenty of fresh vegetables. He relinquished his tonsils and traded in several worn-out glands. He golfed—but never more than eighteen holes at a time. He got at least eight hours’ sleep every night. He never smoked, drank or lost his temper. He did his “daily dozen” daily. He was all set to live to be a hundred. The funeral will be held Wednesday. He’s survived by eight specialists, three health institutions, two gymnasiums, and numerous manufacturers of health foods and antiseptics. There was nothing wrong with the things he did, but they did not prepare him for death. He made one mistake. He forgot God. And now he is in hell.

In our next article, we will investigate the doctrine of salvation. Specifically, we will discover the heart of God in sending Christ to solve the problem of personal sin. We will also spend a little time arguing Calvinism and Arminianism, address the question of how we become like Christ, and even deal with the popular and thorny issue of whether all will be saved.

Notes

1. We saw in this series’ first article (“Developing a Distaste for Doctrine,” The Emmaus Journal 7 [Winter 1998]: 241-253) that Christians often do not pursue doctrine for various reasons. In our second article (“Learning to Listen: The Absolute Need for an Absolute Authority,” The Emmaus Journal 8 [Summer 1999]: 79-89) we looked at four sources people use for deriving their beliefs, concluding that only revelation (the Word of God, the Bible) should be our final source for our doctrine. In the third article (“Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up? The Doctrine of the Person and Work of Christ,” The Emmaus Journal 8 [Winter 1999] 165-180), we discussed the historical evidence for Jesus, His humanity and deity, His works, the atonement, His so-called “descent into hell,” His resurrection, and His ascension. In our fourth article (“What A Mighty God We Serve,” The Emmaus Journal 9 [Summer 2000]: 37-72), we examined some of what the Bible has to say about theology proper, the doctrine of God. In our fifth article (“What Is Man? The Doctrine of the Human Being” The Emmaus Journal 9 [Winter 2000]: 155-169), we dealt with man in the image of God, as well as with the issue of man’s immortality. In this sixth article, we will take a brief look at sin’s origin, consequences, biblical descriptions, universality, and remedy.
2. G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Garden City, New York: Image Books, 1959 edition), 15.
3. G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 15.
4. The Apostle Paul makes this point in Romans 1 when he writes about man’s turning away from his Creator: “For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened” (verse 21).
5. Bruce Milne’s Know the Truth (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1982), 103ff is helpful in this discussion.
6. By the way, this is illegal only when used for fraudulent purposes.
7. Charles Colson, Who Speaks for God? (Westchester, Illinois: Crossway, 1985), 145.
8. C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters and Screwtape Proposes a Toast (New York: MacMillan, 1961), 54.