Exposing Satan's Playbook The Perry Stone

of swelling, tumor, or even pride. Its usual meaning was a heavy weight. In the context of this passage where the writer of Hebrews was referring to running a race, he was instructing believers to lay aside the weights and burdens that would weigh them down in their attempt to run and gain the prize. 1 Weights could be pride, unforgiveness, doubt, worldliness, and other carnal hindrances that weigh a believer down in his or her race to the finish line. The writer then mentioned the “sin” that easily besets the believer. The King James Version reads, “ . . . which doth so easily beset us.” The phrase “easily beset” is also found only here in the New Testament. It means, “standing well around,” or, more clearly, something that is near at hand and readily available. Barnes’ Notes has a great series of commentaries on the meaning of this phrase: Passow defines it as meaning “easy to encircle.” Tyndale renders it “the sin that hangeth on us.” Theodoret and others explain the word as if derived from [peristasis]—a word which sometimes means affliction, peril—and hence, regard it as denoting what is full of peril, or the sin which so easily subjects one to calamity. Bloomfield supposes, in accordance with the opinion of Grotius, Crellius, Kype, Kuinoel, and others, that it means “the sin which especially winds around us, and hinders our course,” with allusion to the long Oriental garments. According to this, the meaning would be, that as a