What Is Sin?

Not the Same Word as 'Crime'

Here's the problem with the word 罪. In everyday Japanese, it sits right next to 犯罪 (crime), and 罪人 (tsumibito) reads naturally as 'criminal.' So when someone hears 'you are a sinner,' the honest, reasonable reaction is: 'I've never broken the law. I pay my taxes, I've never hurt anyone on purpose; I'm not a sinner.' That reaction isn't stubborn or defensive. It's correct, given what the word sounds like. The trouble is that the Bible isn't using a courtroom word at all.

You already have a category that fits much better, even if you've never thought of it as religious. When something has gone wrong (an accident, a death in the family, a run of bad luck), many people in Japan visit a shrine for お祓い (oharai), a purification. Nobody assumes the person receiving it committed a crime. The idea is that something has come between them and what's whole, or clean, or right, and it can't simply be ignored.

That instinct is much closer to what the Bible means by 罪 than a courtroom is, and later in this lesson we'll see where the Bible goes further. 罪 isn't first about breaking the laws of a country. It's about a relationship: turning away from the God who made you and going your own way, which leaves you in a state of being separated from him (神から離れている状態), the way a relationship between two people can crack. So let's say this plainly, because the mistranslation runs deep: 罪 does not mean 犯罪. Being told you carry 罪 is not being called a criminal. It's being told that something has come between you and the God who made you.

Missing the Mark

The New Testament word most often translated 'sin' is the Greek hamartia, and its basic sense is missing the mark. Picture an archer who draws, aims for the center of the target, and releases, and the arrow lands wide. Not because the archer is a monster or a fraud, but because the arrow didn't land where it was aimed. That's one picture underneath the English word 'sin' and the Japanese word 罪: a shortfall from what we were made for, rather than proof that a person is unusually wicked. (The Bible has other pictures too. It also calls sin stepping over a line God drew, and turning away from him. Missing the mark is a starting place, not the whole story.)

Think of the patience you meant to have with your parents this morning, the promise you meant to keep, the apology you meant to make and didn't get around to. None of that makes you a criminal. It does mean something isn't working quite the way it's supposed to, in you, and, the Bible would say, between you and God.

Notice whose target it is, though. The mark isn't a standard you set for yourself; if it were, you could just lower it. It's what God made us for: to love him with everything we are, and to love the people around us as ourselves, the two commands Jesus named as the greatest. Measured against that target, nobody hits the center. That's why the Bible describes the problem not only as letting ourselves down, but as falling short of God.

You don't need religion to recognize this gap, but the apostle Paul described it about as honestly as anyone ever has, writing to a young church in Rome. He wrote in the first person, not to accuse somebody else, describing what it is like to know what is good and still be unable to do it in your own strength:

Everyone, Not Especially You

It would be easy to hear all this as a personal accusation, as if the Bible had singled you out for special criticism. It hasn't.

This gap doesn't stay a private, invisible problem between you and God, either. A break at the center tends to show up sideways, in the relationships around it: family conflict that never quite resolves, the urge to compare yourself to others and come up short, the quiet self-criticism running underneath everything, telling you that you're not quite enough.

And it isn't only about guilt, the sense of having done something wrong. It's often just as much about shame, the sense of being something wrong, of not measuring up, of not quite belonging. Both are real. Both matter. Nothing in this lesson is meant to pile more shame onto what you may already be carrying; the goal is to name something honestly enough that it can finally be dealt with, instead of endlessly managed alone.

One of the most quoted lines in the whole New Testament makes the scope of all this explicit, not some people, not the obviously bad ones, but:

Deeper Than Kegare

Early in this lesson we compared 罪 to the instinct behind oharai. Here is where that comparison stops working, and the difference matters. Kegare is usually pictured as something that settles on you from outside, and a ritual can wipe it away. The Bible describes sin as personal: something we do, and something we are caught in, against a person. When King David looked back on the worst thing he had done (taking another man's wife, then arranging that man's death), he prayed to God, 'Against you, and you only, I have sinned.' He had wronged real people terribly. But he saw that underneath every wrong against them was a wrong against the God who made them.

That is why the Bible takes sin so seriously. God is the source of life, and sin is turning away from him, so the Bible names where it leads plainly: death. Not only the end of a body, but being cut off from the One who gives life. No purification ritual, no pile of good deeds, no fresh start on New Year's Day reaches that deep. If this lesson stopped here, it would be very heavy news.

But the Bible almost never says the first half of this without the second. In the same sentence that names the wage sin pays, Paul names a gift:

A Wound That Isn't the End of the Story

The prophet Isaiah, writing roughly seven hundred years before Jesus, pictured this condition with an image almost anyone can recognize, whether or not they've ever kept sheep: wandering. Sheep don't stray out of malice; they follow whatever is in front of them until they're lost. But notice the verb Isaiah chooses: each one 'has turned to his own way.' It is drift, and it is also a choice we keep making. That's a truer picture of 罪 than 'criminal', and an honest one.

But Isaiah doesn't stop at the diagnosis. In the very same breath, he says something that stops readers short: the weight of all that wandering was laid on someone else. He doesn't fully explain who; people have puzzled over exactly who 'he' is for more than two thousand years. What matters for now is the shape of the claim, that whatever needed to be carried, someone else agreed to carry it.

This is where this lesson has to stop short of the whole answer, on purpose. Naming 罪 honestly, not as crime, but as a real separation that shows up in both guilt and shame, is only half the story. The other half is what, if anything, could be done about a gap this size. Next lesson looks directly at the strangest part of the Christian claim: that God did not leave that question for us to solve alone. Isaiah's own words point straight at it:

Key Words

Sin (罪, tsumi)

Not 'crime': turning away from God and falling short of what he made us for, which leaves us separated from him. Serious enough that its wage is death, and shared by everyone, not proof that you are unusually wicked.

Hamartia

The New Testament's most common Greek word for 'sin', with the basic sense of missing the mark. The Bible also pictures sin as stepping over a line and as turning away from God.

Kegare (穢れ)

A Japanese sense of ritual impurity needing purification: closer to the Bible's picture of sin than 'crime' is. The difference: sin is personal, against God himself, and no ritual can remove it.

• 'Sin' doesn't mean 'crime.' The Bible is describing something relational, not a legal record.
• 'Missing the mark' pictures a gap between what God made us for and where we actually land, not proof that you're unusually bad.
• This gap is universal. 'All,' not you specifically.
• It shows up as both guilt (what I did) and shame (who I feel I am); the Bible speaks to both.
• Sin is serious: the Bible says its wage is death, and no ritual or effort can wash it away. In the same sentence, it offers eternal life as a free gift.
• Naming it honestly isn't the end of the story. Next lesson: what God did about it.

For Reflection

1. When do you feel that gap most? Does it change anything to think of it as falling short of what God made you for, not only of your own standards?
2. Does thinking of 'sin' as a gap or a separation, rather than a crime, feel different? How?
3. Is there a difference, for you, between feeling guilty for something you did and feeling ashamed of who you are?

A Prayer, If You Want One

God, if you're really there, I don't fully understand this word 'sin' yet. But I recognize the gap it's pointing to, and I'm starting to see that it isn't only between the person I mean to be and the person I am. It's between me and you. If you already know about that gap and haven't written me off because of it, I'd like to find out what you did about it. Amen.