Abomination in Adam

TWIN CITIES GRACE FELLOWSHIP

Union in Christ · Lesson 2 of 10

Titus 1:16

“They profess that they know God; but in works they deny him, being abominable, and disobedient, and unto every good work reprobate.”

THESIS

In Adam, God's own reckoning of us — prior to anything we do — is this: detestable, unclean, profane. An identity with sin so total and so inherent that nothing less than justification, sanctification, and glorification in Christ can meet it.

INTRODUCTION

OPENING

Most people carry a settled verdict on themselves — not perfect, but decent. Good enough. And they assume that verdict is more or less shared by God.

Psalm 50:21 names that assumption directly: “thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself” — we build God in our own image, and then trust the reflection.

But Scripture doesn't leave your standing before God to your own estimate, or even to His silence. It gives a definite, declared verdict — and it doesn't start where most people assume it starts.

WHY THIS MATTERS

If a person never faces God's actual verdict on them, they'll settle for a false one of their own making — trading Christ's remedy for religion, behavior modification, self-improvement — anything that doesn't require being saved, because in their own estimate they were never that far gone to begin with.

That false assessment can't bear the weight of what the gospel actually cost — a Son crucified, penalty-bearing, substitutionary, gruesome — because none of that makes sense for someone who only needed a little correcting, not raising from the dead.

Rightly grasping this is what actually produces good works — not works generated to close a gap we invented, but works that flow from knowing Him and what He has done and provided for us. Get the verdict wrong, and even “good works” become something to boast in — a righteousness we manufactured and now take credit for.

The clear verdict doesn't just tell us we need forgiveness — it tells us we need a radically new identity. And it's the basis of ongoing humility: God isn't merely the one-time rescue that got us out of Adam, but our continual strength and refuge, every day we remain in Christ.

THESIS AND ROADMAP

In Adam, God's own verdict on us — apart from anything we do — is total, inherited, and unclean.

That verdict isn't vague — Scripture names it in specific terms, and we'll walk through it in four descriptive features:

I. The Triad — Abomination, Condemnation, Alienation

II. Dead to God

III. Alive to Sin

IV. Enemies of God

TRANSITION

We begin, then, where Scripture itself begins — not with what we do, but with what we are.

I. The Triad — Abomination, Condemnation, Alienation

ANCHOR

Ephesians 2:1–3

“And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins; Wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience: Among whom also we all had our conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind; and were by nature the children of wrath, even as others.”

STATE

Scripture doesn't leave your condition in Adam to a single word — three terms expose the totality of our adversity toward God: abomination, condemnation, alienation.

Each names a different facet of our sheer lostness — three separate problems, each requiring its own remedy in Christ.

DEVELOP

Abomination comes first because it names the core — not a one-time offense that can simply be forgiven and closed, but an inherent condition: a belonging to, a family tie to sin by birth in the flesh, in Adam. This is what's manifest in the actual catalog of sin's fruit — works of the flesh, sins, iniquities, offences, transgressions, wickedness, evil — everything Adam's disobedience brought into the world and into us.

Condemnation comes next, because it is God's verdict on that condition and its vain fruit — the judicial declaration that answers what has already been named as core to who we are.

Alienation comes last, because though it reaches into the relational heart — the desire turned toward what isn't God: self, the earthly, the worldly, the devilish — it's a condition carried out in a body of sin. That body doesn't just need the eradication of sin; it needs to be fashioned for something it was never yet capable of — eternally glorifying God.

A. Abomination

Titus 1:16

“They profess that they know God; but in works they deny him, being abominable, and disobedient, and unto every good work reprobate.”

Webster's 1828: Extreme hatred; detestation. The object of detestation — a common signification in Scripture. Defilement, pollution; evil doctrines and practices which are moral defilements.

Contextual definition: Paul is describing those who profess to know God while their works deny Him — the profession is intact, but the mind and conscience are defiled (v.15), so nothing that follows from that root, however religious it looks, is actually pure.

