Sin

In Aramaic ‘sin’ meant ‘missing the mark.  You put the arrow in the quiver and you shoot it and you hit the mark.  The whole construction of sin goes back to the ancient church and 'She'ol' - the Hebrew word for a burning garbage pit – where we get the modern word ‘hell’.  Church patriarchs, this is an absolute historical fact, said, “that’s great, a burning place, let’s get a devil, and we’ll get big cathedrals, because we’re going to scare the hell out of everybody.”

Now the ‘evangelistic’ will counter and claim, “Using the Greek or Hebrew terms to describe sin as ‘missing the mark’ is a fallacy called illegitimate totality transfer. Any given word has a range of meaning. The range of meaning of the Greek/Hebrew words spans a continuum from “missing the mark” in a literal sense to the more abstract concept of sin…The same Greek word for sin is used as an archery term, so we’re all just ‘target-missers’…The advising against the use of the archery analogy is that it makes God seem petty; we need to help people see the facts of the matter when it comes to our sinfulness and God’s holiness. Sin is not simply a faux pas on par with setting a table with a dirty fork (though that still counts as sin). Rather, the contours of sin have not come into focus until we recognize it as a grotesque, rebellious lust for self-satisfaction and a defiance of the perfect standard that God has made plain in the creation and the Bible. Only then does our self-serving verdict about God’s “pettiness” give way to the knee-buckling awe that Isaiah felt when he announced that he was ‘undone’”.

In regards to spirituality, the ‘fundamentalist’ will say: "Spirituality means 'I want to sense something greater because I know I'm not stronger to do it myself, but I don't have to answer to anybody for anything'".   (Who to answer for?  Gnostic answer:  One's Soul Mind knows when it has made a trespass)

God love the evangelistic and fundamentalist.

Exploring the topic of ‘revealed sin’ can fill an entire book.  A full discussion of the subject is not the purpose of The Golden Seat who takes the stand that there is no sin but a mistake and no punishment but an inevitable consequence.   Rather than focusing on 'sin', it healthier to focus on virtues.

The reader is left with a poem by Wilson Montgomery:

Marks of Our Hearts
By Wilson Montgomery

Sin is a shot by an archer’s arrow
That misses the mark of any target
The “mark” is God’s irrefutable truth
The center of which God never harbors
Hitting it is oftentimes too painful
It can be so unbearable
That archers will avoid it at all cost
Thinking the pain perpetual

Sins are honest delusions that peace resides outside the mark
Pride touts the arrogant proposal that image is the mark
Envy grapples the jealous notion that yours is the mark
Sloth lies on the complacent idea that later is the mark
Greed buys the voracious idea that more is the mark
Gluttony imbibes the delectable figment that food is the mark
Lust pictures the satiating fantasy that sex is the mark
Resentment replays the angry fabrication that judgment is the mark
All are honest desires for inner peace
But all they offer is minor relief

The wages of sin
Is the shame that archers impart
In pointless angst
For missing aim of the true mark

Shame is but a whip for flagellation
That we turn on ourselves and others
Hoping to correct our aim through fear
Buy lashing ourselves and our brothers

Grace is God’s quiver of unlimited arrows
He wants us all to hit the mark
Because His desire is our inner peace
There’s no sin in the marks of our hearts

To all: I feel sad for all who tout God in a fearful/angry light. I pray that they might find a larger torch to find their way to an infinitely forgiving, loving, kind, compassionate God. This is copyrighted, however, I give all who care to permission to share this with whomever.

God Bless, Wilson Montgomery

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