Request your free, three-month trial to Tabletalk magazine. You’ll receive the print issue monthly and gain immediate digital access to decades of archives. This trial is risk-free. No credit card required.
Try Tabletalk NowAlready receive Tabletalk magazine every month?
Verify your email address to gain unlimited access.
Matthew 15:19
“Out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander.”
Westminster Shorter Catechism 18 does not address only original sin when it discusses the sinfulness of mankind’s estate after the fall. It also tells us that the sinfulness of our estate consists of our “actual transgressions.”
Scripture teaches us about original sin, but it also focuses much attention on the actual sins that we commit as individuals. Original sin is a result not of something we did personally but of something that Adam did in representing us. Actual sins, however, are sins that we commit. In today’s passage, Jesus mentions many actual sins that people can be guilty of.
The Reformed tradition has several good definitions of actual sin. Perhaps the best known is the one given in Westminster Shorter Catechism 14: “Sin is any want of conformity unto, or transgression of, the law of God.” An actual sin is anything we do that fails to meet God’s righteous standard revealed in His moral law or that is a direct contradiction or transgression of His law. We sin when we fail to live up to what the Lord requires of us and also when we do what He has expressly forbidden.
Francis Turretin, the great seventeenth-century Reformed theologian, says that “actual sin is the aberration from the law of God (in internal and external acts) proceeding from original sin as the effect from its cause, a river from the fountain and the second act from the first.” The source of our actual sins is our fallen nature, as Westminster Confession of Faith 6.4 tells us. Consequently, we see that our problem is much deeper than is recognized in other world religions. Other religions conceive of sin as referring only to our acts and not as part of our very nature. Many would deny that our thoughts can be sinful. Salvation in such systems, therefore, consists of simply amending one’s life, doing more good deeds than bad ones. The Bible tells us that changing one’s behavior is not enough, as important as that might be. We need a more radical redemption, one that penetrates to the core of who we are and transforms our very natures so that we can be conformed to Christ. In other words, we need God to give us new hearts (Ezek. 36:26).
Sin, both original and actual, separates from the eternal blessing of God. The only way to be restored to a right relationship with Him is to trust in Christ, repenting and forsaking sin (Acts 10:43).
Coram Deo Living before the face of God
Christians are to be concerned with their actual sins, searching their hearts to recognize where they have transgressed or failed to observe God’s law. We also need to listen when others say that we have sinned against them so as to discern whether their accusations are true. When we discover sin, we must confess it, knowing that when we do so, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sin and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness (1 John 1:8–9).
For further study
- Numbers 5:5–7
- Proverbs 28:13
- Ecclesiastes 5:6
- 1 John 1:10
The bible in a year
- Job 7–9
- Acts 7:44–60