No doubt you know these words from Ecclesiastes:

...There is nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing of which it is said, ‘See, this is new’? It has been already in the ages before usEcc. 1:9, 10.

This also holds true for the evil that man commits. Lately the media appears to report a lot more instances of incest than before, yet you can already read about it in the first book of the Bible. Lot was seduced to incest by his two daughters (Gen. 19:30-38). Honestly, if you want to know how bad things are with mankind, you do not need to keep up to date with modern media and literature. When you read your Bible faithfully you already know about all forms of evil from the pages of Holy Scripture, and radio and TV cannot tell you anything new about it.

Take for instance the sexual freedom that people permit and condone in our time. Again, whoever knows his Bible will learn nothing new. There we read about the shameful actions of the men of Gibeah. After they had attempted to satisfy their lusts with a man who was looking for lodging for the night in their town, all of them laid hands on the man’s concubine (Jgd. 19). And when this poor soul died from the consequences of it, her master divided her body in twelve pieces and sent these throughout all of Israel, which in turn caused a civil tribal war (Jgd. 20). Talk about evil!

No — faithful readers of the Bible certainly do not have to learn about evil through modern novels. What evil does not get mentioned in the Bible? The murder of kings, of children, even a grandmother aiming to kill all of her grandchildren (2 Chron. 22:10), adultery and divorce, gross or refined social injustice, wicked trade practices, authorities who made themselves guilty of mass murder; with all of this I am only yet mentioning a few examples of the horrendous evils we read about.

But what is a person really doing when he commits such horrible things? Sure, he is sinning. But what does that mean: to sin? It is my intention to address this and to pass it on as we glean from the Old Testament. Incidentally, I prefer to speak of “the Law and the Prophets” (Luke 16:19; 24:27, 44). The dispensation of the old covenant of God had its complete closure in the destruction of the temple in 70 A.D. It therefore also includes the coming and the rejection of the Redeemer of the covenant. Therefore, I will take the liberty to make a few remarks also about the rejection of Christ. 

Broken Treaty⤒🔗

Now we turn to the question: What do Moses and the Prophets say about sin? Well, they regard it in the first place as a violation of God’s covenant. That should not surprise us. The entire Torah and all the prophets that are based on it speak, in fact, about nothing else but God’s gracious relationship with his people. All their instruction centres on that relationship, the covenant; that includes the instruction about sin and unrighteousness.

“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery” (Ex. 20:2). That was God’s covenant promise for Israel that contained his salvation for all time and for eternity. Based on this, the Ten Commandments followed: the demands and provisions of the covenant. All of these are directed toward one purpose, i.e., Israel’s wellbeing. “If a person does them, he shall live by them [i.e. he shall be happy]” (Lev. 18:5), the Lord said.

The Ten Commandments, therefore, do not constitute a ladder by which we scramble up to heaven, only to discover that nobody will be successful, but it constitutes a short summary of God’s covenant that he established with Israel at Sinai. Even in its format it show similarities with the texts of the treaties that the great kings of those times used with their vassals. And because it here concerns the greatest covenant of grace, established by the Lord God himself, the best and most gracious Sovereign who has ever been, his covenant stipulations together represent an order for life, an order of salvation with real laws-for-life.

Our Lord Jesus Christ gave a short summary of those covenant demands when he said, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets” (Matt. 22:37-40). “Love” here denotes especially loyalty, faithfulness to the covenant, acting covenantally both toward God and toward your neighbour.

What was this band of men in Gibeah doing when they abused the poor concubine? They violated God’s covenant and contravened the order of life of Israel’s great sovereign king. They knew no loyalty, not toward God and neither toward her. That is the essence of sin: unfaithfulness toward God and your neighbour.

You can also derive this from the words that the Hebrew Old Testament use for sin. Allow me to identify three of these.

