“Sin is the result of rejecting God.”
If it’s the result of rejecting God, then the act of rejecting God isn’t sin.
This is correct, although I understand what
@sawdust was referring to, albeit with a logical-semantic error. From an Orthodox perspective, God is a consuming fire, and sinful acts are acts in opposition to God, whereas faith and virtues are acts in alignment with God, and those acts in opposition with God cause us to experience His fire as wrath, whereas those which align us with God cause us to experience His fire as infinite love, since God is immutable and does not actually change from being loving to being wrathful, but rather we change relative to God. The sinful act itself is a rejection of God however, rather than the rejection of God being the result of the sin, for as you pointed out, there is a logical problem with the statement that sin results from rejecting God. The rejection does not cause sin but rather the sin is itself rejection, since any departure from God’s path for us constitutes misalignment with God, putting us in opposition to Him, and thus constitutes sin. This is why the Greek word for sin, hamartia, literally means “to miss the mark.” It’s as though everything we do in life is a bit like a most delicate scenario of archery: there is a narrow path we can shoot an arrow through so that it hits the devil, and if we are sloppy in our aiming or deliberately off course, we hit God instead. Of course hitting the devil is not the reason to be on course, the reason to be on course is to love God and avoid hitting him; that the devil suffers when we refuse to sin is a happy coincidence, a result of him positioning himself so far in opposition to God that any sinful acts we engage in cause him pleasure, and any faith or goodness within us resulting from accepting God’s grace results in his displeasure.
It’s a bit like the second verse to the children’s hymn “I’ve got the joy joy joy joy down in my heart…” which I recall singing in preschool, which is the rather amusing “And if the devil doesn’t like it he can sit on a tack, sit on a tack, sit on a tack!” except the devil has opposed God so much that when we choose to have faith in our Lord, God and Savior Jesus Christ and receive His Holy Spirit, which alone enables us to do good works, the devil automatically finds himself in a veritable hailstorm of tacks. And lest I be misunderstood as advocating dualism, I am obliged to state that the devil is not a powerful rival to God like the Zoroastrian evil deity Angra Mainyu, but rather is a fallen angel who already lost, and indeed who has been defeated by God so many times, and is only permitted by God to act in a manner that promotes the testing and refinement of our faith like gold in a fire, as we see in Job.