What Is Sin?

“Come now, let us reason together,”
    says the Lord.
“Though your sins are like scarlet,
    they shall be as white as snow;
though they are red as crimson,
    they shall be like wool.”
-        Isaiah 1:18 

Part of the work that many of us have to do is unlearning some of the religious language that has been layered on top of the bible. So let’s decode the religious language here and unpack this idea of sin. 

When Isaiah wrote “Though your sins are like scarlet,” that term ‘sin’ was a catch-all phrase that people would have understood perhaps better than us. For us, let’s think of sin as breaking our healthy connection with God, with others, and with ourselves. We could call it dysfunction or brokenness. It’s when things are not the way they are supposed to be.

Now let’s think some about shame – another really loaded word.

We could think of shame as the result of the dysfunction called sin. Shame is the new way we think of ourselves as a result of having an unhealthy connection with God, with others, or with ourselves. So sin is the action and shame is the result.

We’ll be unpacking the work of shame the rest of the week, but for today take a little time and sit with the words ‘sin’ and ‘shame.’ How do they sit with you? Do they trigger you? What might it look like for you to enter into this week of devotions with curiousity?