The most commonly occurring Hebrew word for sinning, “chata”, also implies: missing your goal (see Jdg. 20:16). Someone who sins is defaulting; he fails. Joseph used this word when he said to Potiphar’s wife, who was out to seduce him, “How then can I do this great wickedness and sin against God?” (Gen. 39:9). It was not God’s purpose in Joseph’s life that he should take the wife of his employer, was it? That would mark him as someone who had failed, someone who had violated God’s order for marriage life, and who was now in danger to slide back from the solid ground of God’s salvation into the swamp of sin and death. No — God’s purpose for Joseph’s life was that he should remain faithful, showing loyalty toward God as well as toward Potiphar.

A second Hebrew term for sinning, “awoon”, — often rendered in our translation as guilt or unrighteousness — literally means: departing from the good way. Someone who sins leaves the good way of God’s commandments and that makes him guilty in respect to the Lawgiver, even if he sins unwittingly (Eze. 45:20). And because God’s commands are so wholesome, the Proverbs characterize this deviation from God’s ways as foolishness. This folly is disastrous, as is shown in Proverbs in multiple examples. Sin always brings death and destruction.

A third often-used term is “pèsja”. This indicates sin as rebellion against God and it shows the great depths of sin. Sin is rebellion. The word “pèsja” is also used for the breaking of a treaty by a vassal in respect to his sovereign. When Adam sinned, he committed revolution. He refused to be viceroy any longer, to remain God’s vassal. “God can tell me more but I’ll do what I want!” That is the core of each sin. That explains why we prefer not to speak of the “fall into sin”. After all, falling is often accidental, but Adam had been warned and he committed deliberate insurgence. It would, therefore, be better to speak of the rebellion in the Garden of Eden.

This third term is covenantally determined and coloured by Moses and the Prophets. When an Israelite lied or stole, he violated the relationship of dependence in which he and his people stood toward their divine Sovereign. Therefore each breach constituted illegality, disobedience, and lack of loyalty that was owed to God and the neighbour as allied parties of the covenant. Sin is also always an expression of pride and immoderate self-overestimation. When someone is sinning he considers that, at that moment, he is in control; he is autonomous: “I will determine what’s good or evil!” Therefore, idolatry (the serving of another god) and self-willed religion (serving God in your own manner) were the most serious sins that Israel could commit. We will explore that some more.

Religious Sin←⤒🔗

What do we classify as “serious sins”? In this regard the Law and the Prophets are very instructive. What is the meaning of “evil” for Christians? For many, evil is especially(mainly) an ethical dilemma. When they hear that someone has committed a serious sin, most will think immediately and almost exclusively in terms of moral miseries, the kind with which we started: murder and manslaughter, social injustices, offences in regard to someone else’s money and possessions, and indecencies of a sexual nature. Such Christians often have a harder time with Solomon’s harem than with Jeroboam’s worship of his calves. In religiosity they often do not quickly discover sin and unrighteousness.

Yet in Scripture it is often the other way around. Certainly, the prophets have penalized Israel for its social unrighteousness, such as the oppression of widows and orphans, and the exploitation of those who were deprived. God hates all expressions of oppression. But these prophets mostly derided Israel for its idol worship and its self-willed religiosity. With these Israel transgressed the first and basic stipulations of the Covenant of Horeb. In Deuteronomy, where Moses provides the explanation of the Ten Commandments, the majority of it is dedicated to the first and second commandment (Deut. 6-13). Yes, in actual fact this first commandment (no idolatry) already encapsulated the entire covenant. In breaking this law, the whole covenant was broken. And anyone who sinned against the second command (no self-willed religion) would easily come also to transgress the first command.

The book of Kings shows this quite clearly. King Jeroboam enticed Israel to go directly against the second command of the Lord by serving him through the golden images of calves. As if God, who had come so near to the people of Israel through his Word, needed to be brought even closer to them!

In our “syncretic” age many would probably have expressed great “admiration” for such “piety”, but the prophets condemned this religiosity as “the sin of Jeroboam, with which he made Israel to sin” (2 Kings 10:29, 31; 13:11; 14:24; 15:9, 18, 24, 28). In the Ten Words self-willed religion was called “the iniquity of [the Israelites] who hate me [Yahweh]” (Ex. 20:5). It is therefore possible to hate God religiously!

