Christians Do Not Sin
If sin is lawlessness, sin's opposite is not morality
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.