Devotional/theological reality: Abomination isn't a verdict on isolated bad acts — it's a verdict on the root. Apart from Christ, even sincere religious profession is detestable to God, because what's polluted at the source can't produce anything clean downstream. This is what makes “good works” apart from union with Christ an impossibility, not just a deficiency.

B. Condemnation

Romans 5:18

“Therefore as by the offence of one judgment came upon all men to condemnation; even so by the righteousness of one the free gift came upon all men unto justification of life.”

Webster's 1828: The act of condemning — the judicial act of declaring one guilty and dooming him to punishment. The state of being condemned.

Contextual definition: Paul is not describing a gradual accumulation of guilt through personal sins — he's describing one judicial verdict, rendered through one man's offense, extending to all men by legal solidarity with him.

Devotional/theological reality: Condemnation isn't a future risk hanging over an otherwise-neutral person — it's a present judicial state, already in force, entered the moment you were counted in Adam. You don't become condemned; you're born into it.

C. Alienation

Ephesians 4:18

“Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart.”

Webster's 1828: The state of being alienated. A withdrawing or estrangement, as of the heart or affections.

Contextual definition: Paul locates the estrangement not in distance or ignorance alone, but in a hardened heart that has produced spiritual blindness — the alienation is relational, not merely informational.

Devotional/theological reality: This isn't estrangement from facts about God, but from the very life of God — a settled separation of the heart's affections from their proper object. It's not that the alienated person doesn't know enough; it's that what he does know, he doesn't want.

LAND: You are not sick with sin — you were born diseased by it, head to foot, with no soundness in you; and until you know this, you will never seek the only cure that reaches that far. (echoing Isaiah 1:5–6)

TRANSITION

That core identity has a shape to it. The first feature of it: dead to God.

II. Dead to God

ANCHOR

Ephesians 2:1–3

“And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins... fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind” — deadness that doesn't look like deadness.

STATE

Man is not merely flawed toward God — he is dead toward Him: cut off in relation, though outwardly active and unaware of it.

Venning: “Sin separates man, while alive, from God, who is the light and life of our lives.” Death itself can't do that — nothing can separate a believer from the love of God (Romans 8:38–39). But sin does what death cannot: it severs relation to God in a man who is still very much alive.

DEVELOP

A. What “Dead” Actually Means

Man was made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27) — but after the fall, what's propagated to every child of Adam is Adam's image, not God's unmarred one, confirmed as the inherited condition in Romans 5.

Genesis 5:3

“...begat a son in his own likeness, after his image...”

James 2:26 illustrates the pattern that follows: not annihilation, not inertness — separation from what gave relation and life.

James 2:26

“...the body without the spirit is dead.”

B. Why It Isn't Recognized

The darkness itself is what confounds a dead man from recognizing that he's dead — an understanding darkened, alienated from the life of God, because of the blindness of the heart.

Ephesians 4:18

“...alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart.”

Paul himself is the case study. By his own later testimony, he was dead in trespasses and sins — yet in that very condition, in a religious fury, certain of his own righteousness, persecuting the church he thought he was defending. What Paul needed wasn't more achievement-consciousness. It was sin-consciousness.

Ephesians 2:1

“...you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins.”

John Flavel: “This scripture represents unto us the miserable and lamentable state of the unregenerate, as being under the power of spiritual death, which is the cause and inlet of all other miseries.”

C. What It Produces, Traced Out

Romans 3:9–18 traces this deadness to its fruit — the full catalog of what unaddressed separation from God produces.

Romans 3:10–12

“There is none righteous, no, not one... there is none that seeketh after God... there is none that doeth good, no, not one.”

LAND: You do not know a corpse is a corpse by asking the corpse. Dead men do not know they are dead — that is what makes them dead men, and not merely dying ones.

TRANSITION

Dead to God is only half the diagnosis. The other half: alive to sin.

III. Alive to Sin

ANCHOR

Romans 6:17–20

“...ye were the servants of sin... being then made free from sin, ye became the servants of righteousness... For when ye were the servants of sin, ye were free from righteousness.”

STATE

Man isn't merely capable of sin — he is alive to it: pursuing it, running after it the way a man runs after what he actually loves.

