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1 John: Sinless and Sin Less, Part 2: Evil and Missing the Mark

Sin is one of the key things that John is writing about in his short letter so I thought that we might spend some time looking into what the Bible means when it speaks about sin.

EVIL

Sin, in the Bible, can be defined a few different ways: there is the word Awon, which refers to a deep moral evil that is mentioned in Amos and a few other places.[ii]

MISSING THE MARK

The Greek word for ‘sinned’ in this passage, hamartanō, carries with it the classic definition of sin that we have probably heard before: that of ‘missing the mark’. It brings to mind the idea of an archer shooting for a target and falling short, missing the target. On the surface this seems innocuous enough but… if we find out that that archer is William Tell – who is famous because he shoots apples off of people’s heads – and if we then find out that the apple is about to be placed on our head, it becomes important. You don’t want him to miss the mark. William Tell, of course, was to shoot the apples off the heads of his own sons and as if he missed, the consequences were most devastating for both father and son (as is our own sin). When we continually sin the consequences are often fatal.

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