Hamartano is used a number of times in 1 Corinthians, but hamartia doesn’t come up until chapter 15. Paul first tells believers to flee from fornication because every other sin is outside the body, while sexual sin is a sin against one’s own body (6:18). But to marry is not to commit a sin (v. …
Our Bodies as Sinstruments
Sin is one of the great themes of Romans. The word hamartia occurs 48 times in this book. Jews and Gentiles are both of them under sin, which Paul has proven (3:9). No one shall be justified by the deeds of the law because the law brings knowledge of sin (3:20). This being the case, …
Sin Came Before the Jews Did
It is not surprising that the book of Romans, the book that shows the revelation of God’s righteousness, does so against the backdrop of man’s sinfulness. There are so many uses of the words we have been considering that we will have to divide our treatment of this book in two, with the first installment …
A Mysterious Absence
The word hamartano is used once by Luke in Acts, where it is rendered as offend (Acts 25:8). The apostle Paul was defending himself against Festus, and says that he has not offended in any way — whether against the law of the Jews, or against the temple, or against Caesar. He was not standing …
Sin and Sins
The Johannine use of hamartano and hamartia is straightforward. After Jesus had healed the lame man at Bethesda, He told him to go and sin no more (hamartano), lest a worse fate befall him (5:14). He does something similar, but with a very different tone, with the woman caught in the act of adultery (8:11). …
Sin in Luke
The word hamartano is found in two sections of Luke, used twice in each place. The first is where it is rendered as sin (Luke 15:18,21), and in the second as trespass. The first place is where the prodigal son confesses to his father that he has sinned. In the second passage, Jesus says that …
Only God
Mark does not use the word hamartano, but he does use hamartia six times. He tells us that John the Baptist came and preached the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins (1:4). In the next verse, all of Judea came out to be baptized, confessing their sins (1:5). In the next chapter, Jesus …
In Which We Have All Majored
We come now to the words from which we derive the name of our little study — hamartiology, the study of sin, in which all of us have majored. Those words are hamartano and hamartia respectively. They are used so often in the New Testament that we will have to take our time in order …
When Ignorance Is a Sin
The word amathes means unlearned, and it is used once in the New Testament. Peter is talking about how the apostle Paul is sometimes difficult to understand. This means that there are things in his letters which unstable and unlearned people twist to their own destruction (2 Pet. 3:16). Here the problem is obviously not …
Unprofitable Experiences
The New Testament describes sins of omission in different ways. One of them is found in Heb. 13:17, where the saints are told to avoid making their rulers’ assigned task a grief. They are to be the kind of parishioners that are a joy to serve, not a grief. When this is not done, the …