What "Sin" Meant to Me

Words to Know

Sin — in the prophets, almost always a public act involving money or power.

Usury — charging interest on a loan, especially to someone desperate.

Parable — a short story with a point. I told dozens. Most of them involve money.

This is the biggest single swap in the whole book. It is worth one short lesson on its own.

Go back to the prophets from Lesson 5 and make a list.

Here is what they were angry about. All of it. I am not leaving anything out.

• Judges taking bribes (Amos 5:12; Isaiah 1:23)
• False weights and rigged scales (Amos 8:5; Micah 6:11)
• Charging interest to desperate people (Ezekiel 22:12)
• Holding back a man’s wages overnight when he needs them tonight (Jeremiah 22:13; Malachi 3:5)
• Taking a widow’s house (Micah 2:9; Isaiah 10:2)
• Buying up your neighbors’ farms until the village is one estate (Isaiah 5:8; Micah 2:2)
• Selling poor people into servitude over small debts (Amos 2:6, 8:6)
• Cheating orphans in court (Isaiah 1:23; Jeremiah 5:28)
• Rulers who build with forced labor (Jeremiah 22:13–17)
• Priests who profit from the arrangement and call it holy (Micah 3:11; Jeremiah 6:13)

Ten items. Twenty addresses. Pick one at random and go look. I said I was not leaving anything out, and a sentence like that is worthless unless you can test it.

Now count how much of that is private.

None of it.

Every single item is public. Every one involves money or power. Every one is done in daylight, by respected men. And most of it was perfectly legal.

You should stop me right there, because Lesson 4 printed laws against half of that list. Interest to the poor: banned. Holding back a man’s wages: banned. Rigged scales: banned. Tilted courts: banned. Permanent land accumulation: banned every fifty years.

So how was any of it legal?

Three reasons, and they are the same three from Lesson 3.

The bans had no enforcement. Go back and read them. No court is named. No officer is named. No penalty is set, no fine, no procedure. They are addressed to a man’s conscience, and a conscience is not a court.

The contracts did have enforcement. A written loan with land as security was enforced by the ruler’s court and the ruler’s men, under the law actually in use — Herodian, with Roman above it. Two systems, and only one of them had a bailiff.

And where the ban had teeth, there was a device. The seven-year cancellation had the prosbul, which put the debt into a court’s hands so the cancellation could not reach it. For the interest ban, the device was to write the contract for more than the sum actually handed over.

So the word “legal” is exact. Not unpunished. Legal. That is the whole problem, and it is why the prophets shouted instead of suing.

Now go listen to a sermon and make the same list.

You will find that sin has become almost entirely a private matter. Mostly about the body. Mostly sexual. Mostly something one person does behind a door.

Why did that happen?

Be fair about it first. Private behavior is genuinely part of the tradition, and I taught about it myself. I will show you that in a second.

And it is true that a religion of private conduct can be preached anywhere, under any government, in any economy, for two thousand years, without ever costing a powerful man a single coin. It gives everybody something to feel about themselves and nothing to do about anybody else.

But notice that this explains why such a religion survives. It does not explain how it got built. “Somebody benefited” is not a cause. A cause has people in it, and dates.

So here is the cause, in four steps. Every one is checkable, and Units Two and Three go through them properly.

One. The target disappeared. The prophets were accusing the rulers of their own nation — their own courts, their own kings, their own priests. In AD 70 Rome destroyed Jerusalem and burned the Temple, and there was no nation left to accuse. Within a generation the movement was a small minority in Greek-speaking cities in somebody else’s empire, with no power over any court anywhere.

You cannot demand honest scales in a country you do not run.

Two. The surviving letters told people to sit down. Look at what the instructions in your own New Testament actually are. Be subject to the governing authorities (Romans 13:1). Slaves, obey your masters (Ephesians 6:5; Colossians 3:22; 1 Peter 2:18; Titus 2:9).

Those are documents written for a minority keeping its head down. They are not a farmhand shouting in a royal chapel. They are survival instructions — and they became scripture.

Three. The lists changed, and this is the one to check with your own eyes. The New Testament letters have lists of what is wrong with people: 1 Corinthians 6:9–10, Galatians 5:19–21, Romans 1:26–27, 1 Timothy 1:9–10. Read all four. It takes ten minutes.

Greed and theft are on them, which is to the writers’ credit. But rigged scales are not. Neither is taking a widow’s farm, or holding back a laborer’s wage overnight, or building with forced labor, or a judge on the take.

Put Amos 5 on one side of the table and 1 Corinthians 6 on the other. They are not the same list. You are looking straight at the change.

Four. Then the movement became the government. In AD 313 the emperor Constantine made it legal. In AD 380 the emperor Theodosius made it the official religion of the empire. Bishops became imperial officials with land, courts and tax exemptions.

A church whose patrons are the rich cannot run Amos as a sermon series. It still has to preach something. What is left is your conduct.

And then the church made private sin into a machine. Private confession — one person, one room, a list of acts, a penance priced for each one — grew up in Irish and British monasteries and spread across Europe from about the sixth century. The handbooks the priests used to price those penances are crowded with what people did with their bodies. In 1215 a great council at Rome made private confession compulsory for every Christian at least once a year. ¹

Now look at that machine and ask what will fit through it.

One man’s act, done in private, that he can name in a single sentence.

Now try to confess a rigged market. Try to confess a system you are part of, and profit from, and did not build. Try to bring the price of wheat into that room.

It does not fit. So it fell out of the religion — not because anybody voted on it, but because the equipment could not hold it.

By sin, we meant a thing done in a courtroom. You made it a thing done in a bedroom.

Now the fair part, because I promised.

Do not let anyone use this lesson to make me sound like a man with no standards. I was not.

On divorce I was stricter than the law of my own society, which let a man dismiss his wife with a certificate. I said no (Mark 10:2–12).

And the reason is the opposite of what you would assume. A dismissed woman in my country had no property, no income, and no standing. My rule was not about purity. It was about a man being able to throw a woman into poverty because he felt like it. I closed it.

On the inside, I went further than the tradition, not less far. I said holding a man in contempt puts you in the same place as murder. I said looking at a woman as a thing to acquire puts you in the same place as adultery (Matthew 5:21–28).

So I was demanding. I was more demanding than your church is, in both directions at once.

What I was not was selective.

And the selection that has been done to me, keeping the private demands and quietly dropping the public ones, is the most useful thing anybody ever did with my name.

Do the arithmetic yourself.

Money, debt, wages and the poor take up more room in my recorded words than anything except the kingdom itself. The usual count is around 280 verses and about 16 of the parables. ²

Now set that beside everything I am recorded as saying about sexual conduct. You could read the whole of it aloud in a couple of minutes.

Now think about the last year of sermons you heard.

If those two ratios are flipped, and in most churches they are flipped hard, then you are not being taught by me.

You are being taught by somebody using my name to talk about their own priorities.

The only question worth asking is whose priorities those are, and who benefits from the swap.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Isaiah 1:11–17.

You will find: God rejecting worship, then giving a list of what to do instead. Notice every item on the list is public.

The Short Version

• The prophets’ idea of sin was public: courts, wages, scales, land.
• Today’s idea of sin is private and mostly about the body.
• A private-sin religion never costs a powerful person anything. That is why it won.
• I was strict about private conduct too — but I was not selective, and the selection is the problem.

Think About It

1. Add up last year’s sermons in your head. Which list did they come from?
2. Who is more comfortable when sin is private?