Cheryl

Hello K,

Men do not carry a different sin nature than women do. We are all born in sin and all of us have inherited the sin nature. This sin nature comes from Adam through the father’s seed. Since all of us have human fathers, we are all in the same boat in that we are all sinners and all of us have been tainted with that spirit of rebellion. Eve fell into sin through deception and because she did not deliberately rebel against God on her own, the Messiah was able to be brought into the world through her seed. The Bible clearly says that the Messiah comes through the woman, and the sin nature comes through the line of Adam. Only one person has ever been born without the aid of a human father, so only one human can claim to have been born without the inherited rebellious sin nature and that is our Savior Jesus Christ.

Now this doesn’t mean that Eve did not sin. She did sin and she suffered the consequence for her sin. God said that she would die and she did. However God also judges the motives of the heart. Proverbs 16:2 says:

All the ways of a man are clean in his own sight, But the LORD weighs the motives.

Because Eve was completely and utterly deceived, her motive was not to rebel against God but to receive what she was led to believe God was keeping from her. When God judged her sin, he also judged her motives. Her motive was very different from the motive of Adam who sinned with his eyes wide open to the truth.

Eve’s transgression because of deception helps us in that it was the vehicle that God used to bring the Messiah into the world and the Messiah paid the penalty for our sin. You see God sovereignly used what Satan had planned as the destruction of mankind and God Himself was able to use Eve’s deception by Satan to bring about the redemption of mankind. Satan’s plan was to deceive, kill and destroy and he did catch the woman with his deception and then through her, the man stepped into deliberate and willful sin. Yet because Eve was deceived and did not willfully sin against God on her own, God “turned the tables†on Satan by bringing the Messiah through the seed of the very one whom Satan destroyed through deception.

Romans 3:23 says that all have sinned. That “all†does not include Jesus because he was the only one born without the sin nature and he also had no sin on his own. If he was born with the sin nature then he would not have qualified as the sinless Lamb who takes away the sin of the world. If he had the stain of inherited sin, he could not be the perfect sacrifice.

Mary was born with a sinful nature because she too had a human father. Jesus alone was born without inherited sin. Jesus alone was virgin born. Mary needed the Savior just like all of us need the Lord Jesus to pay the price for our sin.

You are right regarding Adam. He was the human who brought sin into the world and therefore represented all of humanity in sin. He did not merely represent males. He represented all humans, men and women alike, because all of us were in the seed of Adam when he sinned. Physically Adam took us all with him in his rebellion. Adam was the source of the sin nature for all of us. He was the father of all the dying. We all are born to die because all of us have inherited Adam’s sin nature. But Eve was not the mother of the dying. She was the mother of the living. In Genesis 3:20, it says

Now the man called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all the living.

Yet that seed of life in the woman, could not produce life on her own. When her seed was mixed with the man’s seed, the result was always death because Adam was the father of the dying. This is why the virgin birth is so important. Jesus absolutely could not have had a human father. If Jesus had a human father, Jesus would have been born with the sentence of death. But because he had no human father, because God caused the egg to become fertile without the seed of the man, Jesus came from the seed of the woman alone without the death sentence imposed upon him from Adam. This is the miracle of the virgin birth and this virgin birth is as important to our faith as the resurrection is. You also asked:

question – i haven’t done hebrew as much as greek… is the “you” plural or singular in Gen 3:17 when God says to Adam i “commanded you…”? if it’s singular it might add to the case for God only giving Adam the command not to eat of the tree directly. (forgive me if it’s something you have already noted in another time and place before i began reading your blog!)

Genesis 3:17 is singular in using “you†but it cannot be used to prove that God only gave the prohibition to Adam directly. It only proves that God calls each person individually to account for their actions. God also asked Eve what she had done. God did not ask Adam what Eve had done.

If you haven’t listened to my audio talk that deals with the faulty traditions that the church (as well as the cults) have brought into the Genesis account, I recommend that you listen to the audio file linked at this blog topic: http://strivetoenter.com/wim/2006/10/26/audio-talk-now-available-online/

I also recommend that you scroll up to the diagrams directly above and go through them again. The diagrams have been the biggest help for people to understand the concept of original sin and how we inherit it and the importance of the virgin birth of Jesus. I hope this has helped. Let me know if you still have problems in understanding my reasoning process.