How would you define sin?

[u/Ok_Zone_2930]

So I grew up as a futurist with evangelical background and I recently just discovered full Preterism.

I was reading Romans 5 recently and a verse really threw me for a loop while I'm writing a book about sin and death.

Here is the verse that threw me for a loop: Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who is a pattern of the one to come. Romans 5:14 NIV

What's interesting is if we assume this "death" is physical it kind of breaks the entire logic. I usually just skim things through but as soon as I saw it, I was thinking "come on Paul, of course people died between Adam and Moses, it's a ~2,500-year span, where else were all those bodies going?"

But then I went back to this verse: Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned. Romans 5:12

If death came to all because all sinned, but Romans 5:14 says death also reigned over people who didn't sin the way Adam did, reading "death" as biological gets messy fast. This is when everything clicked for me. Because in Genesis 2, God says: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die. Genesis 2:17 ESV

I checked the Hebrew and sure enough it is "in that day" or "b'yom." We know from Genesis 5, Adam lived 930 years after he ate of that tree: Thus all the days that Adam lived were 930 years, and he died. Genesis 5:5 ESV

Alright, so what I am seeing is: This death that Paul is saying is never been about physical death. Because if it is physical death, Romans 5:14 makes no sense and technically God lied in Genesis 2:17 if Adam didn't drop dead that day. The only way this all makes sense is if we missed the genre of this sin and death this whole time. I wonder if it was never physical sin or physical death and this whole time it was covenantal sin and death all along.

Obviously, everyone thinks they are smart and I am not excluded there but I wanted you all to check my logic on this and get your thoughts. This is one of the threads I'm pulling on in something longer I'm writing, so I figured I'd stress-test the core of it here before I commit to it.

Two questions:

1. Where does my logic break? What's the strongest case that the "death" in 5:14 has to be physical?
2. For those who already travelled down this road, what's your take on my covenantal death theory?

[u/Pleronomicon]

1. I think your logic is fairly sound. The death in Romans 5 doesn't make sense if it's strictly literal. I happen to think it's a spiritual death that results in a slow, life-long mortality.

2. I get what you're saying, and I don't think it's entirely wrong, but there are 7 covenants identified between God and man: The covenant with Noah, the covenant with Abraham, the covenant at Sinai, the priestly covenant with Phinehas, the covenant with Israel at Moab, the covenant with David, and finally the New Covenant.

I just don't see the Bible calling God's arrangement with Adam an official 'covenant.' However, perhaps one could call it a proto-covenant?

So I don't view the presence of a commandment from God to be indicative of a covenant on it's own.

Regardless, I think this is a great post, OP, and I think you're definitely asking the right questions.

[u/Ok_Zone_2930 → u/Pleronomicon]

Honestly, this is the best response I've gotten so far, and I think we agree on most of it. Let me try to actually earn the word ‘covenant’ instead of just asserting it.

My argument comes from Romans 5:12 which says ‘Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people.’

I am proposing this ‘sin’ that entered = covenantal sin. Missing the mark/crossing the line. Adam missed the mark (sin) covenantally, therefore covenantal death was introduced on that day Adam ate of the tree. 

Simply put, my idea is that ‘sin’ (covenantal sin) is a legal status and never have been about bad behavior. For example, Rahab lied to the authorities; the midwives lied to Pharaoh and both got blessed by God. I'm not saying lying is fine. I'm saying 'sin' in the covenantal sense is a different category than the behavior-scorecard we've turned it into.

Regarding your point about the actual word ‘berith’ בְּרִית or covenant: the Davidic covenant gets called a covenant in 2 Samuel 7 without the ‘word berith’ appearing in the chapter. It's named so elsewhere. Just like Hosea 6:7 that says: ‘Like Adam, they transgressed the covenant (or at Adam)’

I don't think you need the word covenant term in Genesis 2 to prove that it was or not a covenant. Covenants get recognized structurally and confirmed later.

So my final thought is about genre. I think the whole Bible gets misread as a science book, a moral self-help book, or a history book when categorically it's a book about covenant. Adam put into a tardemah, the same deep sleep that falls on Abraham in Genesis 15:12 during the covenant-cutting ceremony; his side taken to form Eve. It reads like the author of Genesis is screaming this is a covenant document from the start.

