WHAT IS SIN?

Clearly, the one man in the verse above is Adam and that means sin cannot be understood without going back to him to know what entered the world by him. Going back to Genesis, we find that Yahweh instructed Adam concerning the danger of a certain tree, an instruction which Adam didn't keep (Genesis 2:17, Genesis 3:6). There, God did not say, "In the day that you eat of the tree, you will sin" but that, "you will surely die". But our verse today says, death came after sin. So, before Adam will experience death, something that wasn't in the world came into the world and that is sin. What is that? Genesis 3:7-8 tells us firstly, that their eyes opened and they knew their nakedness, even though they were already naked (Genesis 2:25) and secondly, they hid from the presence of God. Simply stated, they awoke to a wrong awareness of themselves and abdicated their original place in God's design. That state of distorted self-opinion is the sin that entered the world. It wasn't the act of eating of the tree.