Quotes About Sin

Sin" is not just "doing things God has forbidden." It is, as we saw, the failure to be fully functioning, God-reflecting human beings. That is what Paul sums up in 3:23: all sinned and fell short of God's glory. He is referring to the glory that, as true humans, they should have possessed. This is the "glory" spoken of in Psalm 8: the status and responsibility of looking after God's world on his behalf.

Israel's sins had resulted in exile, exile had been prolonged, a new "slavery" had been the result—so that the new Passover would need to be effected through sins being forgiven. And sins are forgiven, as we have seen in the gospels and in Paul's other letters, through the representative and substitutionary death of Jesus. But in Romans Paul goes one dramatic and decisive, unique and vital step farther.

this event, all the early Christians tell us, the living God was revealed in human form, in utter self-giving love, to be the focus of grateful worship, worship that would replace the idols and would therefore generate a new, truly human existence in which the deadly grip of sin had been broken forever.

His point is that the cross has liberated people from sin, so that they can be God-reflecting, image-bearing, working models of divine covenant faithfulness in action.

This is how the cross establishes God's kingdom: by bearing and so removing the weight of sin and death.

idols get their power because humans, in sinning, give it to them. Deal with sin, and the idols are reduced to a tawdry heap of rubble. Deal with sin, and the world will glorify God.

Only in the light of Jesus can he look back and see not only that the God-given Torah had the effect of increasing "Sin," but that this was the divine intention all along.

Punishment is what would happen later, if this opportunity were missed: "By your hard, unrepentant heart you are building up a store of anger for yourself on the day of anger" (2:5). What we have in the present passage, though, is not a statement of how that punishment fell on Jesus, but rather a statement of how the sins that had been building up were "passed over." God has drawn a veil over the past, as Paul said in Athens (Acts 17:30).

It is because God loves the world he has made, and especially his human creatures, that he hates everything that spoils, wrecks, or defaces it.

Idolatry, turning away from the source of life, results in sin, which already breathes the musty air of death. And death is the ultimate denial of the goodness of God's creation—the very thing that the Temple, holding together heaven and earth, was supposed to affirm.

The point is that this victory—the victory over all the powers, ultimately over death itself—was won through the representative and substitutionary death of Jesus, as Israel's Messiah, who died so that sins could be forgiven.

What God was doing through the Torah, in Israel, was to gather "Sin" together into one place, so that it could then be condemned.

There is no condemnation for those in the Messiah . . . because God . . . condemned Sin right there in the flesh." The punishment has been meted out. But the punishment is on Sin itself, the combined, accumulated, and personified force that has wreaked such havoc in the world and in human lives.

If Paul is hinting at "punishment" in this passage, it can only mean what it means in Isaiah, which has to do with the "servant" fulfilling Israel's vocation—and simultaneously with the "servant's" embodying YHWH himself, the powerful "arm of YHWH," to take upon himself the consequence of Israel's rebellion, idolatry, and sin, so that Israel and the world may be rescued

The purpose of forgiving sin, there as elsewhere, is to enable people to become fully functioning, fully image-bearing human beings within God's world, already now, completely in the age to come.

Christians have assumed that virtually the only point in Jesus's death was "to save us from our sins," understood in a variety of more or less helpful ways. But for the gospels themselves, that rescue of individuals (which of course remains a central element) is designed to serve a larger purpose: God's purpose, the purpose of God's kingdom.

have argued that the early Christian view of Jesus's death was focused on Passover and hence on the Exodus story, now to be experienced as the new liberating event that was also the great one-off "sin-forgiving" event. Though the language here is unique to this passage, the outline meaning—Passover and atonement, in fulfillment of the covenant and to forgive sins and cleanse from impurity—is the same.

The passage has regularly been read as the vital move in the wrong story— the story, once again, of a "works contract" in which, to put it crudely, humans sin, God punishes Jesus, and humans are let off. This omits elements that were vital for Paul

God's covenant with Abraham and through Israel for the world was there precisely in order to deal with sin, as "the Jew" in 2:17–20 knows and claims.

Sin" is not just "doing things God has forbidden." It is, as we saw, the failure to be fully functioning, God-reflecting human beings.

Are your eyelashes like your hair?" "Yes. They're very beautiful—want to see?" Her lips twitched. "Vanity is a sin,Bluebell." "When you have it, flaunt it, I say." -Elena and Illium

Never before Raphael had blue meant the color of sin, of seduction. Of pain.

Janvier was six feet three inches of pure indulgent sex. He wasn't even trying to project that at this instant—his sexual attractiveness was innate, created by his confidence, the lithe strength of his body, the lazy smile that said he knew every sin and had invented a few new ones.

I asked Mama was it a sin to do what I done, and she said no, it was the same as David slaying Goliath, it was only to save Ulyssa and the others, not because of meanness that I did it. I would do it again, too. I am not sorry, but this has hurt my heart and spirit more than all the other trials, for being forsaken is worse than being killed.