Most Christians learn to think about sin as a personal matter: a lie told, a temptation obeyed, a heart turned away from God. That is true. It is also incomplete. Scripture describes sin that begins in individual hearts and then gets built into customs, rules and institutions that keep doing harm long after the people who started them are gone. Jude 3 Project affirms both individual sin and systemic, structural sin, and it grounds justice in God’s character rather than in any political ideology. This guide shows how the two levels connect. It moves one step at a time, from a single choice in Genesis to structures that outlive their builders. It also names the root the two levels share, so you can recognize it in the world and in yourself.
You can work through this alone in about an hour, or with a group over one longer session. Each step has a short observation task. Those tasks matter more than the explanations around them, so do them before reading on. The discussion questions and the practice near the end work best after all five steps.
Step one: start with what sin is
Before we can ask where sin lives, we need a working definition. The Courageous Conversations lesson What is Sin? defines sin as “Disobedience to God’s commands.” It then adds that “this disobedience is likely rooted in some kind of idolatry.” The second sentence matters. It means sin is more than rule-breaking. Underneath the broken rule is a misplaced trust: something other than God has been given the place God should have.
Hold onto that. Whether sin shows up in one person or in a whole society, we will keep asking the same question: what is being trusted and protected in God’s place?
Observe: Write the definition in your own words, using no more than one sentence. Then write one thing people commonly trust in place of God. Keep both in front of you.
Step two: sin begins in a person
Read Genesis 3:1-13 slowly. Notice who decides. The text says: “And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat” (Genesis 3:6).
The woman sees, judges and acts. The man follows. No system pushes them. The serpent tempts, but the choice is theirs. This is the plain foundation of the individual view of sin: sin is something a person does, from a heart that has decided it knows better than God what is good. The Courageous Conversations lesson traces the same pattern forward through Cain, Abram, Sarah, Joseph’s brothers, Pharaoh, Moses, Saul and David.
Now keep reading to verse 12: “The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat” (Genesis 3:12). One act of disobedience and, within minutes, the relationships are breaking. The man hides from God, then blames the woman, and even hints at blaming God for giving her to him. The woman then blames the serpent.
Observe: List every relationship in Genesis 3 that is damaged by the one act in verse 6. Count them. Then ask: was any of that damage chosen separately, or did it all follow from the first choice?
Here is the first distinction to lock in. Sin starts in the heart, but it never stays there. It immediately becomes relational. The step from relational to structural is shorter than it looks.
Step three: from hearts to structures
A structure is simply a pattern that has become settled: a law, a custom, a business practice, an expectation everyone assumes. People build structures, and people inside them often follow them without thinking. The Courageous Conversations lesson puts the link plainly: “The concept of systematic sin assumes that broken people produce broken structures.”
One picture may help. Think of a riverbed. Water carves a channel, and later water follows that channel without choosing to. A rule written by people who valued some lives over others can keep sorting people that way decades after its authors are dead. The pattern now does the work.
The picture breaks at one important point, and you need to see where. Water has no will. People do. Someone living inside an unjust pattern is not a raindrop with no choice. The lesson makes this point itself: when someone commits a crime, the person is held accountable, not the systems around them, even when those systems shaped the decision. So the riverbed explains how sin can last and spread. It does not excuse anyone who keeps flowing along it. Leave the picture there.
Observe: Name one rule or custom you know of, in any setting, that still produces an outcome its current participants might not personally choose. Who first set it up? Who keeps it going now?
Step four: does Scripture actually talk this way?
The fair question is whether the idea of structural sin comes from the Bible or is being read into it. Look at the passages the lesson points to, and read each one in its context.
- Romans 12:2. “And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.” Paul assumes there is a shape to “this world” that a believer can be pressed into. Other translations render the first phrase as not conforming to the pattern of this world. A pattern is larger than one person’s choice.
- Ephesians 2:2. Paul reminds believers that in the past they “walked according to the course of this world.” The course of the world is something you walk along, like a road already laid down.
- Colossians 2:8. “Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.” In older English, to “spoil” someone means to carry them off as plunder. Paul warns that human tradition can take a person captive.
- Colossians 2:15. “And having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in it.” Right after describing the cancelled debt of personal sin in verse 14, Paul says Christ disarmed the powers.
Be careful here. These texts do not name modern institutions, and they should not be read as if Paul were writing about any one present-day policy. What they do show is that the New Testament speaks of sin at more than one level: personal guilt that must be forgiven, and world-patterns and powers that hold people captive. Colossians 2 holds both in the same breath. The cross deals with the debt and with the powers.
Observe: In Colossians 2:13-15, mark what Christ does for the individual and what he does to the powers. Are these two separate works, or one work with two results?
Step five: the common root
We now have two levels of sin. What connects them? The lesson’s answer is that the idolatry beneath sin is, very often, “an idolatry of the self.” It goes on: “we see self-preservation at the root of so many instances of sin in the Bible.”
Two stories show this at both levels.