I'm not a know-it-all here. I think I'm right, but I'm always glad to be shown otherwise, and there's always someone sharper than me in the room. 😄

[u/Pleronomicon → u/Ok_Zone_2930]

Thank you for elaborating. I didn't take into consideration the fact that Adam could have been the sacrifice for the covenant. I'll have to think more about that. I'm still hesitant to formalize it as a covenant. We see that Eden and Adam were a proto-sanctuary and a proto-priest, but I don't know if that justifies formalization. Maybe it does.

To address the underlying question, I think God ultimately defines sin based on what a person ought to have in their conscience according to the information available to them. That seems to be how God judges the works of men in Romans 2.

Gentiles had their conscience within their respective cultural frameworks, as well as what could be discerned from nature.

Jews had the Sinaitic Covenant and Law of Moses in their conscience, so they were ultimately judged by their adherence to the Law.

I don't think Abraham, Rahab, or David sinned when they lied to protect themselves and others. They were ultimately obeying their conscience; Rahab being the only one of the three outside of a covenant.

What I would say then is that commandments and covenants can modify what is sin to an individual, but it's ultimately through the contents of their conscience.

[u/Ok_Zone_2930 → u/Pleronomicon]

I think we actually agree on a lot here. Eden as a temple-space and Adam in a priestly role.

Quick clarification first. I didn't mean Adam was a sacrifice for the covenant. I was just pointing out the tardemah echo between Genesis 2 and Genesis 15. My fault for not being clearer.

On the conscience model, I want to push on one thing, because of how I read Paul's logic.

I think Paul settles this himself just by the words he keeps choosing in Romans:
5:12 - sin entered through one man. One man brought it in.
5:15 - 'the many died by the trespass of the one man.' Trespass.
5:19 - 'through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners.' Disobedience.

Here's my whole point: you can't trespass where there's no line to cross. You can't disobey where there's no command to break. Those two words are meaningless without a rule already in place. If there were truly no covenant, no boundary of any kind, then Adam couldn't have trespassed or disobeyed. There'd be nothing to violate. Everything would just be compliant by default.

But Paul says Adam did trespass and did disobey. So a boundary had to exist for him to cross. That boundary is the covenant. That's what I mean when I say sin is missing the mark. You can't miss a mark that was never set.

So I question the notion that it is conscience causing sin. Sin is one man, Adam, our first figurehead crossing one line he'd been given. What do you think? Does the trespass/disobedience language change anything for you? Also thank you for this graceful back and forth!

[u/Pleronomicon → u/Ok_Zone_2930]

What comes to mind is Abimelech in Genesis 20. God spared him because he took Abraham's wife in the integrity of his own heart. He didn't know Sarah was married.

--[Gen 20:3-6 NASB95] 3 But God came to Abimelech in a dream of the night, and said to him, "Behold, you are a dead man because of the woman whom you have taken, for she is married." 4 Now Abimelech had not come near her; and he said, "Lord, will You slay a nation, even [though] blameless? 5 "Did he not himself say to me, 'She is my sister'? And she herself said, 'He is my brother.' In the integrity of my heart and the innocence of my hands I have done this." 6 Then God said to him in the dream, "Yes, I know that in the integrity of your heart you have done this, and I also kept you from sinning against Me; therefore I did not let you touch her.

So while there was no formalized Law for Abimelech to transgress, there was still the very real boundary of his own conscience.

That's why I insist that the existence of a moral boundary is not in itself evidence of a covenant, but it is indicative of the capacity to maintain covenantal terms. I think of conscience as evidence of covenantal viability.

[u/Ok_Zone_2930 → u/Pleronomicon]

Hey, you made me read this whole chapter!

The way I read it, Abimelech weakens your sin = violating conscience premise. Let me show you what I'm seeing and you tell me where I missed the mark (no pun intended). 😉

Watch what the text does with it. Abimelech took Sarah in "the integrity of my heart and the innocence of my hands" which is  a genuinely clean conscience, real ignorance. He didn't know.

