The Proverbs speak often about honest work and the importance of guarding against laziness and sloth (Prov. 12:24, 27; 15:19; 18:9; 19:24, 21:25; 22:13, 24:30; 26:13–15, KJV). And this is the type of sloth that most people think of when they think of sloth. Where the theologically slothful are misapplying doctrine, the proverbially slothful are choosing sinful foolishness over God’s way of godly wisdom. A man who doesn’t even work to take care of his basic needs is foolish and slothful. 

When was the last time you used the term sloth? It doesn’t count if you talked to one of your children about a minor character in Ice Age or Zootopia. A quick Google Ngram search, which allows users to chart the frequency of words and phrases in literature, shows that the use of the word sloth peaked in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and nineteenth centuries. Now, let’s go one step further. When was the last time you repented of sloth as a sin? Maybe never. Should sloth even be a sin on your radar as something for which Jesus died, something for which we should repent?

What Is Sloth?

Sloth is one of the seven deadly sins in Dante’s famous work The Divine Comedy, and Dante considers sloth from the perspective of love. He puts three of the seven deadly sins under the theme of love distorted: pride, envy, and anger. He puts another three sins under the theme of love excessive: avarice, gluttony, and lust. In between the first three and the last three, Dante places a single sin, sloth, calling it “love defective.”¹

With this theme of sloth as “love defective,” Dante comes close to a biblical definition of sloth. Sloth isn’t just laziness. There is a deeper inner motivation to sin that, at its core, is a defective love. Biblically speaking, sloth is laziness that comes from carelessness about the commands and priorities of God, a lack of love for God and His ways that undermines a biblical doctrine of vocation (Judg. 18:9; Eccl. 10:18; Matt. 25:26, KJV). For a working model of sloth, we can consider two different types of sloth—theological and proverbial.

Theological Sloth

The Christians at Thessalonica had what we might call an over-realized eschatology. It seems that someone had sent a Pauline forgery to the church at Thessalonica, teaching that the day of the Lord had already come (2 Thess. 2:2). And in the soil of false theology, sinful idleness had sprung up (2 Thess. 3:6).

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