Way back before blogs, back before broadband, before browsers, even before Bill Gates, Lustus was a computer whiz. For a long, long time Lustus lived, breathed and ate computer programming. And somewhere in that primordial digitization of his personality he developed a nasty habit. You see, as a programmer, Lustus had to name things. Lots of things. Functions, procedures, variables, files, directories, everything in a computer has a symbolic name. Over time, Lustus developed a knack for naming a thing according to its purpose and role. And it turns out that naming something is paramount to defining it.
There is an elegantly terse programming language called FORTH. In FORTH, one defines `words’. It goes something like this, “ WORD : definition of what the heck WORD is, does or whatever ; ”. In other words, pardon the pun, “ a name goes here : and it’s definition goes here ; ”. When one invokes a word or name, the definition is executed. The definition is itself a series of words that have been previously defined in the same manner. (At the bottom of things there are some primitive words written in the native computer language.) The word or name is a symbolic shortcut to the text of the definition. The brilliance of FORTH’s inventor, Charles Moore, was in recognizing the importance of the idea that words are defined in terms of other words. When we say a word, it stands for the many words in its definition.
So, back to that nasty habit. Lustus began to ask people to define the terms they use. “What do you mean when you say, blah?”, he would ask. Or more directly, “What is your definition of blah?” You see, to understand a computer command, you have to understand what makes up that command. You have to be able to see underneath the outer layer. This is very much like having to look in a dictionary to make sense of a word. And Lustus, full of nasty habits, often treated human conversation like computer debugging. He had the good intention of fully understanding the speaker, but his methods were more appropriate for dealing with machines. And although Lustus has a bit more tack these days, he still has a nasty habit of reading books this way. In particular, Lustus approaches the Holy Bible with well honed parsing skills. He often asks himself, what is the meaning of this. And in trying to share what he has learned from the Bible he will often ask people these days, “What is your definition of sin?”. Take a moment and answer that for yourself right now. Write it down. Go ahead, finish this sentence, “Sin is …”
Most of the people, not being creedly catechized, when asked “What is your definition of sin?” will say something to the effect of “Sin is disobeying God’s laws.” or “Sin is breaking any of the Ten Commandments.” or “Sin is not doing the right thing.” Even the famous Shorter Catechism teaches, “Q. 14. What is sin? A. Sin is any want of conformity unto, or transgression of, the law of God”. Some of these people may have learned from a word study that sin means “to miss the mark”. But when you ask them “What is the mark?”, they clam up. Lustus knows that part of why they clam up is that they feel like you’re trying to put them on the spot or embarrass them. (And Lustus also knows first hand why Socrates was so okay with the hemlock.) Nevertheless, Lustus thinks he has a better answer and that’s why he asks the question.
It’s probably true that the word sin stems from the notion of missing the mark as mentioned above. But that alone doesn’t address what the mark or bullseye that’s being missed is. I believe that the “mark” refers to the original intent of man, i.e. being the image of God. Sin is any thought, word or deed or any other way of being that lacks conformity to the image of God we were meant to be. When we are ungodly, we sin. Our Lord Jesus never sinned because he never did anything out of character with God.
But Jesus said to them,
“Because of your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment.
But from the beginning of creation, …”
Mark 10:5-6a (NASB)
