I hope you’re doing well! This week’s topic is sort of tangential to last week’s in that we touched on a belief by certain people that only Israel is considered sinful based on the fact that those people defined sin only as a failure to follow the law given to Moses. However they came to this view I’m sure varies by person, but that’s not the topic this week. We’re going to look at this topic of sin and the other terms associated with it to try and gain some clarity on what they all mean.
If you just jumped into studying YHWH’s word, without any context or foundation, and were trying to understand everything about sin, it might seem like a daunting task. I mean, the word sin itself may or may not be obvious to you, but what about iniquity? What about transgression or trespass? And then, when you actually dig into the original language written, you find that not only are some of these used interchangeably for the same original word, they also use other words like lawlessness, unrighteousness, and violence to translate them!
We do know, at least, that these different terms all have their own meaning and place in our vocabulary. In other words, despite how they are interchangeably translated, the original words are used to mean slightly different things. This can be seen in verses that use different terms in the same thought. A couple of David’s Psalms include the words with an “and,” between them, indicating he used them with an intention to describe separate things (Psalm 32:5, 51:2).
We see a good example of the use of multiple terms straight from the mouth of YHWH after Moses had to go up Mount Sinai again with a couple new tablets for YHWH to write on (Exodus 34:7). In this statement, YHWH uses the words avon, pesha, and chatta’ah, to say iniquity, transgression, and sin, respectively. So, being that YHWH Himself specifies each of these separately, this seems like a good a verse as any to start figuring out what they mean.
Before we do that though, you may wonder to yourself, why even look at this at all? Isn’t it enough to know that we shouldn’t do any of it, and that if we just obey YHWH we won’t have to worry about what each of these things mean? You’re right, if we just obey YHWH, we won’t have to worry about if what we did was considered a sin, a transgression, a trespass, iniquity, etc. However, sometimes we fail and stumble, and don’t always obey YHWH. In that case, it’s useful to know what exactly we did and how we should pray for forgiveness of whatever we did. As we saw in David’s Psalms, he felt the need to identify the specific term for what he did wrong in order to ask for forgiveness from it. I am of the mind that we should probably follow David’s example.
In fact, we can use what David said in those verses to help shed light on some differences between the different terms as we look at YHWH’s words. If you notice, David always specified iniquity and sin in the same thought, and used the same words YHWH did: avon, and chatta’ah. The sort of “odd man out,” for David was transgression in both verses, but he uses the same word YHWH did for that one as well: pesha. Something else to note is that out of these terms, YHWH singles out the consequences of iniquity as the thing He is going to visit upon the sons and children of the sons, “to the third and fourth generations.”
If we start with the term sin in our study, we find that the first use of this word is once again from YHWH (Genesis 4:7). In context, YHWH seems to be "fathering" Cain after he became angry from YHWH accepting Abel’s offering but not his. He uses the imagery that sin “lies at the door” if someone refuses to do what’s right.
He tells Cain how to handle it though, in order to prevent letting sin control him: he must have dominion over sin, to rule over it. By using the imagery that YHWH does, He shows us that we have to think of sin as another being. We have to think of it as something to fight with, dominate, and ultimately control. In other words, we have to give sin its proper respect in terms of how hard it is to overcome and the importance of overcoming it. Otherwise, we risk underestimating it and the ability it has to get us to rationalize committing it, rather than using everything we have to defeat it and control it.
Unfortunately, the mentoring YHWH provided was not heeded by Cain, and he killed his own brother out of his anger over the offering refusal. Through this and how it’s recorded in scripture though, we can gain a little bit of insight into where sin becomes something different. To ensure we are being clear, YHWH’s mentoring did not say that Cain committed a sin by offering to YHWH what he did. In fact, it was quite the opposite. In the context of Cain’s offering, YHWH implied that it wasn’t “pleasing,” and that if Cain did not do what was pleasing to Him, that’s when sin will be there ready to take the opportunity to control him.
In other words, doing something that’s not pleasing to YHWH, but isn’t actually disobeying Him, provides the opportunity for disobedience to control someone. When we get to YHWH’s judgment on Cain however, we see a different term come into play. Cain’s response to the consequences YHWH imposed on him for the murder of his brother was that his iniquity was more than he could bear (Genesis 4:13).
