Christians Do Not Sin

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Third Sunday of Eastertide — 1 John 3.1-7

In the appointed epistle for this coming Sunday of Easter, John insists straightforwardly that sin is lawlessness:

“Everyone who commits sin is guilty of lawlessness; sin is lawlessness. You know that he was revealed to take away sins, and in him there is no sin. No one who abides in him sins; no one who sins has either seen him or known him.”

In what sense is sin lawlessness?

And on what basis can the apostle posit such an audacious and self-evidently false claim as the assertion that those who abide in Christ Jesus no longer sin?

The suggestion itself makes me want to curse John.

A good deal of the confusion surrounding this passage, I believe, owes to a lack of clarity about what constitutes sin in the scriptures. Having demoted the Son of God to a Good Teacher and reducing the gospel to moralism, we tend to understand sin in terms of behavior. As a seventeen year old convert to the faith, I was taught that sin is “missing the mark.” It was not until much later I realized how problematic it is that such a definition leaves God invisibly assumed. Self-justifying Christians define sin in other various modes as mistakes or failures, or as an illness that afflicts our fallen nature.

That we persist in redefining sin in so many ways is itself a feature of our sinfulness.

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