Sin as Sinful Work

Everything done against the holy and eternal law of God is sin: “Everyone who commits sin also commits lawlessness,” teaches the Apostle, “and sin is lawlessness.” (1 Jn. 3:4) However, for such violation of the law to be sin properly speaking, it is necessary that both consciousness and freedom participate in it. Wherefore sin is conscious and voluntary violation of a known Divine law, disobedience and resistance to God’s holy will (Saint Tikhon of Voronezh. On True Christianity, 2, Article 3, 1, 40–45). From this it is evident that sin consists not in the limitation of our powers but in their perverse use; not in errors of reason, as though all sin were merely foolishness, but in a corrupted will, by which, even seeing what is good, we do evil. “Whoever knows to do good and does not do it, for him it is sin.” (Jas. 4:17)

Sin is the greatest and most terrible evil: 1) by it God’s Majesty is offended, His eternal and unchangeable law is perverted; a sinning person sets his own will in place of God and willingly submits to it, unwilling to obey God; wherefore by sin he separates himself from God, as the Prophet says: “your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God” (Is. 59:2); and having separated himself from God—the Source of life—he enters the realm of death and under the power of the devil—the chief of sins. “You are of your father the devil,” says the Lord to the wicked Jews (Jn. 8:44); and in general: “everyone who commits sin is of the devil” (1 Jn. 3:8). Wherefore no one could destroy this evil except the Only-begotten Son of God, Who for us humans and for our salvation came down from heaven and became flesh. In this respect, sin is infinite evil; 2) sin promises light but plunges man into darkness: “They did not know”, says the Prophet of sinners, “nor did they understand; they walk about in darkness” (Ps. 81:5); “they shall grope like the blind along the wall, groping as those without eyes would grope; they shall stumble at noon as in the twilight” (Is. 59:10); it promises freedom but casts into slavery, for “everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin” (Jn. 8:34); it promises pleasures but subjects to intolerable torment of conscience, by which “the wicked flee when no one pursues” (Prov. 28:1), “groaning and trembling” like Cain (Gen. 4:12) or Judas the traitor (Matt. 27:5); 3) from sin even the most innocent creature suffers and sighs, and from it come all temporal disasters: bloody wars, plague, sickness, famine, fire, and so forth; for it are prepared Gehenna, Hades, and eternal torment.

Thus sin is, as Saint John Chrysostom says, the foulest, most unclean, and gravest evil; it is “worse than the very spirit of wickedness—the devil—for even the devil from a bright Angel became the devil through sin” (Saint Tikhon of Voronezh. On True Christianity, 2, Article 3, 1, 44).