And how did this “pious” evil develop? Jeroboam’s self-willed religiosity-for-Yahweh paved the way to Ahab’s “idolatry-with-Baal”; from serving images to serving Baal. In today’s terms we can characterize it as “Grandparents’ choosing self-willed piety leads to grandchildren staying away from Church”.

When sin is first and foremost connected to all sorts of moral misery we are inclined to pronounce a heavier judgment on Solomon and his harem than on Jeroboam and his calves, or perhaps even Ahab and his Baal worship. False and profound religiosity can of course make a deep impression on our hearts. But the prophets judged otherwise. Solomon’s harem ultimately did not breach God’s covenant, but Jeroboam’s self-willed worship did. By seemingly bringing Yahweh closer through those images, Jeroboam neglected God’s centuries-old nearness and connectivity to Israel. And the Baal worship of Ahab altogether thwarts in a brutal way Yahweh’s sovereign claim on Israel.

Thus Israel’s most serious sin was found in its “religion”. And it was especially on account of this religious injustice that Yahweh finally sent his people into exile (see 2 Kings 17:7-23).

Living In Sin←⤒🔗

We hope that based on what has been written you do not deduce that according to Moses and the Prophets every sin that an Israelite committed was a breach of the covenant. This is no less the case than if we would consider each difference of opinion in our marriages as adultery.

Israel’s great Sovereign and divine Ally was “merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin...” (Ex. 34:6, 7). He knew quite well that he adopted weak and sinful men as his children. Therefore he gave such a loving service of atonement at Horeb through which he covered the sins and the weaknesses of his people with the sacramental blood of the atonement. (The biblical word for “atonement” literally means “to cover”).

The fact that not every sin or weakness would mark an Israelite as someone who broke the covenant also becomes clear from the sharp distinction that the prophets, the wise men and the composers of the Psalms made between the righteous and the ungodly. Sometimes we say quite easily “We are all sinners”, but David and Job would not repeat this. Instead, David prayed, “Do not sweep my soul away with sinners” (Ps. 26:9), and at all cost Job did not let himself be relegated by his friends to the circle of the ungodly.

For in the language of Scripture each pious person who struggles with sin and weakness is not immediately classified as a “sinner”. In the Bible this word indicates the ungodly, those who broke God’s covenant by the fact that they lived in sin. But in Scripture a righteous person is someone who keeps God’s covenant, even though he falls into sin daily. However, walking in the wrong way is much worse than stumbling on the good way!

With the “ungodly” we think involuntarily of outspoken villains and criminals (here again our limiting of evil to ethical situations comes home to roost), but Scripture portrays them as the “respectable” ungodly. They only had great “‘appreciation” for foreign religions and they were rather sensitive to the emotions that were expressed in the church services with the calf-images of Dan and Bethel...And the latter thing, that sinful piety, marked them especially as ungodly people.

Do not be fooled in our age with humanistic self-righteousness and civil courtesy, for this may imply that you are still dealing with ungodly people. Many boldly ignore the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, whose name was sprinkled on their foreheads and they act as if he does not exist. As we can learn from the prophets, that is one of the most serious manifestations of sin. It means that people sever the bond with God from their side. When people who have been brought up in a Christian home do such things, it is said of them that, “they are crucifying once again the Son of God to their own harm” (Heb. 6:6). Scripture calls this “godlessness”.

However, once again, this does not mean that every sin severs the bond with God. For a man such as David was allowed to compose “psalms of innocence”—Psalms that we still have and use in our Bible: “For I have kept the ways of the Lord, and have not wickedly departed from my God” (Ps. 18:21-23; see Ps. 26 and 44). Did this mean he was sinless? No, but he had remained loyal — and that is decisive: that you do not “walk in the counsel of the wicked” (Ps. 1), but in “the way everlasting” (Ps. 139:24).

It is still not too late for a sinner or a godless person, because the Lord God exclaimed through the prophet Ezekiel who pointed to so much ungodliness in Israel:
 

Why should you die, O house of Israel? Have I any pleasure in the death of the wicked?...And not rather that he should turn from his way and live? Eze. 18:31, 23.

And through Isaiah God said:

Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; let him return to the Lord, that he may have compassion on him, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardonIsa. 55:7.