Abram, entering Egypt, tells Sarai: “Say, I pray thee, thou art my sister: that it may be well with me for thy sake; and my soul shall live because of thee” (Genesis 12:13). That is a personal lie told to protect his own life. The Courageous Conversations lesson notes the setting around the lie: a culture that valued men over women and treated women as possessions a stronger man could simply take. Abram’s fear for himself and the patterns of his world work together. Neither excuses the other.
Pharaoh looks at Israel and says: “Behold, the people of the children of Israel are more and mightier than we” (Exodus 1:9). His fear for his power and his people’s position becomes policy: forced labor, then a command against Hebrew baby boys. Here self-preservation does not just shape a personal choice. It becomes a system of enslavement.
This is the key insight of the whole study. Individual sin and systemic sin are not two unrelated problems. They are the same instinct at two scales. The heart that protects itself at someone else’s expense is the same heart that, given power, writes rules that protect its group at another group’s expense.
The lesson then turns this test toward Christians themselves. It asks whether self-preservation might be part of why some believers, especially some white evangelicals, prefer to talk about individual racism and not systemic racism, since naming systems would require them to change something and give up advantages. Take that question seriously. Then notice that the test cuts in every direction. Any person or group can protect its comfort by choosing which kind of sin it will talk about.
Three predictable mistakes
Mistake one: assuming that if sin is systemic, nobody is really responsible. Step three already answered this. Structures are built and kept by persons. Genesis 3 shows that blaming someone else is one of sin’s first moves, not a way out of it.
Mistake two: assuming that if enough souls are saved, the systems will fix themselves. The lesson describes this as a common evangelical assumption shaped by Western individualism. It also notes the opposite tendency, that Black theology can overemphasize systemic sin so its weight is not lost. The lesson’s own conclusion is that Scripture presents evidence for both and calls Christians to pursue the redemption of individuals and systems together. Personal conversion matters. So does the plain command to do justice and love mercy (Micah 6:8), and Jesus’ account of the judgment, which asks whether the hungry were fed and the prisoner visited (Matthew 25:31-46).
Mistake three: treating sin as nothing more than harm done to other people. This one hides inside a systemic concern. If sin is only harm to neighbors, then whatever harms no one seems fine. The lesson calls this view “an overemphasis on the second greatest commandment to love thy neighbor” that neglects the first. Jesus names loving God with all your heart, soul and mind as the first commandment, and loving your neighbor as the second (Matthew 22:37-39). Systemic sin is still sin against God first. That keeps the whole doctrine anchored. Injustice is wrong because it defies the God whose image every person bears, not only because it causes pain.
A practice: trace one harm to its root
This exercise uses everything above. Do it on paper. It takes about twenty minutes alone, or longer as a group.
- Choose one specific harm you have seen up close. Keep it local and concrete: something in your neighborhood, workplace, school or church. Avoid national party debates for this exercise.
- Write down the personal choices involved. Who decided what?
- Write down the patterns involved. What rules, customs or assumptions keep this harm going even when no one in particular chooses it?
- Ask what each level is protecting. Whose comfort, power, money or safety is being preserved? Be as honest about yourself as about anyone else.
- Write one response at each level. At the personal level, this might be confession, repentance, or a changed habit. At the structural level, it might be one action that works against the pattern in a way you can actually carry out.
If you are leading a group, expect people to arrive with different instincts. Some will hear “systemic sin” as a political slogan. Others will hear “personal sin” as an excuse to ignore injustice. Before anyone responds to someone else, ask them to restate the other person’s point until that person agrees it was stated fairly. Keep the focus on Scripture and on the harm in front of you, not on parties or candidates. No one should be asked to share personal confessions aloud. Steps 2 and 4 can stay private, and people can share only what they choose.
Questions for discussion
- Before this study, did you think of sin as mostly personal or mostly systemic? What in your background shaped that instinct?
- In Genesis 3, sin damages relationships almost immediately. Where have you seen one person’s choice spread into a pattern that affected others?
- The riverbed picture breaks because people have wills. Where does that limit matter most when we talk about responsibility inside unjust systems?
- Colossians 2:13-15 holds forgiveness of personal debt and victory over the powers together. What changes in how you share the gospel if both belong to the same work of Christ?
- How would you answer someone who says that as long as they are not hurting anybody, nothing they do is sin? Use Matthew 22:37-39 in your answer.
- Where does self-preservation show up in your own choices, and where do you see it written into the patterns around you?
- Which of the three mistakes are you most likely to make, and what would correct it?
What this changes
If sin works at both levels from one root, then a gospel that speaks to only one level is a partial gospel. The lesson describes what it means to share the whole of it: people need to know “they have not only been saved from something but that they have also been saved to something.” Saved from the self-protecting heart that drove Abram’s lie. Saved to the work of the Christ who triumphed over the powers that drove Pharaoh’s policy.
In Luke 4:18-19, Jesus reads his mission from Isaiah. In the KJV, it includes preaching “the gospel to the poor” and “deliverance to the captives.” Carry that into the week ahead with one question: in the harm you traced, what would it look like for your words and your actions to bear witness to the same Lord?