I’m not dead; I’ve just been busy. My biking blog will eventually explain in detail.
In the Bible, the crux of sin was not in the actions you took. The matter of disobedience was itself secondary. The central core issue was always disloyalty to God. If He owns you, He will not share you. I keep saying that faith is personal, not objective. What saves you is submission to His lordship. It’s that personal connection to Him. Even confession is secondary; you should not confess what is not first true of your faith. Confession is a privilege that God must bestow by His grace.
Heiser cites very early in one podcast the example of King David. This is the man who obtained a personal promise from God about his dynasty, right up there with Abraham and very few others. David was one of the messiest servants God ever had. His moral failures are too numerous to count. Yet, the one thing on which he never failed in the slightest was his personal loyalty to Jehovah. This is why the Lord tolerated his failures, doting on him like a very indulgent father.
David genuinely loved God his whole life long. If you need a text, look up David’s life.
From this context, we understand that idolatry is the key to the meaning of “sin”. The concept cannot be objectified; it cannot be reduced to intellectual definitions. Sin is defined as the failure of personal loyalty to Christ. We can give examples of what that might look like in actual practice, and both testaments do that very well. But some of those examples are purely contextual. I’m pretty sure you would have a hard time worshiping Nehushtan, the bronze serpent Moses formed during the wilderness journey.
The issue with Nehushtan was displacing the nation’s loyalty to Jehovah. Any displacement of that personal loyalty is idolatry in effect. Idolatry is not the symbols, but defiling your relationship with the Lord. All “sin” is idolatry in effect. Do you give any measure of your loyalty (AKA faith) to anything but God? Even trusting in yourself is defiling.
The modern western instinct to trust in science and reason displaces God. Just because you can observe and accurately estimate what actions will result in desired objectives, it does not mean nobody in the Spirit Realm (AKA the Unseen Realm) can get involved. The Spirit Realm cannot be evaluated by intellect. What any human decides outside of Christ is, by default, under the guidance of any number of unseen beings who hate humans and want us all roasting in Hell. There is no neutral ground, no neutral agency between God and His opposition. There is no part of our universe that is not subject to adjustment by God or the Darkness.
Another commentator in the podcast pointed out that English Bible translations tend to confuse cult sacrifice with giving due honor to someone or some symbol of authority. Even in the Old Testament, it was perfectly honorable and righteous, and even expected, to bow before one’s own fleshly father, never mind a clan chief or king. There is a certain level of human loyalty required, whether the person being honored is morally good or not. It’s actually part of divine revelation that we honor whomever holds the place of father and mother (not just the individual persons). That honor would include public displays of obeisance.
This also included gifts as discussed in the series on Leviticus. However, the act of making sacrificial offerings was in the ancient mind distinctly different. It’s not a question of liking money; it’s liking money enough that it displaces your loyalty to Christ. Materialism itself is the problem, not enjoying prosperity. As long as you are quite clear in your life orientation that God is the Provider of all things, there’s no sin rejoicing in His marks of favor.
