1John 3:4 - Guilty as charged...

"Every the [one] doing the sin also the lawlessness is doing, and the sin is the lawlessness."

-Pure Jesus, for sure.  Meanwhile, we (so much of the world which God so loves) have lives which are not so pure.  Not becoming any purer at all.  These are the ones who are engaging in sin in an ongoing way.  Habitually.  Me-first to the max.  It’s like they are practicing precisely how to do something which God hates.  John here says that this is not only sin, it is lawlessness.  One might ask, what’s the difference?  The two are relatively synonymous, but would there be any significance to a nuanced difference between sin and lawlessness, and why is John going there at this point?

-The word for ‘sin’ in the Greek literally means to miss the mark.  To err, be mistaken, to miss or wander from the path of uprightness and honor, to go wrong.  To wander from the law.  It sort of implies that one has a mark to begin with.  Alternately, the word for ‘lawlessness’ literally means just that.  The person or people do not have the law.  It was often applied by Jews to Gentiles.  It’s probably slightly more of a deragatory term, at least for Jewish/religious ears.  Godless pagans, strangers to the law, and not much more than creatures of instinct, carrying out their ignorant fleshy instincts and more or less strangers to God, to His covenants and character.

-But these are essentially the same thing.  That’s exactly what John says here.  Sin IS lawlessness.  We’re not talking about the occasional transgression, about those who struggle with and still struggle AGAINST their old habits.  We’re talking about those who keep on doing sin, who practice it, even after supposedly receiving a knowledge of God and His law and possibly even professing hope in Jesus.  John says, uh uh.  No way, José.  That cannot be.  The one who continues to break God’s laws is no different, certainly no better than the one who never had a knowledge of the law in the first place.  They look no different than an unbeliever.  Life apart from God, a practical atheist, living like there is no God, like He doesn’t even exist, ‘cuz He certainly doesn’t appear to exist in my life when I am practicing sin and living and looking exactly like the seasonally-happy and hopeless pagan next to me.  And this is where we get labeled hypocrites, those of us who profess belief in God, when we say one thing with our lips and yet say something entirely opposite with our lives.  GUILTY AS CHARGED (too many of us).  Things should not be this way.  Not like this.  This is not at all what God intended.  Next verse..