When I drive out of our village back to our townland of Cordressagh, I pass a telegraph pole bearing a stark message: “The wages of sin is death.” This small, square sign echoes a doctrine I grew up with in Northern Ireland—a message that was reinforced in my early years by a fundamentalist Sunday school teacher, Miss Morgan, whose conviction was unwavering. It was a familiar tract, tucked into Bibles and hymnbooks, a steady reminder of what was believed to be at stake. For a long time, this message lived quietly inside me, shaping how I understood God, myself, and the world, not because it was entirely false, but because it reflected an early, fear-based way of understanding faith that left little room for depth, mystery, or transformation.

That way of understanding the meaning of sin framed faith as something narrow and rigid, more concerned with control and conformity than with awakening. It subtly divided the world into categories—the saved and the sinners—and encouraged a sense of belonging that depended on being on the right side of belief. When faith is held in this way, sin is understood primarily as transgression: a list of moral infractions, a tally of failures, a legal ledger of right and wrong. The focus becomes obedience to external rules rather than inner change, and when this becomes the whole picture, something essential in the teachings of Jesus is easily overlooked or quietly lost.

Many of us were never invited to ask what the word sin actually means. We inherited definitions without examining them, absorbing a theology of separation—separation from God, from one another, and ultimately from our own Divine Being. In doing so, we missed the mark entirely. The original meaning of the word sin comes from archery; it means to miss the mark. And what is this mark we are missing? The center. The core. The deeper reality of unity that underlies all things.

Seen from this perspective, the fundamental mistake—the true sin—is not lying, stealing, or breaking religious laws. It is the belief in separation: separation from God, from one another, and from the deeper reality of Being itself. This belief quietly governs much of human life. It is rarely questioned, rarely challenged, and yet it sits at the root of suffering. When Scripture speaks of death as the wage of sin, it is not pointing to divine punishment for moral failure, but to the lived experience that arises when life is understood through the belief of separation from God.

We are already one, but we imagine that we are not, and what we have to recover is our original unity, a truth that contemplatives across the centuries have recognised.

We are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity.
— Thomas Merton (1915–1968)

When we believe we are separate—from others, from God, from life itself—we live inside a great illusion. The world reflects this illusion back to us in conflict, violence, fear-based religion, and doctrines that divide rather than unite. This is why Jesus so often taught in paradox, not to offer new beliefs, but to unsettle the assumptions that keep this illusion in place. Across spiritual traditions, the mystics have always understood this. They do not merely believe—they KNOW. And what they know is unity.

When the phrase “the wages of sin is death” is heard through this lens, its meaning shifts entirely. Death is not the punishment imposed for moral transgression; it is the lived experience that follows from believing we are separate, time-bound selves confined to a body that stands apart from God and must one day disappear. When identity is rooted in this belief, life is quietly shaped by fear, striving, and loss, and death feels inevitable.

Yet what dies is not who we truly are. The body passes, as all forms do, but the deeper reality of Being does not end. We only believe that it does. Sin, then, is not what makes us die; it is what makes us think we already are. And forgiveness is nothing other than the remembering of what has always been true.

For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.
— Matthew 16:25

This is the invitation to the direct experience of eternal LIFE, as it is being revealed through this unfolding series on Sin no More.