Now, most translations use the word “punishment” instead of iniquity, but I believe this is a misunderstanding of what Cain was saying. It’s not that Cain was lamenting about his punishment, he was lamenting that continuing to live with knowing that he killed his brother was too much for him to bear. More than that, if you look at the context of Abel’s murder, Cain planned the whole thing out by luring him to a field in order to do it. Then, knowing this was wrong, Cain tried to deceive YHWH by pretending not to know where his brother was.
This is where sin transitioned to iniquity in Cain’s situation. He didn’t just murder his brother in a sudden fit of rage, he dwelled on it, thought about it, about the best way to do it, and then lied about it afterwards. And not only that, the person he lied to about it was YHWH.
Going back to Cain’s statement for a moment, we need to address why he was talking about his iniquity rather than his punishment. Besides the fact that the Hebrew word he used occurs 230 times and in 221 of those times the KJV, in particular, translates it as simply iniquity, we have to remember the power of speech and recognize in this situation who the speech coming from. The spoken word, especially from YHWH, has meaning and power, and has the ability to determine outcomes. YHWH did not punish Cain by doing to him what Cain did to his brother. He very well could have (although, of course, it would not have been considered murder). After all, in the commandments given to Moses, the consequence of murder was death.
Instead, YHWH simply banished Cain from being able to successfully perform his trade, his livelihood of farming, for the rest of his life. The judgment was not to be put to death, but to wander the earth without being able to produce food from the ground. Cain, on the other hand, tried to declare that he would be killed by someone while he was wandering. He wanted to be relieved of having to live for the rest of his life with his brother’s murder on his conscience, but YHWH did not pass the judgment of death and so He would not allow Cain's declaration to remain. Instead, He put a mark on Cain to prevent someone from killing him and as a result, Cain had to live out the rest of his days with the memory of his iniquity on his mind (Genesis 4:15).
So, we find that while iniquity includes the concept of sin, it is actually more specifically the knowing, pre-meditation of committing the sin, and to a slightly lesser extent trying to cover it up. This is confirmed when we go back to one of the Psalms of David we looked at earlier. I’m sure you remember the Bathsheba situation, don’t you? You know, where he committed adultery with the wife of a leader in his army, and then tried his best to cover it up but ultimately ended up having the guy killed (2 Samuel 11)? He wrote Psalm 51 after the prophet Nathan called him out on it, and in that Psalm he pleads for a washing clean of his iniquity.
Obviously, what David did would be considered pre-meditated and he even tried to cover it up, so him calling it iniquity seems to validate that as being part of its definition. However, we can’t forget the odd man out, transgression, which David also mentions in this Psalm. What exactly is that? We know by looking at some verses that it is not just another word for iniquity (Job 7:21) and it is something that deserves to be specified in addition to sin (Joshua 24:19, Leviticus 16:16, 16:21).
From the context of its use, we find that transgression seems to be a category of sin similar to how iniquity is a category of sin. However, we can also see that it seems to be less egregious of a sin than iniquity. Some even equate transgression to rebellion, so it’s more that it refers to actions related to choosing to disobey or sin against someone rather than setting out to commit a pre-meditated sin and then cover it up. If we were to think of these concepts as a deep pit, iniquity would be at the bottom, transgression would be towards the middle and sin would be at the top edge. Continuing with this visualization, doing things displeasing to YHWH would be around the pit on the surface sloping towards the top edge of the pit.
I’m sure there are other ways of characterizing these words to try and understand them better, but I hope this has helped to provide a little more clarity on the concepts. Our goal should be to stay far away from this “sin pit” in the land of obedience to YHWH, but should we find ourselves in it and trying to climb out, it’s helpful to understand where we’re at so we can approach YHWH appropriately. There are many verses in scripture where YHWH talks about not accepting offerings to Him because the people providing the offerings didn’t fully grasp the severity of what they did and therefore couldn’t sincerely provide their offering. Let’s not be one of those people, and let’s come to YHWH in the proper humility for our request of forgiveness.
Shabbat shalom and YHWH bless you!
-Rob and Sara Gene
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