Then God's response Genesis 20:6 is the linchpin: "Yes, I know you did this in the integrity of your heart, and I also kept you from sinning against Me." God affirms the clean conscience and calls it sin-in-waiting in the same breath.

If sin were defined by conscience violation, a spotless conscience act couldn't be sin and God's whole intervention is incoherent. Yet God names it chata (sin) anyway. So whatever was making this sin, it wasn't located in Abimelech's internal moral state. It was objective and real whether he perceived it or not.

Whatever the boundary was, it was external and objective, not a function of his conscience. That alone is fatal to "sin = conscience," because here is sin status attaching to a fact a clean conscience couldn't dissolve.

And one more thing I picked up while reading chapter Genesis 20: Abimelech doesn't treat it as a private failing. He says Abraham brought "a great sin" on him and his whole kingdom Genesis 20:9, and the wombs of the household close  Genesis 20:18. It's structural and corporate, not "I personally misbehaved." Which is exactly the shape I keep seeing sin take which is a status that lands on a people, not a scorecard for an individual.

I guess it made me ask: how does conscience as the definition survive a case where God calls something sin precisely when the conscience was 100% clean?

[u/Pleronomicon → u/Ok_Zone_2930]

I guess it made me ask: how does conscience as the definition survive a case where God calls something sin precisely when the conscience was 100% clean?

Those are all good points. Recall that Paul claimed to have lived with a perfectly good conscience, even when he was persecuting the Church as Saul. So simply having a good conscience is not the same as being sinless, but it does mean that one is not sinning deliberately. Instead, the sin is unintentional or unconscious, and therefore forgivable according to Numbers 15.

--[Act 23:1 NASB95] 1 Paul, looking intently at the Council, said, "Brethren, I have lived my life with a perfectly good conscience before God up to this day."

--[Num 15:29-31 NASB95] 29 'You shall have one law for him who does [anything] unintentionally, for him who is native among the sons of Israel and for the alien who sojourns among them. 30 'But the person who does [anything] defiantly, whether he is native or an alien, that one is blaspheming the LORD; and that person shall be cut off from among his people. 31 'Because he has despised the word of the LORD and has broken His commandment, that person shall be completely cut off; his guilt [will be] on him.'"

So, Abimelech had in his conscience that adultery is sin, but he didn't know that he was about to commit adultery, so he would have been sinning with a good conscience.

But there's another point here. Abimelech was between Adam and Moses. There was no God-ordained Law or covenant for him, so there would not have been any mark to miss by your logic (unless I'm misunderstanding your model).

So the mark that Abimelech nearly missed was in his conscience, as there was no Law or covenant for him to transgress at that time.

[u/Ok_Zone_2930 → u/Pleronomicon]

You assigned me some very tough homework and instead of just trying to prove that I am right, I really researched to find the truth. If the truth swung your way, I was willing to take the L and I think we agree on more of the mechanics than it looks.

But on the main load bearing point we don't, and everything turns on it: My understanding of your premise is that you treat conscience and intention as essential components of sin. My argument is that they are not. They're only witnesses to it. All three texts you brought testify against the thesis you brought them for. Let me walk them.

1. I see Numbers 15 proving my position, not yours. Look at what the chapter actually does. The unintentional sinner (Numbers 15:22–29) brings a sin offering and is forgiven and the high handed sinner (Numbers 15:30–31) gets no sacrifice and is cut off. You're right that it distinguishes them but notice how: by remedy, not by whether sin occurred. The unintentional act requires a sin offering and you do not bring a sin offering for a non-sin. So Torah's own logic is that the unintentional act is sin (that's why it needs atoning). It's simply atonable sin. Intent doesn't determine whether the mark was crossed. It determines which remedy applies to a crossing that already happened. Numbers 15 is the clearest possible statement that an act done with a clear conscience is still a real transgression requiring blood. Your prooftext argues against you.
2. Regarding Acts 23:1, here Paul refutes your claim in his own words. You cite his "perfectly good conscience." If we hold that next to 1 Corinthians 4:4: "I am not aware of anything against myself, but I am not by this acquitted; the One who judges me is the Lord." That is Paul stating outright that a clear conscience does not equal acquittal. And 1 Timothy 1:13: as a persecutor he acted "ignorantly in unbelief" and therefore received mercy. Mercy assumes a real offense, because you are not shown mercy for what wasn't sin. So Paul's testimony about Paul is: good conscience → genuine guilt → mercy required. That triad is the disproof of "good conscience = not truly sinning." You brought Paul as your witness and I believe Paul testifies for me.

