Please do not fear or dread these high-level academic vocabulary terms, but hamartiology simply means the study of sin. What is sin? What does it do? How does it affect us? What are the consequences of sin? All of that falls into the system of hamartiology, the study of sin.
Unfortunately, sin is really treated extremely superfluously today. We hear the term so much that it no longer has its sting. Even worse, it is so poorly and infrequently defined, often intentionally, that the solution seems like no big deal. Some of the biggest names that “represent” (and I use that term loosely) the faith boast on TV that they do not and will not preach about sin; they don’t want to talk about the “negative” stuff. They just want people to be happy and smile and go about their day, while giving up their paychecks to them.
There are many people who aren’t afraid to say the word “sin,” but they definitely don’t define it or describe it as the Bible does. When the Prosperity preachers or the Progressive preachers speak about sin, it is not in context of Biblical language, but as a mere “barrier to your blessings.” While it is true that sin will block us from being able to receive God’s blessings, the blessings are not the primary issue. There are others who know that sin is doing something wrong, but they try to soften the blow to call it mere “mistakes” or “imperfections.” Sometimes they will go further and say it is merely “something God doesn’t like.” The whole idea is that it takes the weight of sin off man for his choices or at least reduces it. It does several things. It reduces man’s responsibility for his choices because “I was born that way” or “Nobody’s perfect.” It also can give the unintentional effect of painting God as a petty figure. Many scoffers have objected to such notions. They object to why God should send any of them to Hell because as far as they are concerned, they are not bad people, and God is holding them responsible for things that are quite trivial. The people doing this are not intentionally being heretical, but they are not giving a correct diagnosis to the problem and thus they are giving the wrong medicine for the problem.
So, what is sin? We actually cannot get a proper understanding of it without going to Genesis. Just like we can’t define man properly without Genesis, we also cannot define sin without Genesis. Not only does Genesis give us the entrance of sin and death into the world but it also gives us the description of death. The term “hamartiology” comes from the Greek word hamartia that can mean sin in general or it can mean to “miss the mark” as in archery. Last year I wrote a full 20+ post series about sin and what it is, so I’m not going to regurgitate all that here. The key is that when we “miss the mark,” it’s not merely just getting a low score. It means missing the cut, you aren’t good enough, and you are out!
Why does God require such high standards of absolute perfection? No one can do that – and that’s the point. We cannot do it because man was never meant to be able to do it on his own. Man was created to depend upon God, and this was where the first sin came into the picture. God gave Adam specific instructions to work the garden and permission to eat from any tree in the garden. But there was one prohibition: don’t eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, because to do so would cause death. Note that God did not punish Adam for eating fruit; God punished Adam for directly and defiantly disobeying Him. The fruit itself was not the problem, it was the commandment of God that was the issue. Adam did not trust God and believed a lie instead. Then knowing what God said and knowing in his conscious that it was wrong, he disobeyed anyway.
This is what sin truly is. It’s not merely missing a target and “meaning well.” It’s intentional defiance and seditious treason against the thrice-holy God. God is not just holy; He is pure, righteous, and just. He cannot allow sin to be in His presence because of these attributes. He will destroy that sin and anyone or anything attached to that sin. This is why the punishment for sin is death. It’s not God being petty or overreacting. But if any person or being is found with sin, that being must end up in the one place where any intimate communion with God or even God’s presence will not be experienced: Hell. Every person in Hell is not going to experience God’s love and tenderness but rather His anger and wrath. And because sin is against the infinite God, the punishment for sin is also going to be infinite.
Adam’s sin wasn’t just on Adam himself but upon all mankind. While many scoffers object to this, it is actually a glorious reality. Adam is our federal head; he represents each person. He not only was our original father, but his choice to sin carries both forensic and legal consequences to us today. We all not only have our own inclination to sin, but we have all sinned individually. All this plays a vital role in our salvation, which will be discussed next week.
But what happens when one teaches the earth is billions of years old? All this teaching about what sin is suddenly disappears. Why? Because everything behind a universe that old all depends upon calculations of processes that happen today, which are part of a sin-cursed universe, not part of the original creation that God made which was “very good.” Also, with every teaching about old earth geology, there are fossils of dead things within those rock layers. By teaching an old earth, what comes with it are teachings of millions of years of death within those layers. The old earth crowd will argue that because the Bible does not explicitly state that “animals did not die before sin,” therefore their arguments of animal death are perfectly valid. The problem is that they openly admit that if humans died before sin, then that undermines the Gospel. Well, we find human fossils in antiquity, too. Skull 1470 is just one such example dated to 1.8 million years old, in a layer that was revised twice to match the Evolutionary story. Prior to the finding of that skull, the KBS Tuffs were dated to 2.7 million years by hundreds of dating methods, and prior to that they were dated to 270 million years, all changing when they found things inside the layers that mess up the Evolutionary story. See this video from Ian Juby where he traced this history. I still question why people think those methods are reliable when they throw them out at will when they mess up their Evolutionary story but praise them when they support it. Deep Time puts human death long before any view of Adam. That puts death before sin and thus makes death not the due penalty for sin and that nullifies the cross.
You can only have a correct view of sin by having a correct view of origins. Yes, there are preachers who have held to old earth beliefs and taught sin correctly, but if you listen to them, all their teaches on the topic were as though the Bible’s history was correct, not as though the secular models about the age of the earth were correct. In those people, you will not find teachings that carry Deep Time ideas through their logical conclusions, because those theologians never did think it through. Always test what you hear with Scripture. That is why Bibliology is so important.
Next week, we’ll look at soteriology, the study of salvation.
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