Certainly there are many different sins and "all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God." (Romans 3:23).

But then what does is mean to sin or to be sinful?

We can define sin as some action that goes against the will of God. Then sin can be classified as evil, since God is good. We can then apply Augustine's definition of evil as a privation of good to sin. As a result we see that sin is the absence of God.

This is supported by evidence throughout the Bible. One such instance is in Genesis. When Adam and Eve commit the very first sin they are driven from the presence of God. In fact, throughout the Old Testament there are examples of the Israelites wandering away from God so that he must send them a prophet to bring them back from him. They are, in those moments, sinning and out of God's presence.

Jesus himself is another example of this. When he is on the cross he cries out "My God, my God why have you forsaken me?" (Mark 15:34). The question is, why did God forsake his only son? But then we must recall that Jesus took the sins of the world upon the cross with him. Taken in this context, his words make sense since sin is the absence of God.

Now, having defined what sin is, we can explore the nature of sin. In other words, the commonalities between how people sin.

It became apparent to me that there are two different ways in which we might define how people sin. One is by nature, this is, in fact, the idea of original sin. The other is by choice.

I will start with the sins by nature. This basically means that we, as humans, sin because it is who we are; to be human is to sin.

This argument is very compelling, taking into account facts such as how "all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God." (Romans 3:23). This fact makes it clear that there is some part of who we are, our human nature, that is prone to sin. This leads to ideas like original sin, an idea coined by Augustine.

Does this mean that sin is not by choice? Actually, no. It is just as clear that we sin by choice as well.

This becomes very apparent when we take Jesus as an example. We know that he had to be sinless in his life in order to die on the cross for our sins, so then we should look at how his life was different than our own.

One striking episode of Jesus's life occurs after he was baptized. Jesus went to the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. I believe he had to do this for two reasons. One was so that he could relate to the temptations of humans because it is more difficult to forgive someone if you cannot relate to their experiences. The second reason, the important reason for this argument, is so that he could be sinless.

He was tempted to sin but did not choose to sin. This shows that sin must also be a choice since what made Jesus sinless was not choosing sin while we do.

But then if both of these are correct, how can they exist together? To answer this question I look back to Genesis, to the story of the first sin that was mentioned earlier. Adam and Eve were tempted and chose sin. This reveals that sinning by choice was first and is what led to the our own sinful nature.

In other words, it is our nature to sin because of our choices.