Sin and the Fall
RTS Papers / Evangelism / Summer 2016
What is wrong with the world? If a good God made it, then how has it become filled with so many horrors? How come we die and why are there so many disappointments for the short time we are here? You may know the story a little. The Bible tells us that our first parents, Adam and Eve, fell from God’s paradise, sentencing the whole human race to sin and misery. But what is sin? There are three very important things we need to know about it. SIN disobeys God, distorts us, and destroys everything else. That is what is wrong with the world and with you and me.
Sin Disobeys God
The Apostle John gives us what may be the most concise definition of sin anywhere in the Bible. He said that “sin is lawlessness” (1 John 3:4). Sin is legal because God is the ruler of all things. He is the rightful King and no matter where we go, we are in his kingdom. That means that God’s law stands over all things. So when the Bible says that, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23), we can be sure that sin is no innocent mistake. And there is also no such thing as a “little sin.”
There is a passage in James’ letter that clues us in on why it is so evil to break God’s commandments: “For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it. For he who said, ‘Do not commit adultery,’ also said, ‘Do not murder’ (2:10-11). There is a “He” behind the commandments. A person of infinite worth has been dishonored when we violate any of his commandments. That is why no matter how trivial a wicked deed might seem to us, in reality it deserves the wrath and curse of God.
So DEATH is the legal consequence of sin — first spiritual death, then a resulting bodily death — “The soul that sins shall die” (Ezekiel 18:4) and “The wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). When Adam became separated from God by the abuse of his own image, he shattered that image for everyone in his line. That is, all of his descendants who were yet to be born, which is everyone, since God “made from one man every nation of mankind” (Acts 17:26). As the old New England Primer paraphrased it to Puritan children, “In Adam’s fall, we died all,” or in the words of Scripture, “in Adam all die” (1 Corinthians 15:22). Paul says it most clearly to the Romans,
Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned (5:12).
So whose sin causes my death according to the Bible? Answer: Adam’s and mine. Adam’s sin was the ultimate cause in history and mine is the material cause, yet just as real and more of my concern. We cannot declare independence here. Think about it. When Adam and Eve rebelled, the distortion of their souls reshaped the race born to them, and all their children became natural-born sin-factories. Now what product does a sin-factory produce but sin? Therefore we are not sinners because we sin; we sin because we are sinners. It is in our nature. We can do no other. The Psalmist confessed: “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me” (Psalm 51:5). That is what is wrong with the world — the one staring at each of us in the mirror.
Sin Distorts Us
Being made in God’s image, all of us are worshiping something.
Has a nation changed its gods, even though they are no gods? But my people have changed their glory for that which does not profit. Be appalled, O heavens, at this; be shocked, be utterly desolate, declares the Lord, for my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water (Jeremiah 2:12).
Sin is irrational. I do not mean that we do not use our reason when we sin. What I mean is that it causes us to go insane: to lose touch with God’s reality, including even ourselves. The biblical story of the Prodigal Son is a good picture of this. We exchange the glory of God for the lowest of his creations (cf. Romans 1:21-23). If we remember that God has designed us to find ultimate happiness in Him, we will see that our trouble is not that we want to be happy. Our trouble is that we are not very serious about it. Here is how C. S. Lewis once put this.
It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.(1)
Sin makes us ever-withering pleasure-seekers. The way that the Bible puts together the concepts of sin as lawlessness and sin as insanity is under the heading of idolatry.
One Christian pastor has said that an IDOL is anything less than God that, if you lost it, would devastate you. Do you have such an ultimate good? Has it not become a cruel master with no lasting benefits to show? We are miserable rebels, striking out against a gracious heavenly Father who gives us all we need, and yet making ourselves all the more miserable trying to get a stronger dosage of the corruptible desires that are passing away (cf. 1 John 2:17).
We can see that sin has a domineering power over us. Jesus said that “everyone who sins is a slave to sin” (John 8:34) and Peter wrote in his letter that “whatever overcomes a person, to that he is enslaved” (2 Peter 2:19). Now that is ironic. From the very first lie in the Garden of Eden, the devil has persuaded mankind that sin is freedom and that God’s commands are bondage.
The problem goes all the way down to the depths of the heart, to a place that no mere mortal has ever even seen of himself: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9)
Sin Destroys Everything Else
Now remember how we saw that the glory of God is the happiness of human beings. Consider what falling short of God’s glory does to others. Our failure to glorify God is the height of selfishness. It is utterly hateful because if God is really what makes the soul happy, and if my life denies to others that very source, then whatever shallow notions of love I may have, my sinful actions are petty and causing great harm to the human race. Sin is selfishness.
Now look at the world. It is an utter mess of every kind. At first we wanted to blame that on God. But this idea of blame, where does it come from? Where do we get off calling the world a bad place if there is no such thing as “the way things ought to be”? Do you see the problem with our moral outrage against God? All of our negative moral pronouncements really depend upon the very law of God that our sin wants to deny. Our consciences are informed by a moral memory, a sense of the way things ought to be and a longing for it to return.
What about all of our religion? Can it fix the problem? The prophet says, “all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment” (Isaiah 64:6). What about all of our good intentions and seeking after God? The Psalmist says,
The Lord looks down from heaven on the children of man, to see if there are any who understand, who seek after God. They have all turned aside; together they have become corrupt; there is none who does good, not even one (Psalm 14:2-3).
Now given the goodness of God and the depth of our sin, the Bible understands salvation to be a real dilemma. We moderns may not. We may be asking, “How could a good God possibly send anyone to hell?” Yet the biblical authors asked the very opposite question: How could a good Judge acquit anyone who has done what we have? We have committed treason against the King of all goodness, we have wrecked our souls and the life He gave us on loan, and in so doing we have made a mess of everything else. In the biblical view, there is no way out and nothing we can do.
Truly no man can ransom another, or give to God the price of his life, for the ransom of their life is costly and can never suffice, that he should live on forever and never see the pit (Psalm 49:7-9).
If such a deep problem is to be solved, God will have to do something for us that we cannot and will not do for ourselves.
(#sin #evil #fall #AdamandEve #guilt)
(1) C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996) p. 26
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