The following is an edited email correspondence related to Making, Keeping, and Breaking Promises (3).

I recently found your blog and started reading some of your commentary on Ephesians, and I have been edified and enlightened by your godly counsel. I pray that God continues to use your diligent work so powerfully in the lives of other believers.

I have a question I’ve been considering for a while, and since you made a certain comment in your latest post about promises, I wondered if you might briefly inform me. You say, "Then, some promises might not be outright sinful, but they are unwise."

Does this mean that someone can really make a foolish decision or action and not be in sin? Shouldn’t foolishness qualify as a failure to conform to God's commandment to love him with all of our minds? I’ve often thought that after I make a foolish (but not outright sinful) decision I should repent for it.

Thanks for your message.

Yes, I agree that many unwise decisions are also sinful, and all sinful decisions are necessarily unwise (e.g. Proverbs 6:32, 7:7; Ecclesiastes 7:25); however, I am uncertain that all unwise decisions are also necessarily sinful.

A sinful decision entails breaking an actual commandment. Now, the commandment to love God with all our minds is certainly a commandment, but what this commandment implies must be defined by the other parts of Scripture. Also, to love God with all our minds might not necessarily imply that we will never make any foolish decisions, just as to love God with all our body might not mean that we will never physically fail, or to have unlimited physical strength. Moreover, some individuals are naturally sharper than others about some of these things that we are talking about, but this does not automatically make them morally superior.

Thus to love God with all our minds does not imply that you must get a perfect score on every math test in your life (even as you seek to glory God in your school work), or that you are morally forbidden to make even foolish mistakes on those tests — failing to get a perfect score each time might be due to the noetic effects of sin, but might not be sinful in itself. (On the other hand, it would be sinful for you to neglect your studies and thus do poorly on the tests.)

Similarly, to love God with all our minds might not mean that we must be all-wise, but that we must use everything and every part in us to obey God's commandments. But this means we need an actual commandment against something like co-signing.

In this case, I am uncertain that it is justifiable (from how the Scripture describes it) to call co-signing a loan an outright sin. I think one's motive and knowledge must be taken into account here. If it is done out of plain defiance to Scripture, or out of a mindset that thinks it is wise when the Scripture says that it is not, then it is clearly sinful. But short of this, I am not sure, since the Bible does not clearly describe it as sin. At least on the superficial level, it is more of a practical issue than a moral one; however, many practical decisions involve moral motives, whether good or evil, and that’s why I say that this is true "on the superficial level."

Or, there might be a scenario where it is neither sinful nor unwise to co-sign — that is, if the person thinks of it as if he is taking on the whole loan, or as if he is taking out the loan himself, and in effect, as if he is directly lending the money to the person he is co-signing with. And since the person might be unable to pay (that's why he needs a co-signer in the first place), the co-signer should consider himself as practically giving the other person the money, never to be repaid again.

Now, if the co-signer is prepared to think of the transaction this way from the very beginning (but this is almost never what people have in mind when they co-sign), then for him there is no difference between co-signing and giving the money away. And if he can afford it, then it is his money to lose. There is no sin here, except if the situation is such that, it would be sinful for him to give that money away, or to give it to this particular person. Assuming that this is not the case, the passage from Proverbs does not exactly apply, since there Scripture is describing the unexpected effects of co-signing — the co-signer is foolish because he ought to expect those effects, namely, to be left with the whole responsibility to repay the loan.

So, I think you are right in principle, that many foolish actions are also sinful actions, but not always. Sometimes people commit foolish actions just because of their own limitations — that would be the noetic effects of sin, but not necessarily sinful in themselves. This distinction is important.

We must take the Scripture seriously, and thus we must take sin seriously. But taking sin seriously means that we must define sin very precisely and with good warrant, so that when we call something sin, we should have ample biblical justification to do so; otherwise, we risk becoming legalistic.

In this case, I am sure that some or even many instances of co-signing are sinful, and I would wonder why someone would still do it after reading that passage, but I don't think there is enough scriptural warrant to say that it is always sinful, as if it is like murder, adultery, or blasphemy.

Recommended:

Vincent Cheung, The Sermon on the Mount

Jeremiah Burroughs, The Evil of Evils

Ralph Venning, The Sinfulness of Sin

John Owen, The Mortification of Sin

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