Sin (2) Old Testament Law

For the Jewish people that Jesus walked amongst, the word amartia was failure to comply with God’s law. That is also quite different from the way that Christians talk about sin.

The Torah (God’s law) was not a standard of holiness, which the people of God needed to comply with to be holy. The law cannot be used as a holiness code, because it does not contain a complete list of all sins. Pride, patience, kindness, and gentleness are not really mentioned in the Torah; neither is presumption or gluttony. We should not be surprised at these omissions, because this is not the purpose of the Law.

God’s full standard of righteousness was not spelt out clearly until the Fruit of the Spirit were listed in the New Testament. The fruit describe God’s standard, but it seems that God knew that it would be impossible for humans prior to the cross and fullness of the Holy Spirit, so he did not bother setting them out systematically until after the Spirit had been poured out. The fruit are the outcome of a spirit-filled life, not a standard of righteousness that we must struggle to comply with.

Moses realised that the Torah was not given to define sin, but to provide a way for people to live in peace and harmony with each other. God gave the law revealed to Moses to provide a communal program that teaches people how to live together in a tightly populated land without too much discord.

The law was given when the children of Israel were about to move into a new land. While they were slaves, their taskmasters had controlled every aspect of their lives. Once they were freed from slavery and planted in a new land, they faced the challenge of living together without falling out with each other over trivial issues. God gave them the Torah to equip them for this task.

The Instructions for Economic Life cannot be fulfilled by an individual because they provide guidance for people to interact in various economic activities. They dealt with challenges that did not arise while they were slaves. These instructions are inter-personal, so they did not provide a standard for personal righteousness.

• The Laws for Society (judicial laws of Moses) are instructions to the entire nation about how to deal with crime. God gave the Israelites a system of law implemented by local judges to constrain crime in their new society, so it is only tangential to personal righteousness at best.

  The laws focused on preventing adultery, theft, slander and murder. These four sins are the ones that disrupt the relationships between the people living together in a community. If I am proud and arrogant, my neighbours may not like me, but they are not harmed. If I steal from other people, those I steal from do suffer. A good society needs protection from theft.

• The Tabernacle provided them with sacrifices to provide protection from spiritual attack by absolving people of their inevitable failure to fully obey God.

• Sexual immorality is one of the key ways that evil spirits get transferred to another person. The laws about sexual immorality and health were to provide people with spiritual protection in a world where the spiritual powers of evil were rampant and not yet defeated by the cross.

The law also provides guidance for marriage, instructions for defence and war, guidance for caring for the poor, and many other social and economic issues, but most of these are instructions to a community of people.

So when John the Baptist was challenging the people to turn from their “amartia”, he was not talking about personal sin, but the failure of God’s people to live in God’s way in the land he had given to them. Instead, they had copied the nations.

Even though they were ruled by the Romans, applying God’s laws for society and economic guidelines would have given them a peaceful and prosperous lifestyle. Their failure to implement the Torah deprived them of the economic and social blessings that God had promised to them. Instead, most people were one step away from poverty, and their lives were miserable.