Sin isn't merely present in the unregenerate heart — it's craved. Loved. Pursued with the same passion a starving man brings to food, because to that heart, sin is food.

This isn't a servant dragged unwillingly to his master. This is a servant who loves his master — who runs to sin, not from it, and calls that running freedom.

Venning: “...committing it with both hands greedily, as if they could not sin enough.”

Job 15:16

“How much more abominable and filthy is man, which drinketh iniquity like water?”

Proverbs 4:16–17

“For they sleep not, except they have done mischief; and their sleep is taken away, unless they cause some to fall. For they eat the bread of wickedness, and drink the wine of violence.”

(Venning, on that same drinking down of iniquity —) “...as if it was their element and nourishment and pleasure also.”

DEVELOP

A. Servanthood Defined

Not a servant dragged to a master he resents, but alive to him — running to him.

John 8:34

“Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin.”

Romans 6:16

“Know ye not, that to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are to whom ye obey?”

Scripture gives us the picture of what that kind of servanthood actually looks like: the Hebrew bondservant who, given the chance to walk free, says instead, ‘I love my master... I will not go out free’ — and has his ear bored through as the mark of a devotion he chose. That posture is usually preached toward loving Christ. But it's the same posture the natural man holds toward sin — not compelled, but consenting; not merely obeying, but loving the one he obeys.

Exodus 21:5–6

“And if the servant shall plainly say, I love my master... then his master shall bore his ear through with an aul; and he shall serve him for ever.”

This isn't reluctant compliance — it's approval. It's pleasure taken in the very things a man knows condemn him.

Romans 1:32

“...who knowing the judgment of God... not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.”

B. The Domain — The Body of Sin

This servanthood doesn't first operate out in the world at large — it operates in the body itself, where sin's motions are already stirring before a single outward act ever takes shape.

Romans 7:5

“...the motions of sins, which were by the law, did work in our members to bring forth fruit unto death.”

The members become instruments, handed over and put to active use in the master's bidding — what should have been offered to God is offered instead to self: self-service, self-preservation, self-satisfaction.

Romans 6:13

“Neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin...”

What should have been peace becomes open warfare — a body enlisted against its own Maker from the inside out.

Romans 7:23

“...warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members.”

Venning: “The body is a body of sin, the members are servants to uncleanness and to iniquity... Take him from head to foot, from the crown of the one to the sole of the other, there is no whole (because no holy) part of him; but all is filthy, and full of putrefactions and sores.”

Isaiah 1:5–6

“The whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint... there is no soundness in it; but wounds, and bruises, and putrifying sores.”

And this is exactly why the remedy has to match the wound in scope. Scripture doesn't ask for partial sanctification — it asks for whole sanctification, because what's wrong isn't partial either. We are, by nature, wholly against God; so we must be made wholly His.

1 Thessalonians 5:23

“And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless...”

C. What It Produces — Fruit Unto Death

Every servanthood produces fruit for its master. This one's wages are death, and Scripture doesn't leave that fruit abstract — it names it.

Romans 6:21

“What fruit had ye then in those things whereof ye are now ashamed? for the end of those things is death.”

The works of the flesh are not hidden or hard to identify — Paul calls them manifest, plain for anyone willing to look.

Galatians 5:19–21

“Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness... envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like... they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.”

Paul traces the same fruit from a different angle — a mind given over, and a life that follows: filled with every kind of unrighteousness, and even approving the same in others.

Romans 1:28–32

“...God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient; Being filled with all unrighteousness... Who knowing the judgment of God... not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.”

LAND: He is not merely sick with sin. He is in love with what is killing him. This is not a man merely infected with sin — this is a man sin has made alive, and calls that life. He does not serve sin because he must; he serves it because he loves the wages, and has not yet tasted them. Every appetite fed is a debt collected — what feels like life is death, taking its payment in installments.

TRANSITION

Dead to God. Alive to sin. What's left is what that makes you — an enemy of God, not just someone who sins, but someone sin has named.

IV. Enemies of God

ANCHOR

Romans 5:10

“For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life.”