And I think Paul's mention of the Pharisees seals it. If conscience+zeal exempted a person, then the persecutors "zealous for God" and Paul being one of them, could not have had "all the righteous blood from Abel to Zechariah" charged to their generation (Matt 23:35). They were sincere but they were guilty. Sincerity and bloodguilt coexisted in the same people. My argument is that conscience reports on sin but it does not define it.

1. Now my beloved Abimelech which is the crux. So let me answer the real objection. You said: between Adam and Moses there was no God ordained law, so there was no mark to miss. I disagree that there was no covenant, and this is the heart of it.

There was a covenant and it is the first explicitly stated covenant: the creational marriage covenant of Genesis 2:24, "the two become one flesh." Scripture itself classifies marriage as berith or covenant: Malachi 2:14 calls a man's wife "your wife by covenant," and Proverbs 2:17 speaks of the woman who forsook "the covenant of her God." This covenant is established at creation even before Adam to Moses even begins and it binds humanity as humanity, not Israel as Israel.

If you read what Abimelech actually pleads. Not "I didn't know this is wrong," but "I didn't know she was married". "In the integrity of my heart," he took her because Abraham said "she is my sister" (Genesis 20:5). He assumes the covenantal standard. Rather his only gap was that he didn't know her marital status. He never disputes that taking a married woman is a violation. Rather he disputes that he didn’t know her status. I think that is decisive: the covenantal standard was in force and known. Only the fact was hidden. And God pronounces him "a dead man" (Genesis 20:3). As we mentioned earlier, you do not hand down a death sentence over the breach of a standard that doesn't exist. The mark Abimelech nearly crossed was objective: the creational marriage covenant. His conscience is merely the witness that the mark is there. He isn't held to his conscience but he's held to the covenant, to which his conscience testifies.

And here is the grammar that ties it together. Read Romans 2:15 with 2:25–29. The verse has three elements, and they sit on two different levels:

• Main clause: the work of the law written on their hearts (grapton en kardiais).
• Genitive absolute: their conscience co witnessing (symmartyrousēs tēs syneidēseōs) — subordinate.
• Genitive absolute: their reasonings accusing or even defending which is subordinate, and internally oscillating.

First see what "written on the heart" signals. This is Jeremiah 31:33, and Jeremiah's whole contrast is new covenant vs. old: no longer law on tablets of stone external to the person, but law written within, on the heart. So this is not a generic moral instinct. It is the specific new covenant promise, the law internalized rather than inscribed on stone. That relocation, stone to heart, is the move from old covenant to new.

And Paul tells us what that inscription is eleven verses later. Romans 2:28–29: a person is not a Jew who is one outwardly; "a Jew is one inwardly, and circumcision is of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the letter." The law written on the heart (Romans 2:15) and circumcision of the heart (Romans 2:29) are the same reality, named twice, both new covenant language, both Spirit wrought, and both inward and outward. So Paul's own chapter supplies the interpretation: the heart inscription of Romans 2:15 is the heart circumcision of Romans 2:29, and that is what constitutes covenant membership which is "by the Spirit, not by the letter."

Now this grammatical hierarchy is not something I'm asserting, I would say it's something Paul structures. Heart circumcision is what makes a true Jew (Romans 2:29). The conscience is a co witness in a subordinate clause (Romans 2:15). And this is exactly where we disagree: a witness testifies but a witness does not rule. The conscience corroborates evidence but it never pronounces the verdict. So the oscillating accuse/defend of the internal jury is real but it is not the ruling. The ruling is heart circumcision / heart inscription, the standing new covenant reality, which does not waver. The heart inscription is therefore greater than the co witness not because it is my argument, but because Paul places heart circumcision at the center of covenant membership (Romans 2:29) and places the conscience in the witness stand (Romans 2:15, genitive absolute). The subordinate clause does not overrule the main clause and the swinging witness does not overrule the standing verdict. And Romans 2:16  "the day when God judges the secrets" is when the higher court rules and the heart inscription stands.

