The question of what is and what is not sin becomes one of the central questions for every religious person. What criteria can one follow in this case? The Bible offers us commandments and...
The question of what is and what is not sin becomes one of the central questions for every religious person. What criteria can one follow in this case? The Bible offers us commandments and many different interpretations of them.
In essence, all biblical books are in one way or another connected with the question of keeping or violating the commandments given by God. But one can relate to keeping them in different ways. One can be guided by external criteria, as most believers usually do. In that case much depends on how one understands this or that commandment, how one interprets it. What, for example, should be considered or not considered murder, theft, sexual immorality, blasphemy?
The Decalogue already forbids all this. But there have been and still are many variants of interpreting the commandments of the Decalogue. Above all because all interpreters in one way or another analyzed them from outside, as if from the side, trying to establish rules and laws given once and for all. The Bible itself refutes such an approach. Already the Old Testament offers us at least two variants of legislation based on the Decalogue. And they do not coincide in everything. Thus the Bible seems to tell us: do not seek the only true and only possible interpretation; it does not exist. The fulfillment of the commandments depends on place and time.
Only God's will is unshakable, those divine intentions that stand behind each of the commandments of the Decalogue. A person's behavior can differ in different situations. Old Testament legislation is only an example of how the commandments can and should be applied in real life. There could have been more such examples. And in order not to become confused, God's commandments must become for a person an inner spiritual imperative. What in Gospel times was called the inner Torah.
Its commandments, as Jeremiah said, are not carved on stones, but written in the human heart. Then every situation will be perceived by a person through the prism of this inner Torah. And one will be able to rely on one's heart in what concerns sin or its absence. If the heart, led by the inner Torah, does not condemn a person, then he can calmly turn to God. Such a person, of course, is not sinless either, but he can say to himself and to God from a pure heart: in the struggle with my sin I have done everything I could.
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3:21 If our heart condemn us not - If our conscience, duly enlightened by the word and Spirit of God, and comparing all our thoughts, words, and works with that word, pronounce that they agree therewith. Then have we confidence toward God - Not only our consciousness of his favour continues and increases, but we have a full persuasion, that whatsoever we ask we shall receive of him.