Lesson video

Hey, and welcome to this lesson on Christian beliefs about sin and salvation.

I'm Miss Kendrick and I've been looking at lots of Christian beliefs in this unit.

If you've not done any previous sessions, that's absolutely fine.

I'll try and make sure I really clearly explain anything that I refer to from previous sessions.

So what we're going to be looking at today, so we're firstly going to have a look at a bit of a recap on where Christians believe sin has come from in the Bible, we are going to look at definition of sin, the 10 commandments as a guide to how to avoid sin.

And we're going to look at some different beliefs about how Christians believe sin can be overcome.

We're going to touch on salvation and its bit in this lesson and a few different ways.

But the next lesson on atonement is going to look in more detail at what Christians believe about how Jesus's work made salvation possible.

So you might be interested in that lesson as well.

I hope you are 'cause I am, I think this is very interesting topic.

Firstly, what you're going to need for this lesson, you're going to need a pen or pencil, ideally, as well as different coloured pen or pencil to make corrections to your work or additions to your work, and some paper to write your answers down on.

And it's really important that you do write down these answers to questions.

This is not a lecture for you to just watch me, I assure you, I'm sure there's much more interesting things to watch if you're just going to watch video, but you need to engage with this and do the tasks to help you really learn the information.

So we're going to start off by recapping a little bit of the story of the fall in Christianity.

So if you've been taking part in these lessons so far, you might be thinking, "Oh, for goodness sakes, "she's talking about the fall again." And yes, I am and that is because it's quite an important event in Christian belief because this is one reason why Christians believe there is sin in the world.

Regardless of whether or not the story of the food is believed to be literal or symbolic.

Many Christians will use that as an explanation of the human condition.

The human condition being that people tend to do bad things.

No matter how well people try to behave, we often make mistakes and do wrong things and accidentally hurt other people.

Or we can also just look in history and look around us and it's very easy to find examples of people treating others badly intentionally as well.

But this tendency towards sin is called original sin and traditional Christian teaching and the words are the phrase "Original Sin" describes the sin that all humans are born with, that is inherited from Adam and Eve, due to this story of the fool.

Again, that might be believed to be a literal inheritance or it might be believed to be a more symbolic inheritance.

Either way, it's a really important concept when we're looking at sin and salvation.

Now, in the creation story, God tells Adam and Eve that eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge, good and evil, will lead to death.

And this is interpreted in several ways.

Some Christians may believe that if Adam and Eve had never sinned, never eaten this fruit, then perhaps they would have had immortality and still be alive today.

Others may believe that this expresses an idea of a spiritual death due to the belief that sin separates God and humans.

Yet another understanding is that some Christians will see this as a permanent death in the afterlife, that those who said would not experience an eternal life in heaven, but perhaps would cease to exist or maybe even have a punishment in the afterlife.

And we're going to be looking at that in a future lesson as well, in heaven, hell, purgatory.

So, before we look in more detail at Christian beliefs about sin, we're going to pause so you can answer a couple of questions on this background story of how sin came into the world according to the narrative of the Bible.

Okay, so do make sure you're pausing so you're getting down at your answers to these questions or adding to your own answers.

Okay, so here we've got three questions, which hopefully will solve.

When I say solve we're not going to fully solve them.

We're going to explore them because we're going to have lots of different Christian beliefs about this.

So very ambitious to say that we're going to solve these.

But the questions are, what do Christians today understand as sinful? And I'm glad I stopped myself from saying we're going to solve that because lots of Christians can have different views on what they consider sinful in this day and age.

What do Christians today believe are the consequences of sin? Again, we're going to have a variety of belief.

And finally, what do Christians today believe about how sin can be overcome? A definition of sin.

Sin can be defined as an offence against a religious or moral law.

Some Christians will talk about sin being any action that goes against God, or maybe even a thought or an intention.

So if someone intends to hurt somebody, but fails, they might say, well, that's still sinful, you've still committed a sin in your heart.

