In the beginning, sin was not a problem. God’s creation was good, as he had created it to be, and all its parts functioned well together. God did not create sin. What he did do, however, was create human beings with the real ability to reject the plan that he had put into place. You see, although more complex definitions are possible, it is probably most helpful to think of sin as basically the decision to choose a plan that is not God’s plan. “Remember, it is a sin to know what you ought to do and then not do it,” (Jas 4:17) which is what our first parents did in the Garden of Eden when they decided to follow the serpent’s instructions rather than God’s. But why was that even possible? Why were Adam and Eve so easily able to find their way out of God’s plan?
The sinning was certainly not God’s plan, but the ability to do so was. What I mean is this. Genesis says that “the LORD God made all sorts of trees grow up from the ground—trees that were beautiful and that produced delicious fruit.” It sounds great, doesn’t it. But as we read on we find that “in the middle of the garden he placed the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” (Ge 2:9) Both these trees? In the middle? Wasn’t one of them the tree that if they ate from they would surely die? Why was it in the middle of the garden instead of at the edge?
For of course it makes sense that God would place the tree of life in the middle of the garden. God never makes it difficult to find him or to choose his plan. And his whole purpose in creation was that Adam and Eve—and us—would enjoy life with him and with one another forever. In the garden, God’s plan—life—was always easy to find. But God also planted this other tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, right beside the tree of life, right where we would continually come across it. And he did this for the same reason he created: because he loves us.
If God’s plan was the only plan we had to choose from, then at the end of the day we would really be little more than slaves, or hamsters, or robots that responded to him because we didn’t have the capacity for anything else. But God’s will was never to create robots; you don’t share your love with a robot, or with a prisoner. God’s love is real love, the kind that never tries to force its recipient to love back, and so, even though he is the Lord of the universe, he made it easy for Adam and Eve to walk away from him and choose to go their own way. He gave them the real freedom to make their own plan if they wanted to. If he hadn’t, we humans would have never been able to answer his love with the free response of our own hearts and genuinely love him back. If he hadn’t, we’d be robots. That’s the reason why there was the possibility for two kinds of plans in the garden: God’s plan, and the plan where you choose your own plan.
So, in the beginning, sin was not a problem. And yet when Adam and Eve sinned, when they decided that they would choose a different plan for themselves that was not God’s plan, sin became a problem for all of humanity, and for all of creation. Just as parents make decisions every day that shape and determine their children’s future—where to live, who to play with, whether to start piano lessons or soccer, what to eat—the decision that Adam and Eve made has had a determining effect on all of their descendants, including us. And just as some parental decisions are irreversible upon their children—say, emigration or nutrition—the decision that the parents of all humanity made to choose ‘not God’s plan’ has had an irreversible effect on everything else since. Because of their sin, we humans have all become separated from God, totally lacking the ability to return things to the way they once were. In the Church, we call this event ‘the fall’ to catch precisely this meaning: that something final and disastrous happened at that moment which cannot now be undone or overcome.
When Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, they made the decision on behalf of all creation to choose the plan that was not God’s plan. Just as they had been given the authority to name the animals, they were given the real freedom to set their own direction, which has now become our direction. In choosing to reject God’s plan—in choosing to sin—Adam and Eve placed the whole of creation under the dominion of Sin. (This is the root meaning of the phrase ‘original sin’, that we have inherited a world both broken and dominated by Sin; the denial of this theme, claiming that human free will is strong enough on its own to enable some people to live free from sin, is, in its essence, the heresy of ‘Pelagianism’.) We are sinners from the start. Augustine says that babies aren’t any more sinless than anyone else—even if they look it—they just usually lack the ability to force their self-will on those around them like the rest of us do. (Confessions, I.vii.11) As humans, we cannot keep from starting to sin, and once we have started, we cannot stop. Jesus puts it this way: “I tell you the truth, everyone who sins is a slave of sin.” (Jn 8:34)
Because, then, we now live in a world ruled by Sin, everything is broken, and our world has really become a messed up place. Under the control of Sin, we have become not only the enemies of God, but enemies of one another, because each of ‘our own plans’ tends to get in the way of everyone else’s until we can only really succeed by crushing one another, and often our own selves, even if that wasn’t how we intended our plan to turn out. Sin means hostility toward God and harm to one another because it means choosing to do things not the way God planned them to be done.
This is the problem of Sin. It dominates our lives and guides our world according to a plan that is not God’s plan, a plan that we cannot stop continuing to choose. It’s why our relationships continually break down, and why we find friendship with God to be impossible; it is why the earth itself is corrupted, and why we cannot even really love or understand our own selves satisfactorily. When Paul says that “the wages of sin is death,” (Ro 6:23) he means that eternal and spiritual death awaits the one who lives under the dominion of Sin, but also that every sin creates and anticipates death in and around the life of the sinner, even if the effects are sometimes difficult to see. The problem of Sin means that we live in death every day—spiritual death, physical death, social death, personal death, environmental death—and that we continually reinforce death ourselves even though we hate it. It means that every one of us, aside from the grace of God, has been set from birth on a path that leads without exception to what Revelation calls the ‘second death’. It means we can do nothing to escape the decisive and irrepairable hostility that exists between us and God and the unending competition and contention that characterizes all our relationships. God’s plan for the garden was life: the problem of Sin is death.
And it is a problem from which no one is exempt. All of us are born into this same broken world and have inherited the same broken sinful nature. Sin affects everyone, and its only remedy is found in Jesus Christ.Especially in the Alliance, we use the word ‘lostness’ to talk about how this brokenness of Sin affects every person on the planet. The Bible states it explicitly: “everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God's glorious standard.” (Ro 3:23) As much as we might sometimes like to imagine the opposite to be the case, there simply aren’t people who through their natural piety or religious intensity have broken out on their own from under the power of Sin and escaped death. It is an impossibility. Doing it ‘on your own’ is very the definition of Sin; it’s the exact thing Adam and Eve did to give the world over to the command of Sin in the first place. ‘On your own’ is the thing preeminently unable to free us from our slavery to Sin, our destructive compulsion to do it on our own even when we don’t want to. Every person is lost apart from Jesus Christ.
Jesus, however, not only defeated Sin itself on the cross, but as the ‘second Adam’ has reinstated for us the possibility of choosing God’s plan through his own obedience to it. Jesus breaks the power of Sin expressly by being willing to not do it ‘on his own’, but by choosing to submit to the plan of God the Father. It is his life in us that can finally liberate us from Sin and make us free from sinning: free at last to truly see God’s plan and free at last to choose it. “There is salvation in no one else! God has given no other name under heaven by which we must be saved." (Ac 4:12)
The creation was good, and God’s plan was good, but we used our freedom to choose our own plan, to choose separation from God. In doing so our freedom was taken from us and our lives became defined by Sin and by sinning; ever since, Sin has meant death for us both in this life and the life to come. Death. That’s the problem of Sin. But it is a problem that has a solution, Jesus Christ, the one who reconciled us to God, recreated us in God’s own image, and restored God’s good plan—the plan of life.
If I was preparing for accreditation I would . . .
• Be aware that sometimes theological books use the word ‘Sin’ (spelled with a capital ‘S’) to talk about the cosmic presence and results of Sin in the world, and ‘sin’ (spelled with a lower-case ‘s’) to talk about the sinful actions of individuals
• Be ready to discuss (and succinctly define) the terms ‘fall’ and ‘lostness’
• Memorize Romans 3:23, Romans 6:23, and probably John 8:34
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