STATE

We are not alive to sin merely in the sense that we commit it now and then — we are so identified with it, so given over as its servants, that our master has named us after his own works. We don't merely commit fornication; we are called fornicators. We don't merely commit idolatry; we are called idolaters. The name isn't attached to the act — it's attached to the person.

1 Corinthians 6:9–10

“Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers... nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.”

DEVELOP

A. What an Enemy Is

Webster's 1828: One who is unfriendly; one who hates another and desires or attempts to injure him; a foe; an adversary.

Scripture doesn't use “enemy” loosely — it locates it in the mind itself. This isn't occasional friction; it's a fixed disposition, incapable by nature of anything else.

Romans 8:7

“Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be.”

This adversarial posture isn't confined to the mind alone — it shows up in every part of a man:

In thought — every imagination of the heart only evil, continually.

Genesis 6:5

“...every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”

In attitude and disposition — alienated, hostile in mind, expressed in wicked works.

Colossians 1:21

“...alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works.”

Even in countenance — the very set of the face refusing to seek after God.

Psalm 10:4

“The wicked, through the pride of his countenance, will not seek after God.”

And in activity — the same body whose members were built and fitted by God for His service is instead turned to warfare against Him. The motions of sin already traced in the last feature are not neutral; they are active hostility, carried out in the flesh.

Romans 3:10–12

“There is none righteous, no, not one... there is none that doeth good, no, not one.”

B. The Moniker Itself

The name isn't abstract theology — Scripture uses it with weight, tying identity directly to destiny.

Romans 5:10

“...when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son...”

Paul names the moniker and its inheritance together — not merely those who commit these things, but those the kingdom itself will not receive.

1 Corinthians 6:9–10

“Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers... shall inherit the kingdom of God.”

The same pairing appears again — the works named, and the same verdict on inheritance attached to the name, not merely the act.

Galatians 5:19–21

“...fornication... idolatry... of the which I tell you before... that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.”

And again — the covetous man is not merely guilty of covetousness. He is called an idolater, and that name determines what he does and doesn't inherit.

Ephesians 5:5

“...no whoremonger, nor unclean person, nor covetous man, who is an idolater, hath any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God.”

C. The Father Behind the Name

A moniker is a family name — it tells you whose you are, not just what you've done. Christ names the father behind sin's family directly, to the most religious men of His day.

John 8:44

“Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do... he is a liar, and the father of it.”

That fatherhood didn't originate with man. Scripture traces iniquity to its actual first appearance — not a flaw built into creation, but something found afterward, in a being who was, until that moment, without it.

Ezekiel 28:15

“Thou wast perfect in thy ways from the day that thou wast created, till iniquity was found in thee.”

Isaiah 14:13–14

“...I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God... I will be like the most High.”

That iniquity didn't stay contained. It was trafficked — carried from the father to the first man, planting two seed-lines in the world from that moment forward: the seed of the serpent, and the seed of the woman. This is where our whole series' language of two men and two unions first appears in Scripture — before Romans 5 ever names Adam and Christ as the two heads, Genesis 3:15 has already announced that humanity would divide into two families, one born of the serpent's line, and one born of a promised seed who would one day crush him. Union with one of the two men in Romans 5 is the outworking of union with one of these two seed-lines named all the way back in the garden.

Genesis 3:15

“...I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed... it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.”

Galatians 4:4

“...God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law...”

Adam received it, and what began as one man's trespass became every man's inheritance — not sin merely imitated, but sin transmitted, born into the flesh itself.

Romans 5:12

“By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.”

Psalm 51:5

“Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me.”

And so the line completes itself: born in Adam, servants to the sins that name follows, and therefore children of the very father Christ named at the start.

1 John 3:10

“In this the children of God are manifest, and the children of the devil: whosoever doeth not righteousness is not of God...”

TRANSITION

Abomination is the first of three descriptive features of who we are in Adam — but it isn't the only one.

Next we turn to Condemnation: God's own verdict on this condition, and the judgment it rightly deserves. It's a grim word, and next week won't be an easier message than this one.

