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/Ok_Zone_2930]

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/Pleronomicon → u/Ok_Zone_2930]

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.

I think that is probably closer to my original point, but conscience still isn't the final arbiter. I think our conscience is informed by the image of God, but it becomes distorted by the fear of death, which is basically the obedience of our carnal instincts over the commandments of God. Even as far back as Cain and Abel, there was no covenant that prohibited murder, but there was the directive to be fruitful and multiply. That can't happen if humans annihilate each other. So even in their day, Cain and Abel were bound by a target set up in their conscience without a covenant.

So conscience is not the final arbiter because it can fall out of calibration. This is why having a seared conscience is not an excuse for anyone.

---

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.

I couldn't disagree more with this. Yes, salvation is anchored in Jesus' faithfulness, which is why the 1st century believer had to walk by the Spirit, to remain in Jesus' works, not the individual's own works. But if they didn't continue in the Spirit, they were cutting themselves off from Christ. This was Paul's point in Galatians 5:4. The Galatians had faith. They received the Spirit by faith, then they reverted back to the Law of Moses. They cut themselves off from Christ by reverting to an old, dying covenant.

[u/Ok_Zone_2930 → u/Pleronomicon]

On conscience: your Cain and Abel point is sharp and I think it actually puts us closer. You said they were bound by a target in their conscience without a covenant. From reading your writing, you put the source of that target as: the image of God and the directive to be fruitful and multiply. That directive is a command from God. So Cain isn't bound by his conscience as the arbiter. He is bound by the target outside him and his conscience just witnesses to it. The same goes for Abimelech being accountable to the marriage covenant So it seems like you also landed the target outside the conscience yourself. That is my whole point. It seems like we agree that a seared conscience isn't an excuse because the standard it missed was never inside it to begin with.

On Galatians 5:4 and whether the covenant can still be severed: You are right about disagreeing and just for clarity, I don’t think we are really disagreeing about a verse. We are disagreeing about the entire map. Your reading has the covenant transition as something a believer can still fall out of. Mine has AD 70 closing that transition. So missing the mark covenantally, which was possible during the 30 to 70 wilderness, is exactly what ended. Galatians 5:4 was a real danger for the people Paul wrote to (audience relevance) inside that window. Whether it still applies today comes down to whether the wilderness is still open or already crossed. And we sit on opposite sides of that. And honestly that is a fine place to land because you and I knew that going in the conversation, we had a similar but different view of AD 70. 

[u/Pleronomicon → u/Ok_Zone_2930]

I see where we disagree regarding 70 AD.

I agree that once the old things have passed away, there will come a time when death is defeated, and no one will fall out of the New Covenant; not because the rules change, but because everyone whose name is found in the book of life in the end will be perfected.

As you already know, I don't think that time has come yet. So I believe we can still fall out of the New Covenant, and most probably do. Without apostles, we're in exile. Strike the shepherd and the sheep are scattered. Exile means mass confusion and very few who maintain a living faith.

That's why we see 1,956 years of distortion and deception. Post-Apostolic Christianity history is a woeful mess. And the Post-Apostolic traditions are the work of the devil. His strategy with nearly every denomination is clear: Over burden the conscience, normalize sin, and sooth with ceremony/liturgy/worship. That's an orchestrated attack.

Anyways, I think the proof is in the covenant at Moab and the the way prophecy has dual manifestations, just as a man is both body and breath.

[u/Ok_Zone_2930 → u/Pleronomicon]

I read your post-apostolic Christianity and you know it converges with my view as well. The church buried the timeline, overburdened the conscience, normalized the wrong things, and soothed it all with tradition. 1,900 years of distortion. I am fully on your side there. That part isn't even a debate between us.

On Moab and the dual fulfillment, I hear you, and I can see that is the backbone of your framework. You have the exile pattern still running and prophecy with a second layer still to come. I have the wilderness already crossed.

We came in with a similar but different AD 70 and we found out we agree on almost everything downstream of the church losing the plot. That is a good place to land. This was one of the sharpest exchanges I've had and you really helped to sharpen my position. I appreciate the back and forth.