HAVE ALL SINNED?

 There are various internet sites dedicated to “exposing” mistakes and contradictions within the Bible. I love to scour these since they provide rich opportunities to expose their own misinformation and errors in reasoning. Here is another supposed contradiction to investigate:

    “Indeed, there is not a righteous man on earth who continually does good and who never sins.” (Ecclesiastes 7:20)

    “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” (Romans 3:23)

    “This is standard Christian dogma, but things get confusing when you read the opening verse of Job, which says of Job, 'This man was blameless and upright.' Even as his life was going to hell because of Satan and God’s little experiment, Job was vindicated in his belief that he had nothing to apologize for. We see another example in Noah, who was also 'blameless' (Genesis 6:9).”

Let us take these biblical statements one at a time.

    Ecclesiastes 7:20 – If you look at the wider context of this quote, you can note that it is still possible for a person to be righteous while occasionally sinning. Thus, in Eccles. 7:15 the speaker says he has observed righteous people, and based on this he expresses the opinion in the following verse that being too righteous is not really a good thing. But he hardly means that people should sin occasionally. So something more is at play here.

    Romans 3:23 does indeed agree with Eccles. 7:20, as the above-quoted critic states. And Paul even provides a definition of “sinning” in the end of his statement: it is the same as falling short of God's glory. That definition fits all of us to a tee.

    Job 1:1a now brings us to the critical problem at hand since it states that Job was blameless and upright. Again, the text gives us a definition of the key word “blameless” in the following verses. Job 1:1b tells us that he feared God and turned away from evil. In other words, we are concerned with a person's general orientation, not whether he or she has never committed a single sin.

And at this point, our internet critic plays a little fast and loose with the actual facts. He says that eventually God vindicated Job's belief that he had nothing to apologize for. In actuality, Job never stated that he had nothing from which to apologize; he only expressed the feeling that whatever sin he may have committed certainly did not warrant all the grief and suffering he was undergoing at God's hand.

And as to being vindicated at the end, Job was only vindicated from all the baseless charges of which his friends were accusing him. In fact, toward the end of the book, God answers Job with these words: “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?” (Job 38:2) Job has to admit that he was speaking out of ignorance and repents in dust and ashes (Job 42:6). And as far as Job being vindicated by God, the only such vindication Job receives is found in 42:7; it is a partial vindication at best that states Job has talked about God in a more enlightened way than his friends had.

Hartley comments on Job 1:1 as follows:
“Two sets of word pairs characterize Job as a man of untarnished character and devout faith. The first pair, blameless (tam) and upright (yasar), indicates that Job was a person of pure motivation. Heb. tam frequently designates a sacrificial animal as 'spotless, without blemish,' but when used with a person it means personal integrity, not sinless perfection.”

    As our critic points out, Noah was another “righteous” man who was “blameless.” (Genesis 6:9) But some added information is again omitted here. In the first place, we are provided an approximate definition of the two key words “righteous” and “blameless” by the immediate context. The previous verse says that Noah “found favor with God,” and the whole of verse 9 qualifies the description of Noah as being “a righteous man, blameless in his generation.” 

Thus, we have a case as with Job in which a righteous person is blameless when compared with his peers. But in neither situation does it indicate Job and Noah were, as Paul says in Romans, without sin and achieving the same glory as God possesses. As Hamilton states, “Of course, Noah was not 'free from defect.' He was tamin, but not sinless. Perhaps a word like 'wholesome' or sound' or 'candid' would be more appropriate when applying this word to people.”

But what about the word “righteous? Olivier treats saddiq (righteous), yasar, and tam as parallel concepts indicating from a judicial point of view who is innocent, guiltless, and blameless.” Seebass says, “Righteousness in the OT is not a matter of actions conforming to a given set of absolute standards, but of behavior which is in keeping with the two-way relationship between God and man.”

And moving from the OT to the NT, we have a somewhat fuller understanding of righteousness. Reimer says in regard to Paul's thought, “For Jews, the law is an expression of God's character; to obey it is to live as God would have us live. Paul, then in his joining of righteousness primarily to faith rather than behavior, moves outside the orbit of OT/Jewish usage.”

And Seebass states, “By the works of the law, i.e. on the basis of perfect obedience, no man can be justified (Rom. 3:20)...he who would be justified by the works of the law shows that he has fallen from grace...Paul concludes that man can be justified only by faith in Christ...i.e. by trusting utterly and only in God's grace, which by definition must be a free gift (Rom. 3:24).”

In conclusion, there is absolutely no contradiction between the various OT and NT passages relating to righteousness and sinlessness since the two are not really the same concept at all.