In verse 4 the apostle defines sin as lawlessness and says that everyone who commits sin is guilty of it. This is not the most comprehensive definition of sin that might be given, but neither is it “somewhat superficial,” as one writer has indicated. By lawlessness John naturally recalls thoughts of God’s Old Testament law by which sin is revealed in its full sinfulness. As the Westminster Shorter Catechism states, “Sin is any want of conformity unto, or transgression of, the law of God.” So the law shows how far short men fall from God’s standards. On the other hand, what John says is actually more complete and therefore also more profound than this. For he does not say that sin is merely the breaking of a divinely revealed law. Rather, he indicates that sin is the spirit of lawlessness which lies behind the rebellion.
At this point John’s understanding is clearly one with that of the apostle Paul, who writes in Romans that “until the law sin was in the world (Rom. 5:13). The proof, as Paul indicates, is that death is sin’s consequence and that men and women died before the law was given.
This definition of sin means that sin is simply the desire to have my own way. It is this which causes me to transgress the law of God when the law is given. This desire expresses itself in the stubbornness of even the smallest child or in the rebellion of a young person in his teens. It is the disposition that causes some to break the speed limit when driving, cheat on income tax, use an employer’s time for personal affairs, attempt to get ahead at the expense of others, and so on. It is what Isaiah described when he declared, “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way, and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isa. 53:6). This is what characterizes every man or woman apart from the transformations produced by God’s grace.
When a Sunday school teacher once asked a little boy to define sin, he answered, “I think it is anything you like to do.” He was not far wrong. At least he was right in the sense that in our natural state we all want to do that which, in part if not completely, is opposed to the holy will of God.
When we begin to speak of sin in the areas of personal desires, however, the immediate impulse is to begin to defend those desires, pointing out that they do not necessarily hurt anybody and that much that we desire is good and not wrong. But that is just what we must not do; for if we do, we are actually minimizing sin and placing ourselves wrongly within the camp of those who, as we think, do not need a Savior. Moreover, John will not allow this chain of reasoning; for in his second discussion of sin, in verse 8, he shows that all sin is of the devil, however mild or seemingly harmless, and he shows the fundamental connection between the devil and the one sinning. Sin may be mild in any particular case. But it is in the devil’s way and leads to more transgressions. On the other hand, righteousness is God’s way, and it alone reveals the godlike character of the one is practicing it.
As we read this section we detect what must be a further reference to the tendency of the Gnostic teachers to underestimate sin or excuse it. Perhaps the Gnostics excused sin as being essentially negative in nature; that is, as being connected with what is finite. Again, they may have related it only to their bodies and not to their minds, which they may well have said were above any dispositions to sin. But John will not have this. Sin is not merely negative. It is willful rebellion. Moreover, it involves the mind as that in which rebellion originates. It is only when we see this that we begin to abhor sin and turn from it to seek a Savior.
