New Adam

Original Sin

A- Original Sin

Behold! I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother made me! So the psalmist laments. The idea of Original sin has long been a central tenet of Christian faith. We have all sinned, we have all fallen short of the glory of God, we are not the ideal image which God created us to be. We a confession of our sinfulness at the begging of every Lenten season, “We confess that we have not loved you with our whole heart...” We confess this each month as we prepare to take Holy Communion, and we will again make this confession at the Lord’s table today. This confession admits to the reality that we are all affected by the very first sin, committed by the very first human, Adam.

“Is that fair?” you might ask. “Why should I be guilty because of what someone else did?” Such a question is simply ignorant of the reality of humanity, however! Of course what one person does affects other people! Our society pushes hard for individualism, a philosophy that ultimately has lead us down a terrible path of moral relativism, where “You have your truth and I have mine.” “Live and let live” seems to be the new American motto. And yet such an ideal is impossible to achieve! Because I live, I find that other lives happen to intersect with and affect my own. A choice that someone else makes very often does affect me, and likewise choices I make affect others. As John Donne might say, “No man is an island entire of itself.”

This is especially true of parents! What a mother or father chooses for their family will effect their children, and often will carry far-reaching consequences that shape the rest of the child’s life. This is the unbearable burden and responsibility of parenthood. So it was for the first man as well. His choices necessarily had consequences for those that would come after him. And so when Adam sinned, we also sinned. When Adam and Eve rebelled against God, they shattered the relationship between God and man, and created an environment of sin and rebellion that every other human afterward would have to live in.

What Paul does not mean here is that we are guilty for the original sin of Adam, any more than we are guilty of the sins of our parents. And yet, that sin affects us still! It is not that we are guilty of the sin, but that we are cursed by the sin, Sin, like a disease, now has a grip on humanity, it has marred the image of God in us, and made us incapable of being what God made us to be. While we may not be guilty of Adam’s sin, it is now inevitable that we will commit our own sins to be guilty of!

“But what about free will?” you might ask! Aren’t we free to make our own choices? Romans responds to that question with a resounding “no”. We are no more free not to be sinners than a sick person is free not to be sick! We have a great deal of freedom in our lives, to be sure, but not freedom from sin. We are free to do as we please, so long as what we please involves sinning!

This confession admits to the reality that we are all affected by the very first sin, committed by the very first human, Adam.

The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1989), .

A New Adam

What can we possibly do then? The penalty of sin is death, and we have been cursed by sin. We will inevitably sin, so we will inevitably die. This is the dire problem Paul has spotted with humanity. Fortunately, God, wise as he is, has found as solution.

If the children of Adam inherit their sin from him, then what we really need is a new Adam, but one whose children will inherit righteousness instead of sinfulness. This is what Jesus has come to do.

Whereas Adam was disobedient to God in the Garden of Eden, Christ was obedient to God in the Garden of Gethsemane. Whereas those in Adam are under the rule of sin, those in Christ are under the rule of God. In effect, God, through Jesus Christ, has broken the cycle of sin and death. Jesus has wiped the slate clean, and now all of humanity has been given an opportunity to choose: Adam or Christ, Sin or Righteousness, Life or Death.

Two Reigns

Paul, however, is getting at much more than just two “ancestors” here. This is about more than just biological inheritance, that is sin and death through Adam, and grace and life through Jesus Christ. That is certainly important, but it is not the whole story.

Notice how Paul speaks of sin and death: “Death ruled from Adam until Moses.” Paul speaks, at times, almost as if sin and death were people. This is because there is indeed a powerful, dark spiritual reality behind sin and death. That death ruled is not a mere turn of phrase: we were in bondage to Sin and Death, we were slaves to dark spiritual forces, and those powers were cruel masters. Speaking of sinful desire, John Chrysostom said, “Can you tell me what advantage a man has who, although not in bondage to another man, is in constant subjection to his own passions? At least men are merciful from time to time, but the passions- they won’t be satisfied until they’ve destroyed you!” Sin always asks for a little more, then a little more, until it has everything, including your very life.

Consider the story of

But Sin and Death are not the only cosmic powers at play in the world. They are not the only rulers humanity has to turn to. In Christ, God has offered us another option. He has broken the chains of bondage with which we were enslaved to sin, and he has offered us the opportunity to choose our master. And Jesus is a far better ruler than Sin. While Sin operates like a cruel taskmaster, Lord Jesus invites us into glory with him.

Paul says that “If, because of the one man’s trespass, death exercised dominion through that one, much more surely will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness exercise dominion in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.” Under the dark powers, only Death rules. Under Christ, all those who receive his grace rule. This was, after all, the plan all along! God created mankind to “rule over the earth” alongside himself. We are still under the rule of God, but God’s rule is not the kind of harsh, cruel, slave-like reign of Sin.

The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1989), .

The Power of Grace

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This Lenten season, God has set before us a choice: Adam or Christ, Sin or Righteousness, Life or Death. In Jesus Christ we are given the power to break the chains of sin and become a new people, holy people, the way God always intended.

Paul, however, would like to challenge our common notions of salvation. Here in Romans, we see that God’s grace is really about much more than a mere “forgiveness” of sins. Yes, our sins are most certainly forgiven by God. Being “righteous” or “justified” by God’s grace, on the one hand, does mean that we are found “not guilty”, and it does mean that we are made right with God again. But the grace and gift of Jesus is about more than a relational change, it is also about a conditional change.

In other words, grace not only means we are in a right relationship with God, but it also means that our sinful condition has been transformed by God into something else. Those who have recieved the grace of God and the free gift of Jesus Christ have recieved the antidote to humanity’s disease. We have recieved the power to go and sin no more. “For just as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.”

Certainly we will still be tempted by sin. And we will, at times, likely fall to that temptation. But there is a very real expectation that Christian lives look different after accepting Christ than they did before accepting Christ. There is a very real expectation that God’s grace will change you, will continuously change you, so that those who accepted God’s free gift become more and more like Jesus and less and less like the children of Adam.

In short, Paul is saying that God’s grace is more powerful than sin. God’s grace has real power to transform people. The gift offered through Jesus Christ is more powerful than the condemnation of Sin.

N.T. Wright statue story

Adam’s sin has done this to humanity. We are broken, our relationship to God is broken. No matter what we do, we can’t put the pieces back together again and expect it to be the same. The signs of brokenness will always be there.

“It isn’t a case of what they knocked down, God will put back up. Nor is it a case of ‘what they did wickedly, God will do graciously.’ God has done far, far more.”

“The old self needs to die. The self-centered orientation needs to be shattered. And the healing that comes beyond this brokenness does not involve simply picking the pieces back up and gluing them back together so that we can go on being our old selfish selves. Rather, they are reconfigured into a new whole, a new self.

The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1989), .