In the Gospel stories Jesus says that, "Anyone who looks at a woman and lust after her "has committed adultery in his heart, "even if he hasn't actually done that act of adultery." So again, lots of Christians would say that sin isn't just about your actual actions, but it's also about a person's intentions as well.

Another thing to be aware of when it comes to police about sin is that there's a difference between sin and religion, and a crime.

Now, the reason why it's important to point out this difference is because sometimes there's an overlap between what is considered a crime under UK law, and what is considered a sin in a religion.

So for example, murder is considered a sin in Christianity, and it's also a crime under UK law.

And I think pretty much all countries would have that considered to be a crime.

But there are some things that are considered sinful in Christianity.

They are not against the law.

So for example, adultery which means to cheat on your husband or wife is often considered a sin by Christians.

However, it's not a crime under UK law, people might think of it as a bad thing, but it's not something that you could go to prison for or be punished for.

There's also lots of things that might be considered sinful within Christianity, that lots of other people outside of Christianity or even some Christians might not consider it simple.

So one example of this is consensual sex outside of marriage or before marriage.

Some Christians would consider that a sin because they would say that the teachings in the Bible say that sex should be saved for marriage.

However, some Christians would argue that there's nothing wrong with sex in a loving and committed relationship and lots of non Christians would also argue that there's nothing wrong with having sex with someone you're not married to, as long as it's consensual.

So again, you can see here, there's going to be quite a lot of variety and difference between what might be considered lawful, or what might be considered okay by different people in different groups in society.

So we're going to have some quickfire questions on what I've talked about so far.

And then we're going to have another look at Christian understanding of sin, and how Christians believe God works to deal with sin in history.

So firstly, any act against the law of a country is considered a sin, true or false? One, two, three.

False.

There is some overlap between things that are considered sinful and things that are against the law.

True or false? True.

Which of the following is considered a sin, but it's not against the law? Or I'm going to say which many Christians are most Christians considered to be a sin, but it's not against the law? Adultery.

So again, cheating on your husband or wife.

Some things which are considered a sin by some Christians may not be seen as wrong by some groups in society, true or false.

True, and the example I gave that was consensual sex outside of marriage.

Okay, so we're going to look at some rules to live by.

Now, I've already talked about this idea of Adam and Eve, sinning and bringing evil into the world and lots of Christians would argue that prior to the fall, Adam and Eve just knew how to live good lives.

They weren't tempted to be selfish, or treat one another badly, and that it is the moment of the fall when they sinned against God and eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

That sense starts to come into the world.

And the biblical narrative starts to talk about people doing bad things like murder, or stealing and things like that.

Now, I wonder if you have any rules and your household, which simply exist, because at some point you or a brother or a sister found a really creative way to misbehave.

For example, in my household when I was a child that ended up being a rule, which was nobody is allowed to jump off the top of the wardrobe.

That might seem like a strange rule.

And I think when my parents decided to have children, they weren't thinking well, we're going to need to make sure we have that rule when we raise these girls.

But what happened one day is my sisters decided to jump off the wardrobe, one of them ended up folding and ended up with several stitches.

And because of the consequences of that, that rule had to be put into place, you might be able to think of your own examples of rules that are in your household because of creative ways that you might have found to fool out with your parents or your carers or your brothers or sisters.

And this helps us to think about some of the rules that we see given in the Bible.

So in the biblical narrative, as sin enters the world, humans find a huge myriad of ways to go against God and act against each other, either worshipping other gods, or stealing, murdering things like that.

Now, it says in the biblical narrative that what God did in response to this was He started to give people rules and boundaries because it was clear they did not know how to live.

So rules were given to help them.

The 10 commandments are a good example of these rules.

And although the 10 commandments themselves they're very famous, they are actually only part of 613 rules, which God gave the Jewish people to live by.

And these covered moral issues such as stealing and adultery, as well as civil issues.

So, civil issue I mean, in our culture would be where you're allowed to park your car for example, but also other aspects of life, like what they could eat and what they could do on certain days.

And this was to make sure that people knew how to live in a way that was holy and in a way that respected God.

