Does God ever impute sin? "Blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not impute sin." (Romans 4:8; KJV)


The word impute means roughly "to put into" or "to give". We are saved because of Jesus' imputed righteousness.

What does this verse mean? Does God make us sinful in His eyes by giving us sin?
In this passage Paul is quoting from Psalm 32. The King James Version in both cases uses derivatives of the verb to impute. However, other well-respected more modern versions of the Bible do not translate it this way e.g. the NIV or the NRSV.

There is a less common meaning of the word impute meaning "to assign a value to" which is used in finance. In this sense, which may have been in more general use at the time the KJV was written, the verse meaning matches much better to the other translations. Otherwise it seems to suggest that there is a difference between the KJV and modern texts which would likely to be due to the manuscripts used and available to the KJV's translators.