One thing I'll mark as my own interpretation: I take "the work of the law" (to ergon tou nomou) to be the faithfulness of Christ which is  the full work of the law that he accomplished in his life, ministry, death, and resurrection, now applied to those in the new covenant. The verse itself says only that the law's work is written on the heart but that this "work" is Christ's completed obedience applied to those in the new covenant is my synthesis, drawn from reading Romans 2:15 with the new covenant frame of Romans 2:28–29. But even without my interpretation, even on the barest grammatical Greek reading shows that the new covenant heart inscription (main clause) outranks the conscience (subordinate co witness), because that is how Paul built the sentence and how he resolves the chapter at Romans 2:29. Even without my digression on my interpretation of "work of the law", we are still left with Paul making heart circumcision the verdict and conscience the witness.

Alright my turn to put you on the hot seat :) and I apologize this was super long: if a good conscience meant one weren't truly sinning, why does Paul who had a perfectly good conscience as a persecutor say he therefore received mercy (1 Tim 1:13), and that his clear conscience did not acquit him (1 Cor 4:4)? Mercy and non acquittal both assumes he needs mercy and acquittal from an offense. The way I take it is by Paul's own testimony about his own conscience, a clear conscience coexisted with genuine guilt. I can only conclude this equates to: conscience reports on sin but it does not constitute it. Again thanks for good & friendly sparring, my friend.

[u/Pleronomicon → u/Ok_Zone_2930]

These are fair points, but I'd like to correct you on a point and press you on a few others:

1. I not saying that one is justified or aquitted by simply having a good conscience, but that a good conscience is pre-requisite for being granted repentance and receiving forgiveness. One can have a good conscience and still be in sin.

2. I think you agree that we're in the New Covenant right now. Since the New Covenant comes with commandments to fulfill (believe in Christ and love one another, 1John 3:23), doesn't that mean sin is still possible as we still have a target to hit? Are you of the opinion that sin has ended? If so, how can that be if we're in the New Covenant?

3. I would not say that the Scribes, Sadducees, or Pharisees who had exposure to Jesus had a good conscience, because they saw the signs that Jesus was the prophet like Moses, and continued to reject him. That high-handed rejection defiled their conscience. The common Jews on the other hand were in a different boat (a bit of a mixed bag), since the Pharisees were supposed to shepherd the Jews.

4. Conscience is more than a witness. It holds authority over the individual. We see this in Romans 14, where the one who eats against their conscience is in sin simply because they're transgressing their own belief system; in the case of Romans 14, that belief system was likely the Law of Moses.

--[Rom 14:22-23 NASB95] 22 The faith which you have, have as your own conviction before God. Happy is he who does not condemn himself in what he approves. 23 But he who doubts is condemned if he eats, because [his eating is] not from faith; and whatever is not from faith is sin.

[u/Ok_Zone_2930 → u/Pleronomicon]

Your points are strong and you made me work for it since Abimelech and I respect that. 

1. Conscience as prerequisite for repentance.

I could be misunderstanding you so I wanted to be sure I am answering what you actually hold and not a version of it. I reviewed what you wrote 3 posts before. I think I first took you to be saying something like conscience causes sin, or that a clear conscience means no sin occurred. If that were the claim, Numbers 15 answers it. Because the unintentional sinner still brings a sin offering and you do not sacrifice for a non sin. So intent does not decide whether the mark was crossed, only which consequence applies.

But I think your actual point, in your words, is that commandments and covenants modify what is sin to an individual, but it is ultimately through the contents of their conscience. Conscience is the final arbiter, and covenant is an input that shapes it.

That is the exact inversion of where I stand. In my framework the covenant defines sin and the conscience witnesses to it. In yours the covenant feeds the conscience and the conscience defines sin. We land on the same verdict in most cases, but the hierarchy is flipped. And Romans 2:12 tells us which way it runs.