Now if we look at the 10 commandments, which we're going to focus on, we can see that they can be split into two types, there commandments regarding how people should relate to God and there are commandments relating to how people should treat one another.

So the first four commandments and sometimes the 10 commandments are numbered in slightly different ways.

But the first four here say, number one, do not worship any other gods.

So there's this idea that God should come first out anything else in a person's life.

Connect to that secondly is do not make idols.

So an idol is like a statue or something like that, an image of a God that people would pray to.

Number three, do not take the Lord's name in vain.

So, some Christians would say that to use God's name to swear would be against the 10 commandments or to use God's name lightly and in a disrespectful way, goes against the 10 commandments.

And number four, remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.

So the Sabbath day was the day of rest in Judaism under these laws, Jews were not allowed to work on this day because it was supposed to be a day completely devoted to God and to rest.

And this links to the creation story in which God created world in six days and rested on the seventh.

Next, we have six commandments that relate to how people should treat one another.

So we've got to honour your parents.

So that means to respect them and obey them.

Do not commit murder, do not commit adultery, so again, that's cheating on your husband or wife.

Do not steal, do not lie and do not be jealous.

Jealous is an interesting one, isn't it? The word in the Bible is often uses covet, so don't look at somebody else and want what they have.

And we could say, well, maybe this is because it leads to resentment.

Maybe it might lead to wanting to steal what that person has, or wanting to act in a way that brings them down.

So we've got two types, commandments that relate to God and commandments that relate to humans.

Now in the Old Testament, God lays out a way to deal with sin when it happens.

There's never the expectation that someone will never ever sin or never ever become unclean.

There's an idea about certain things being clean and unclean in the Old Testament.

Now, in these instructions when a person sins or becomes unclean, one of the things that they should do to become clean again or to get rid of their sin was animal sacrifice.

So animal sacrifice was done in the temple in the Old Testament Judaism.

There were other punishments as well.

So for example, for serious crimes such as murder, there would be other punishments so sometimes things like the death penalty, but often, animal sacrifice was used.

This was understood in three different ways we can understand this in three different ways.

Number one, animal sacrifice was giving up something valuable.

So this was an agricultural community, people might not have used money in the same way that we do now, but a lot of their wealth would have been in their possessions and animals were part of those possessions.

You could get a lot of animals, you could get wool from sheep, you could get a milk, you could get meat as well.

So, in sacrificing and valuable animal, the person has shown that God is more important to them, than that animal and that wealth.

An example might be let's say, you've fallen out with a friend or a sibling, and you've decided that actually, it's probably your fault and you want to make up to them because you're sick of not being friends anymore or not getting on anymore.

You might decide that you're going to give up something that you wanted to do to do something that they want to do to show you if you're sorry, and that they're more valuable to you, so you might decide that actually rather than in system watching your favourite TV programme, you might sit and watch your siblings or your friend's favourite TV programme to show them that your relationship with them is more important than that thing that you want.

Another idea going on here is the idea of transfer of sin.

I've already talked about the idea of the punishment of sin being death.

So one understanding of animal sacrifice is that the sin is transferred from the person onto that animal, and then that animal is then sacrificed.

So the punishment for sin, death is carried out, but not on the person it's carried out on the animal instead.

So in this way, you could sort of see justice taking place, the just punishment is carried out, but the person doesn't have to stop for themselves, and that's going to be a really important idea for what we're looking at next lesson on atonement.

And finally, we've got the idea of communing with God.

So the meat from the animal was split into three, the person making the sacrifice would take one third, the priests who carried out of sacrifice would take another, and the rest would be given to God as a burnt offerings.

So it'd be burnt and it was pilled a little bit like the smoke from the offering going up to heaven would be like God, having that part of the meal.

And the word communing is a bit like community so it's like spending time.

So for example, if you've not seen someone that you're close to for a really long time, you might have a meal with them.

Because a meal is a really good way to spend time with somebody and in Jesus's time and culture, whoever you ate with was who you approved off and therefore there's a sense of community in meals.

