Several years ago, when I had only three grandchildren and they were all under three years old, I walked with them down to the shallow pond behind the house. On the walk back, I bribed them with the promise of chocolate milk when we got home because we needed to hurry. One-year-old grandson had tripped at the edge of the pond and was soaked in stinky pond water, and he needed to be cleaned up.
The bribe worked, and after the clean-up job, we all sat in the front yard drinking our chocolate milk. All of us, that is, except the two year old. She was more interested in starting a toddler fight than drinking. She stood facing us, scowling, sippy cup extended. “You can’t have my chocolate milk!” she announced. She repeated it a few times, but the others were too focused on their own drinks to notice her.
Then she placed her cup on the ground and walked away, pretending she had no interest in it, but still alert, ready to run back to grab it when someone else tried to pick it up. Her plan, which didn’t work because the other two were paying no attention to her, was to start a scuffle and also be its victim.
This may seem like unusually sophisticated strategy for a two-year-old, but it isn’t. Toddlers are living proof that we’re all born sinners. New parents are often shocked at how soon their little ones learn to manipulate to get what they want, and how often their wants are perverse. (That some parents don’t see this is evidence that human thinking skills are not what they ought to be, either.)
The Fall
The Bible tells us that it all started with Adam, from whom the whole human race has descended. The previous two posts in this series centered on the Bible’s first two chapters, Genesis 1 and 2, in which God created the world, including human beings, whom he made in his image. Everything was perfect until the third chapter when Adam and Eve listened to the serpent in the Garden of Eden and rebelled against God’s one prohibition.
There is much we can learn about sin and temptation from this true story, but I’ll simply note that Adam and Eve’s disobedience was more than just breaking a rule. To quote D. A. Carson,
That is what a lot of people think that “sin” is: just breaking a rule. What is at stake [in the garden] is something deeper, bigger, sadder, uglier, more heinous. It is a revolution.1
After all, the chief motivation for Adam and Eve’s rule breaking was a desire to “be like God” (Genesis 3:5). They were setting themselves up as their own gods by doing what they thought was best for them instead of trusting the rightness of the their Creator’s rules. To use Carson’s term, they were “de-godding” God.
This one rebellious act resulted in the fall of humankind. The Bible teaches that Adam, as the first human, represented all of his posterity before God, so the consequences that came from this single sin—a disordering of the whole creation order, and universal death (both physical and spiritual)—affect all humankind.
And because Adam represented us all, every human being has inherited sin from Adam. Since this inherited sin exists within us from the start, right from the moment we are conceived, we call it original sin.
Inherited Guilt
The first aspect of original sin is inherited guilt. The sin of Adam is counted against every one of his descendants. “God thought of us all as having sinned when Adam disobeyed,”2 so each of us was born already guilty and condemned for Adam’s disobedience.
Some complain that this is unfair: How can we be blamed for what Adam did? There are a few ways to answer this objection, but what seems clear to me is that since Christ’s representative obedience is necessary for our salvation (a truth we’ll get to later), it does us no good to argue that the representative system is unfair. We’d have no hope without it.
Inherited Corruption
The other part of original sin is inherited corruption. We are all natural-born sinners. At birth, the corrupt seed that will grow and blossom into bad fruit is already there waiting to sprout (Psalm 58:3).
This is the reason no one had to teach my little granddaughter to manipulate others to get what she wants. It’s an innate ability—or perhaps more accurately, an innate disability. Like the rest of us, she was born with the desire to rule her own life and the lives of those around her—to be her own god, if you will—and as soon as she could express herself adequately, that’s what she began trying to do.
Inherited corruption means that every one of us is a sinner, first in our inner being, and then in our actions. So original sin packs a double whammy of guilt—guilt inherited from Adam, and even more guilt resulting from our inner corruption and all the sins that flow from it.
This is humanity’s principal problem. We are guilty before God, and as a result, alienated from him. And we can’t repair the relationship. We can’t reverse the revolution.
Thank God the story doesn’t end here.
Previous posts in this series: