Anon y mous

”God has placed us all under sin so that we would all be in a position to have faith in Him instead of earning our way to God.””My friend, let me say it this way. If Jesus was born with the same nature as the rest of mankind, then He couldn’t be the Savior. He had a different nature (sinless) but that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t human.”“This is where Jesus was different than Adam’s end. Jesus never gave in to temptation and
His temptations were “in every way just as we are” while Adam was tempted to rebel in only one thing.””We didn’t sin “in Adam” as if we participated in his sin. We were “in Adam” when he sinned so that the consequences of his rebellion would be felt by those who had yet to be born. We experienced the results of the poison and our DNA was changed from perfect to disposed toward sin.”
“If there is no sin nature (or natural desire for sin) then the sin that Adam brought into the world didn’t go anywhere. It just died with him. But the Scriptures talk about a “spread” of sin that has spread to all. This natural desire for sin lives in each one of us and it comes from the rebellion of the one man.”<

Romans 5:12 is one of the verses most often cited in support of inherited “sin nature.” However, that’s not what the verse actually says.
“Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned”

We didn’t all sin “in” Adam. Death spread to all men because all sinned. Adam, whose name means humanity, is the archetype for mankind.

The nature of humanity was, in Adam, to die.
The nature of humanity in Christ, to live.

“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”
This is such an important part of Christianity. God who loves us, made us alive in Christ, freeing us from the wrathful rule of the prince of the power of the air and bondage to our passions, and created us anew for good works. According to Eph.2:3, we “were” children of wrath – we were subject to the wrathful rule of the prince of the power of the air, but now Christ made us live.

Personally, as someone who by my early 20’s, was so bound up in the fear of my impending death and the futility of life (without God) that I saw no point in living, this was huge for me.
Jonathan Edwards himself could have preached “Sinners in the hands of an angry God” to my face and not effected me, but knowing that God set me free did.

So, I came to God because I found no point in living and then heard that He cares and went to great lengths to show it (“for God so loved the world…”) and He has a purpose for me. It wasn’t until after I was already in a relationship with God that the Holy Spirit began to show me the sin in my life. First, through grace and mercy, He loved me just as I was – lost in life and in need of Perfect Love. He loved me into a relationship. He did not condemn me into a relationship. Perfect Love that casts out fear. Sin is something that can only be truely understood from within a Christian vantage point. If you don’t know God, then it is impossible to see sin in its proper perspective.

“As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath.” Eph.2:1-3

This depicts the habitual style of life which had characterized these believers prior to their conversion. Had Paul intended to convey the notion of inherited sin nature at the time of their birth, he easily could have expressed that idea by saying,
“you became by birth children of wrath.” But he didn’t.

“But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up together, and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.” Eph. 2:4-6

Christianity tells the story of a God who is about the business of rescuing mankind and all creation. We cannot rescue ourselves. Our God is not some distant deity. He is the Lord who comes near, the One who enters His creation as a part of it, who empties Himself. And by doing so, God is the one who destroys death and heals mankind, making relationship with God possible for us all. It was always God’s purpose for mankind to be joined in full relationship with God. And that is only ever possible through the action of God. We could never have joined ourselves to God unless he first joined his nature to ours. Otherwise, you end up with a God who is either overly concerned about defending His honor or a God who cannot forgive an offense without payment – a God without mercy and grace. Now, that does not correlate very well at all with the God I find in Scripture and it oversimplifies mankind’s problem and the measures necessary to save us. God paid His own penalty – that is forgiveness.

“There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death. For what the law could not do in that it was weak through the flesh, God did by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, on account of sin: He condemned sin in the flesh, that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.”

Because I reject the “inherited sin nature” perspective does not then mean that I believe that any of us are somehow free from the myriad actions and choices of our parents and ancestors. Nobody starts life with a clean slate completely free from the influence of anyone but themselves. But the language for what we experience is not properly boiled down to “guilt or innocence.” It is the language of consequences as well.