Now, traditionally, Christians would say that the animal sacrifices in the temple could not be a true solution to human sin because people would continue to sin and sacrifices have to be carried out after that.

And this is where we start to get into Christian ideas about Jesus being the ultimate sacrifice for sin.

But like I said, we're going to look at that more in next lesson is a really important part of salvation.

I'm going to explain a bit more detail in the lesson on atonement.

What we're going to look at now, before we do some quickfire questions, is Jesus's teachings on what's considered sinful or how to avoid sin.

So Jesus was asked, which is the greatest commandment in the law.

So that's talking about those 613 commandments that God gave Jews in the Old Testament.

So Jesus answered, the first one is, Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.

This is the greatest commandment, the most important commandment.

The second most important commandment is like it, love your neighbour as yourself.

The whole law of Moses, and the teachings of the Prophet depends on these two commandments.

So what Jesus is saying here that rules like do not murder and do not steal are summed up in that command to love your neighbour as yourself.

Because if you genuinely love somebody, as you love yourself, you're not going to do things like that to them.

And even more importantly, is to love God with all of your hearts and with all of your soul and with all of your mind or sometimes it says strength.

And again, that sums up those other commandments like do not make idols, do not pray to other gods and lots of Christians and Jewish people would say that, that commandment love God also encompasses that command to love other people as well because other people are creations of God.

So if you love God, you treat God's creation well as well.

So you'll often see these quotations in particular love your neighbour as yourself, it's good to have a bit of context for that it is a favourite verse of students when it comes to the GCSE and it is very useful.

So we're going to do some quickfire questions and then we'll move on to some longer questions.

So, of the two commandments that Jesus said are the most important which one is missing? So if you can say the whole thing to yourself, 'cause that's good way to remember quotations.

So it's love your neighbour as yourself.

What rules do Christians believe God gave in the Old Testament? The 10 commandments, which of the following commandments is focused on God? Keep the Sabbath holy.

Which of the following commandments is focused on living with other humans? Do you not lie? Which two of the following commandments did Jesus say summed up 10 commandments? So we've got Love the Lord your God with all your heart and love your neighbour as yourself.

In the Old Testament, what did the Jews do to make up for sin? One of the things that they did to make up for sin.

Performed animal sacrifice.

Of the two commandments that Jesus said are the most important, which one is missing? Love the Lord your God with all your heart.

Which of the following is not an understanding of how animal sacrifice worked? It didn't act out that God was angry, but it was communing with God and the sin was transferred to the animal, and it's giving up something valuable.

Why do Christians believe that animal sacrifice is no longer necessary? Because they believe that Jesus was the ultimate sacrifice.

Which of the following commandments is focused on God? Keep the Sabbath holy.

Which of the following is not an understanding of how animal sacrifice worked? So we're repeating this question.

So it acted that God was angry.

So that's not one understanding of it.

Which two of the following commandments did Jesus say summed up the 10 commandments.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and love your neighbour as yourself.

Of the two commandments that Jesus said are the most important which is missing.

Love your neighbour as yourself.

And of the two commandments that Jesus said are the most important, which is missing? Love the Lord your God with all your heart.

Okay, the next thing you're going to do is you're going to pause and you're going to answer some questions on the next slide.

Then you'll get some feedback and we'll look at the next step.

So, we've looked at Jesus's commandments to love God with all your heart, soul and strength and to love your neighbour as yourself.

But some people might say, well, that's not actually as straightforward as it might initially seem.

I mean, what does it really mean to love your neighbour as yourself? What if your neighbour has different needs to you? Or what if your neighbour is a really toxic person to be around and you might say what it's better not to have that person in my life? And how do you show love to God? Many people might say, "Well, God is quite distant "or maybe God doesn't need human love "in the same way that we might need "to feel love from each other." So, some Christians would say, "Well, how do you show love to God?" Now Christians believe that when Jesus ascended into heaven, remember what the ascension is? So essentially means to go up.

So it's the belief that Jesus went up into heaven to be seen at the right hand of the Father and Christians believe that Jesus is still alive today in heaven.

Now, when Jesus ascended, He told His disciples to wait for a helper.

