October 26, 2008
One of the most amazing glimpses into God’s unseen world is the truth concerning our sin. It is apparent to me that what God the Holy Spirit has taught me about sin ultimately determined what I now believe about God’s grace. The horror of sin is what makes grace, grace.
What does it mean to be a sinner? What does Paul mean by his words all have sinned and come short of the glory of God?
I understand that sin means “to miss the mark” and the mark that we have all missed is the absolute righteous standard of God. God requires that I have a righteousness equal to His own if I am going to live in His presence. Yet it became painfully obvious to me that I had not come close to measuring up to that standard. I was not alone! There is not even one righteous man, not one?
Our sin has everything to do with Adam the first. How exactly are we connected to him? As I attempt to answer this question, I am aware that I am gazing in awe into God’s unseen world.
This is what I was taught early in my Christian life – that I had been spiritually “influenced” by Adam’s sin in the garden. This mysterious influence causes everyone to sin. We are born spiritually innocent, and we become sinners only when we reach the “age of accountability” before God. That age is not the same for everyone. When that age is reached, we are then held accountable to God for our sin, but not before.
I once believed and even taught this! The problem I ran into is I could not find this “accountability teaching” anywhere in the Bible. The truth is, I was not born innocent before God and, therefore, I did not become a sinner with time. I was born a sinner and this nature expressed itself outwardly early and often.
I realize that this subject creates a minefield of emotion in us all. However, emotion is never to become a substitute for truth.
Jesus said it is “that which proceeds out of the man that defiles him. For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed the evil thoughts, fornications, thefts, murders, adulteries, deeds of coveting and wickedness, as well as deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride and foolishness. All these evil things proceed from within and defile the man.’” (Mark 7:20-23) King David said that he was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin his mother conceived him (Psalm 51:5).
Adam did far more than just influence me to become a sinner. In the very beginning, God planted a garden in a place called Eden and in that Garden He placed the first man, Adam. God planted many beautiful fruit trees and He also placed there a tree that He called “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” God told Adam to freely eat from all the trees with the exception of this one tree. The fruit from this tree was verboten (forbidden). The reason was made clear. God said, in effect, “Adam, if you disobey Me, you shall surely, most positively, without a doubt, die” (Genesis 2:17).
Adam ate from the tree, and true to God’s word he died. His physical heart did not instantly stop beating, nor did he stop breathing and fall over lifeless. That would have ended the episode right there.But Adam died. Death in the Bible means separation. Adam immediately became separated from God. Adam’s sin did not take God by surprise. In fact, God had a sacrifice already prepared from before He even made the world (1 Peter 1:19-20). That tells me that God’s creation, the fall, redemption and restoration of man, is all about God’s glory, not man’s.
Remarkably, Adam was not alone in his sin. Oh yeah, you might say, Eve was involved also. She is not the one I had in mind. Paul’s words “in Adam all die” (1 Corinthians 15:22a) drift into my mind. Every member of the human race was there in Adam when he sinned. How is that possible? Adam sinned and died thousands of years ago.
If I believe the Bible, then I trust that Adam and Eve were our first human parents. The entire human race came from them. So it is obvious that the genetic makeup for us all – our DNA – was in our original human parents. So we were there in the Garden in Adam when he sinned and died. In like manner, I was in my great-grandfather Greenberry Hill, when he was fighting in the Civil War. Had my grandfather been killed in that war, having no children, then I would not be here. I would have died in Him. All of his future children would have died in him.
Likewise, we were all there in that garden when Adam sinned and died. When he sinned, all sinned! When he died, all died!
“By one man sin entered into the world and death by sin and so death passed on all men for all sinned” (Romans 5:12). Human sin and death entered into the world through Adam. How did Adam’s transgression pass from him to all men? Adam’s physical seed from which the human race was to be regenerated became corrupt when he disobeyed God. Adam died physically at the ripe old age of 930 years. All of his offspring, his children and grandchildren – his seed – also died.
Genesis chapter five is one gigantic list of tombstones marking the fact that Adam’s death seed was moving out full speed ahead. Since we all were regenerated from Adam’s fallen seed, father to child, generation after generation, Adam’s sin and death finds its way to all and as a result we will all die physically, assuming that Jesus Christ does not return first. Like the smell of perfume opened in one part of the house eventually spreads throughout the entire house, Adam’s death passed from him throughout all of the generations of man. This is what makes the virgin birth of Jesus Christ so very important!
When Adam sinned, the plants and animals also began to die because the seed that regenerates them was attached to his fall. Like Adam’s seed it became corrupt. Paul writes that all of creation was subjected to futility (Romans 8:20-21). Every member of Adam’s fallen race is born physically alive but spiritually dead. Every animal and plant will die because they have all been regenerated with fallen corrupt seed.
For all sinned. All sinned when Adam sinned. I was born a chip off the old Adamic block. I did not become a sinner with time and evil influence.
For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God means that I sinned and died in Adam and that sin passed down to me and through me on to my children and grandchildren. Jesus was speaking to a wanna-be disciple who desired to follow Him but asked first to go home and take care of his family responsibilities. Jesus must have stunned him with these scorching words, “Follow Me and let the dead bury their own dead” (Matthew 8:22; Luke 9:60). How do dead people bury dead people? He was obviously speaking of spiritual death. I am not a sinner because I sinned. I was not innocent before God until I sinned. I was born guilty before God and separated from Him. I sin because I am a sinner. The implications of this truth are extremely important. If I was simply influenced by Adam’s sin then I have the power within myself upon hearing the gospel to scurry to the cross work of Jesus Christ and find life. However, if I was born dead in Adam then God had to bring the gospel of grace to me and then give me the ability to understand it and the faith to believe in Christ and receive life. Lazarus remained dead until he heard a familiar voice calling his name and so it is with all men.
For more on this subject, read our article “The Fall of Man.”