Q. What is sin?
A. Sin is any lack of conformity to, or transgression of, the law of God.
Commentary
This definition is compact, but it reaches every sin that ever was or will be committed. Sin is measured against one standard, the law of God, the perfect expression of His holy character. Whatever agrees with that law is righteous; whatever departs from it in any degree is sin. Sin is not defined by human opinion, cultural consensus, or personal feeling, and it is not finally an offense against our neighbor or ourselves but against God, whose law it breaks. Until we see sin as God sees it, measured by His law and aimed against His majesty, we will never grasp its seriousness or our need of a Savior.
The catechism names two ways the law is broken. The first is any lack of conformity to it. This covers the good we fail to do, the love we withhold, the duties we leave undone, and the corruption of nature in which we are born. A man may break no visible commandment and still fall short, for the law requires not only outward acts but inward purity, and the absence of righteousness is itself sinful. The second is any transgression of the law, the positive doing of what God forbids. Here are the sins of commission, the open acts of rebellion in thought, word, and deed. As John writes, “sin is lawlessness” (1 John 3:4). Both the failure to keep the law and the breaking of it leave a man guilty before God.
Seeing sin this clearly humbles every pretension of human goodness. None of us is righteous by the measure of God’s law, whether in what we have done or in what we have left undone. This is no cause for despair but the necessary first step toward grace, for the same God whose law exposes our sin has provided a Redeemer who kept that law perfectly and bore its penalty in the place of His people. The man who feels the weight of his sin is the man prepared to flee to Christ, in whom alone there is forgiveness and a righteousness not his own.
Scripture Proofs
“For sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law” (Romans 5:13).
“Everyone who makes a practice of sinning also practices lawlessness; sin is lawlessness” (1 John 3:4).
2nd London Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689
6.2: Our first parents, by this sin, fell from their original righteousness and communion with God, and we in them whereby death came upon all: all becoming dead in sin, and wholly defiled in all the faculties and parts of soul and body.
6.3: They being the root, and by God’s appointment, standing in the room and stead of all mankind, the guilt of the sin was imputed, and corrupted nature conveyed, to all their posterity descending from them by ordinary generation, being now conceived in sin, and by nature children of wrath, the servants of sin, the subjects of death, and all other miseries, spiritual, temporal, and eternal, unless the Lord Jesus set them free.