And if you look in the book of Acts, you can read this really amazing story in which the disciples are hiding, they're praying in a locked room, they're still a bit worried that they might get arrested and killed just like Jesus was.

And all of a sudden, there's this rushing wind and tongues of fire rests upon their heads, but they're not burned.

And they started to miraculously speak languages that they've never learned before.

And they go out into the streets.

And they declare the gospel message, the good news of Jesus's death and resurrection that they believe made it possible for humans to be forgiven from their sin.

And then the story they're speaking to people to choose from all different nations because there's a festival in Jerusalem which lots of people have come to you, people are amazed at these miraculous signs and wonders.

So this is known as the date of Pentecost.

And today Christians celebrate Pentecost as the day the church was born.

So the church as the community of believers, not just a building, and also as the day when the Holy Spirit was given.

So my question is, can you remember what Christians believe the Holy Spirit is? Give you a moment to think about it? And we've got an answer on this slide here.

So we've often talked about the Trinity and the belief that God is one God in three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

And we've looked at this diagram in previous lessons if you've taken part in them, and it's really useful in expressing this traditional Christian belief in the Trinity.

And as you can see, we've got the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

All of them are equally gods, but they're not considered to be the same as each other.

They're considered to be different persons with different roles, but they all have God's qualities like that eternal, omniscient, omnipotent things like that.

And they work together in relationship with each other.

Christians would say there's not three separate Gods who just really like hanging out with each other, or that there's one God who says, today, I'm going to be Jesus and tomorrow I'm going to be the Holy Spirit.

But there's three distinct persons in God.

And the Holy Spirit is one of these.

The main role of the Holy Spirit and Christianity is to be a guide.

Christians today will see the Holy Spirit something that guides them to know right from wrong, to convict them of sin in their lives.

The words convict means to realise that something that you're doing is wrong.

So it If I lied about something, I might feel convicted, that what I did was wrong, and that I need to make up for it and tell the truth.

So in that way, some people might say the Holy Spirit is a little bit like a person's conscience.

But just to be clear, Christians would say it's much more than that.

It's not just that little voice, that's your own voice in your head, they would say that it is God drawing somebody towards what is good and away from things that are bad.

So in this way, Christians believe that the Holy Spirit guides them towards Jesus and therefore guides them towards the salvation, which they believe can be received through Jesus's work.

So many Christians will pray for guidance from the Holy Spirit or we've got really important traditions.

For example, in the Roman Catholic Church, they would say that tradition which helps them to understand the scriptures and things like that is a living tradition that is led by the Holy Spirit.

So questions would say that the Holy Spirit is almost God's purpose and action in the world.

So we're going to pause, you're going to answer some questions and then we're going to look a little bit at the idea of grace.

Okay, well done for answering those questions.

I hope you've gotten all your feedback from those answers that I gave you, and that you added them to your own work.

So just one last point before we finish this lesson, and you go on to do your exit quiz, which is going to be really helpful for the next lesson as well.

Now, Christians traditionally believe that the offer of salvation, the offer of forgiveness is one that's freely given.

And this is called grace.

They believe that God's grace and forgiveness is something that a human could never earn through their own efforts to be a good person, but that is something that is freely given by God.

But something that is bought at a great cost.

And this is where we're going to look next lesson at Christian beliefs about Jesus's death as a sacrifice for sin, the sacrifice being that great cost, which Christians may have made it possible for God to freely forgive them for sin.

Thank you for taking part in this lesson.

So just to recap, we've looked at what Christians believe about how sin came into the world beliefs about some things many Christians consider to be sin today.

We've looked at how sin was dealt with in the Old Testament to animal sacrifice.

And we've looked at how Christians believe the Holy Spirit guides them towards doing good things and guides away from sin and towards salvation.

Look at all the writing you've done.

I hope that you're really chuffed with yourself and that it's been really helpful for you and next is that we're going to look in more detail about how Christians believe God dealt with sin once and for all.

Thank you for all your hard work.

Now complete the exit quiz and I will see you next time.