What Is Original Sin? Why the Bible Says the Problem Is Older Than You

Last week we looked at the first sin. The snake asking a question about what God had said, distorting truth to create doubt in Adam and Eve, who eventually gave in and disobeyed God.

This week, we will attempt to answer the question. What does any of that have to do with me?

I was not in the garden. I did not eat anything. And yet Scripture insists that what happened there now affects me also.

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—

Romans 5:12

Sin entered through one man. Death came through sin. Death then spread to everyone because everyone sinned.

It is as if Adam’s disobedience opened a door to sin in our hearts that has never been closed.

What came through the door

It is a condition.

Paul calls it the flesh. James calls it desire. John calls it the world. Different words for the same thing, a working principle of self-preference, distrust of God, and inward turning that has been in control of humans ever since.

For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.

Romans 5:19

Made sinners. Not as if we chose to become sinners by our own first wrong act and then it opened the doors, the door was already open, through Adam’s sin, we were made sinners because we are born in the image of Adam. It is not something anyone can escape. It is what older Christians called original sin. It does not mean the first sin Adam committed. It means the condition every person is born into because of it.

The size of the problem

Without this understanding, sin is a list. A collection of bad things people just happen to do, an unfortunate tendency, a habit that better education or stronger discipline could correct.

With it, sin is a condition the heart is in from the start, and no amount of education or discipline can overcome it.

Scripture does not treat sin as merely behavioral. When David was confronted about Bathsheba, he did not write a psalm of behavioral regret. He wrote this:

Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.

Psalm 51:5

David is not blaming his mother. He is identifying something that was true of him before he had done anything at all. The sin he had just committed was not an aberration in an otherwise clean life. It came from a deeper place, something that has always been there, his sinful nature.

Paul says the same thing in Ephesians.

And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the flesh and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.

Ephesians 2:1-3

Dead in the trespasses and sins. By nature children of wrath. By nature. Sin is a condition, not conduct. The conduct comes out of the condition.

And that word, dead, connects back to the garden. Adam and Eve were warned they would die, and neither of them fell down dead that afternoon. But through sin death was introduced into the world as we know it, and eventually they did die.

But more than a physical death was introduced, they also experienced a spiritual death in their separation from God because of their sin.

The condition Adam ended his garden life in is the condition every child of Adam begins life in.

Two things are true at once

Here is where pwe might push back, and the objection is a fair one. If I inherited this, how is any of it my fault?

But here are two facts we cannot deny.

The first is that guilt came through Adam. His fall was the race’s fall, and his nature is now ours. By one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners.

The second is that every one of us validates it.

None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.

Romans 3:10-12

All have turned aside. Not Adam only. Every person, with their own will, in their own moments of decision, has made the same self-preferring choice Adam made.

Inhereted corruption. The first explains why the condition is universal. The second explains why each of us is accountable for it.

Anyone who has genuinely tried to be better and failed knows, that the issue runs deeper than just correcting the action or response. Something in us keeps wanting to do the things we don’t wnat to do. You can want to change, and yet, like us all, still watch yourself do the same thing again.

Much more

If Paul had stopped there, this would be the bleakest chapter in the letter. But he does not stop there.

For if many died through one man’s trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many.

Romans 5:15

Much more.

Adam’s disobedience through selfishness brought death to all. Christ’s obedience through sacrifice brought grace and salvation to all who are His.

A small problem needs a small fix, and if sin were only behavior then better effort might have been enough. It is not, so it was not. The cross is the size it is because the problem is the size it is.

He came after us

The first essay in this series said sin is the absence of godly love. This is where that absence came from. The heart that does not love God as it should and does not love its neighbor as itself was not built that way. It was made for love. Adam’s fall turned it inward, and every heart born since has arrived with that same corruption already in place.

But God did not leave the story there.

The same chapter of Genesis that records the curse records the first promise of a rescuer.

I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.

Genesis 3:15

And that promise was only the beginning. The covenant with Abraham. The rescue out of Egypt. The law, the prophets, the long wait for a King. Read from Genesis 3 forward and the whole Bible is the account of a God going after the people who walked away from Him.

Sin is the separation we are born into. Grace is God crossing it to get us back.

Next week, the heart. Jesus said that is where sin actually lives, and that the behavior everyone can see is only the symptom.