A Defect or a Betrayal: What Jesus Actually Said About Sin

At our Bible study last Monday, someone in the group challenged my whole way of thinking with one sentence: “I’m not sure I believe in sin.”

I want to start by thanking him for that. Bringing up a core tenet and putting real pressure on it is harder than agreeing, and it got me thinking all week. I haven’t been able to put the thought down. So here’s where the study led me.

I was trimming my grapes the other evening, listening to K-Love on Pandora, when the thought arrived: if there is no sin, then what did Jesus die for?

That sent me looking at what the Bible actually says about sin, and what Jesus himself said about why he would die.

In 1 Corinthians 15:3, Paul passes along what he calls received tradition:

“For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures.”

So we learn this early in church and receive it as a core tenet. Fine. But received isn’t the same as examined.

The other central passages line up the same way. Romans 5:8, God shows his love in that Christ died for us while we were still sinners. 2 Corinthians 5:21, the one who knew no sin was made sin for our sake. 1 Peter 2:24, he bore our sins in his body on the cross. 1 John 2:2, he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins and for the whole world’s. Hebrews 9 and 10 run an extended argument that his death was a single, final sacrifice replacing the temple system. And Isaiah 53 is the Old Testament passage the early church read as prefiguring all of it, where the servant is wounded for others’ transgressions.

Except those are all other people talking about sin. What did Jesus say?

From Jesus himself the material is sparser, but pointed. Mark 10:45, he came to give his life as a ransom for many. And the words over the cup at the Last Supper, Mark 14:24, blood poured out for many.

He says less about sin in the abstract than about specific people caught in it. But a few consistent moves run through the teaching.

He relocates it from the act to the interior. The Sermon on the Mount keeps taking a command and driving it inward: you’ve heard do not murder, but anger already belongs to the same family; you’ve heard do not commit adultery, but the look that possesses someone has already done the thing (Matthew 5:21–28). In Mark 7 he makes it explicit. Nothing entering a person defiles them. What comes out of the heart does. That one saying dismantles a whole purity system. Sin is something you generate, not something you catch.

He treats it as a condition producing symptoms rather than a tally of incidents. A tree is known by its fruit, and a good person brings good things out of the heart’s storehouse (Matthew 7:17–20, 12:33–35). And in John 8:34, sharply: everyone who sins is a slave to sin. Not “has done something wrong” but “is held by something.”

He inverts the expected ranking, and this is the most disruptive part. The people in genuine danger, in his telling, are not the notorious ones. They’re the ones certain they’re fine. The tax collector who won’t lift his eyes goes home justified; the Pharisee reciting his virtues doesn’t (Luke 18:9–14). Those who are well have no need of a physician (Mark 2:17). Take the log out of your own eye first (Matthew 7:3–5). In John 9:41 he tells people that claiming to see is precisely what keeps their guilt in place. Admitted sin is workable. Unadmitted sin is the trap.

He isn’t lenient about it, either. The same teacher who eats with the wrong people says it would be better to lose a hand or an eye than to be ruined whole (Matthew 5:29–30), and that anyone who trips up one of the little ones would be better off drowned (Mark 9:42). He takes it more seriously than his critics did, not less.

And in practice, he forgives before anyone has earned it. He tells the paralytic his sins are forgiven before he heals him. The woman accused of adultery is sent off uncondemned but not unaddressed: go, and don’t do this again.

But what is it?

None of that actually defines the thing. It establishes why Christians believe Jesus died for our sins. It doesn’t say what sin is.

The word in the biblical languages is mostly an archery metaphor. Chet in Hebrew, hamartia in Greek, both carrying the sense of missing the mark. That’s the base image. Aiming at something and falling short. Which already smuggles in a claim: there’s a mark to miss, some intended shape for a human life.

Past that, the tradition stacks several distinct ideas under the same word. There’s transgression, the legal sense, breaking a command. There’s rupture, sin as a broken relationship between a person and God and between people, which is what the prodigal son story runs on and what we spent most of Monday circling. There’s sin as a condition rather than a set of acts, the way Paul writes about it in Romans 7 as a power inhabiting people so that he does what he doesn’t want to do, and in Romans 5 as something that entered through one man and spread to everyone, which is the seedbed of what later got called original sin. And there’s Augustine’s framing, later developed by Aquinas, of disordered love: not desiring bad things, but desiring good things wrongly, too much, or in the wrong order.

The archery image threads through all of them. The claim isn’t primarily that you’ve broken rules. It’s that you’re not yet what you could be.

Where that leaves the original challenge

The texts establish that Jesus taught about sin coherently and at length. If his authority is granted, the case is closed. If it isn’t, then what you’ve established is what a first-century teacher believed, which is a different thing and a much smaller one.

What’s more interesting to me is that a good deal of what he describes doesn’t need theology to be recognizable. The log in your own eye. The certainty that insulates you from seeing yourself. The gap between what you intend and what you actually do. The way harm keeps propagating when it isn’t forgiven. Those are observable, and people with no religious commitment at all describe them constantly under other names. Someone can accept every bit of that and still resist the word “sin,” because the word carries an extra claim: that the mark being missed was set by God, and that the failure is against a person rather than merely a standard.

The diagnosis lands whether or not you accept the physician.

Plainly, something is wrong with us. Not with circumstances, not with other people, but with us. Including me, and including you. Everyone who has looked honestly has found it. The thing I swore I’d stop doing and did again. The ease of seeing another’s fault against the difficulty of seeing my own. The way I can want to be good and still not manage it. Jesus described this more precisely than almost anyone, and he wasn’t describing a doctrine. He was describing what he saw.

Whether you call it sin depends on one thing: whether there’s someone the failure is against. Sin isn’t just wrongdoing. It means the mark was set, and you owe an answer for missing it. Drop God and you still have the wrongdoing, but you lose the mark and the one who set it. You’re left with a very good description of the human condition and no one to take it to.

That’s the actual fork. Not whether the condition is real, because it plainly is. Whether it’s a defect or a betrayal.