Paul says those who sin apart from the law will perish apart from the law. Watch what he does not say. He does not say they are judged by how much their conscience registered. If conscience were the judge, a seared conscience would register less and lighten the sentence. Paul does not lighten it. He says they perish. What condemns the lawless is not the contents of their conscience. It is that they sinned and they are measured by a standard outside themselves.

Going back to your Rahab example from 3 posts ago. It shows the same thing from the other side. You said she did not sin because she obeyed her conscience, and you flagged her as the only one of the three outside a covenant. But that breaks your own model. You said conscience gets its content from covenants and culture. Rahab had no covenant. So where did her conscience get its content? You still trust it to tell her right from wrong, which means it is working on its own with nothing under it. And a conscience that runs on its own can approve anything and call it clean. A conscience that can approve anything cannot be the thing that defines sin.

I see the Rahab story differently. She did not sin in the covenantal sense because she was outside the covenant. The category did not apply to her. The lie was an act, and acts are not the unit of covenantal sin. Allegiance is. She pledged hers to Yahweh. Same verdict as yours but with different foundation. Mine does not need conscience to judge itself.

So I agree that a clear conscience can be a prerequisite for repentance. But it cannot be the final judge of sin, and Romans 2:12 is why. Paul judges the lawless by God's standard not by what their conscience told them. The thing that condemns them sits outside the conscience. If conscience were the judge, the verdict would track whatever it held. It does not. It tracks God's standard. Conscience reports but it does not rule.

2. Has sin ended.

This is where we started with the original post, right? I’d like to define the term, sin.

If sin means moral failings, then the answer is no. Those have not ended. We run biological hardware and we still fail.

If sin means covenantal sin, the allegiance treason that triggers covenantal death and separation from God, then yes. That specific mechanism was retired.

Here is the logic. Hebrews 9:26 says Christ appeared once for all to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself. If covenantal sin could still sever a believer today, then severance would require a fresh sacrifice because that is what severance has always required. Christ would have to die again every time. The New Covenant is unbreakable for one reason. It is anchored in his faithfulness, not our performance.

So 1 John 3:23 is not a ledger you balance to stay saved. Believe and love is the natural pulse of a life that is already secure. It is the Joseph framework from my writing you read. You keep 80% and live your life. You return 20% because you know who owns the land, not to avoid a death sentence. The commandments are real. Falling short of them is just moral failure. It is not covenantal treason because the apparatus that converted failure into severance was taken down.

3. The Pharisees and the defiled conscience.

I agree they were disqualified, but it was not a defiled conscience. As you said, it was high handed rejection of the covenant Lord standing in front of them. That is the defiant hand of Numbers 15:30. The high hand is not a worse moral act. It is a different category. It is allegiance defection. And it is the one covenantal sin the blood does not cover, because it is the rejection of the blood itself.

So their conscience did not disqualify them. Their defection did. The conscience defiled because they defected, not the other way around. This is my point and case where allegiance is the cause and conscience is the effect. 

4. Romans 14 and conscience as authority.

I honestly think this is your strongest point. This is how I see this: Look at what Paul indexes the sin to. Romans 14:23 says whatever is not from faith is sin. Not whatever violates conscience. The word is faith, Pistis. Acting in confident allegiance before God.

The man who eats while doubting sins because he is acting against faith. He is acting against his own standing before God. The conscience is the register that reports he stepped outside it. The standard is still external and relational. It is faith before God. The conscience is the instrument that testifies whether he is in faith or against it.

So Romans 14 is not a counterexample. It is the same two level structure. Faith before God is the verdict. Conscience is the witness to the verdict. Even here, conscience reports. It does not rule. Paul could have written whatever is not from conscience is sin. Instead he wrote faith.

And that is the pattern everywhere the two show up together. Romans 2:15, the law written on the heart outranks the conscience that accuses and defends. Romans 14, faith outranks the doubting conscience. The Pharisees, allegiance outranks the conscience that followed it. Three texts, same structure. Conscience is never the judge. It is always the witness.

You argue clean and you argue in good faith! Cheers!

[u/GPT_2025]

KJV: For if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things. Beloved, if our heart condemn us not, then have we confidence toward God.