But every verdict God pronounces against us in Adam is being built toward an answer already secured in Christ. He doesn't stand at a distance from what we've just named — He takes it on.

He meets abomination with His own cleanness, condemnation with His own righteousness, and alienation with glorification — reaching all the way to the inward man and to the body itself.

Christ Himself has become our righteousness, our sanctification, and our redemption, so that if we glory, we glory in Him — because there is no glory left to find in ourselves.

Under the law, a priest could only ever do one thing with a leper: identify the disease and declare him unclean. He could diagnose it. He could never touch it — to touch a leper was to become unclean yourself.

Leviticus 13:45–46

“...he is unclean... he shall dwell alone; without the camp shall his habitation be.”

Christ does what no priest under the law could do. He doesn't just identify the leprosy of our abomination from a safe distance — He touches it.

Mark 1:41

“And Jesus, moved with compassion, put forth his hand, and touched him, and saith unto him, I will; be thou clean.”

And when He touches uncleanness, the uncleanness doesn't spread to Him. His cleanness spreads to us. That's the whole of the gospel in one touch — abomination met, not with distance, but with a hand that heals what it touches.

LAND: Sin gave you its name. Christ is offering you His. This is not who you have to remain — it is only who you are, until you are touched. An enemy does not save himself; he can only be reached by the One he opposes — and that is exactly what has happened. You were named by your father in sin. But you can be renamed by the hand that touched the leper, and did not turn away.

CONCLUSION

SPINE

To the one still in Adam: Everything this sermon named — dead to God, alive to sin, enemies of God — traces back to one thread: this is not a behavior problem you can fix your way out of. It is who you are, at the root, before a single act is ever committed. No amount of self-improvement reaches a root that deep.

To the one already in Christ: This was your root too — not a distant hypothetical, but your own former name, your own former father. The spine holds for you as much as for anyone: what changed wasn't your effort, it was your union. Never let familiarity with the doctrine dull the wonder of having been pulled out of it.

CONVICTION

To the one still in Adam: You have likely been rating yourself the way Psalm 50 warned against — assuming God's verdict resembles your own. That assumption has to go today. The question isn't whether you're good enough by comparison to others. It's whether you've faced God's own verdict on you, apart from anything you've done, and whether you're still trying to answer it with religion instead of a Savior.

To the one already in Christ: If this sermon only produced relief that you're no longer described by these words, it hasn't done its full work. It should also produce a settled humility — you were this, entirely, apart from grace — and a renewed compassion for those who still are, since you were reached by the very One you were opposing.

APPLICATION

To the one still in Adam: There is only one way this can change — not by trying harder, not by managing behavior, but by believing on the One who can actually change it. Jesus Christ, the sinless Son of God, took on flesh, lived the life you could never live, and went to a cross to bear the penalty your sin deserved — dying in your place, and rising again on the third day. He did this so that everyone who trusts in Him alone would be forgiven completely, not on the basis of anything they've done, but entirely on the basis of what He has already done. If you have never believed in what Christ has done for you, do it today — and be saved.

To the one already in Christ: This doctrine isn't only for the moment of conversion — it has ongoing work to do in you. Let it produce continued humility, a daily remembrance of what you were and what grace alone accomplished. And let it become power, not just information: through the Spirit, put to death the deeds of the body this week (Romans 8:13) — naming one specific deed you've been indulging rather than mortifying, and depend on the Spirit, not willpower, to put it to death.

CLOSING PRAYER

Father, thank You that You have not left our identity to our own estimate, but have named it plainly — dead to You, alive to sin, enemies by nature, in Adam — and that You did not stay at a distance from what You named, but touched the leper, and were not made unclean by it; Your cleanness became ours instead. If there is anyone here still in Adam, we pray this would be the hour they trust Jesus Christ, who lived the life we could not live, bore on the cross what our sin deserved, and rose again the third day — believe now, and be saved. And for those of us already in Christ, let this truth never grow old to us; let it produce lasting humility and, by Your Spirit, the power to put to death this week what we once served so willingly. In Christ's name, Amen.