Q13 // Did our first parents continue in the state in which they were created?
A // Our first parents, being left to the freedom of their own will, fell from the state in which they were created by sinning against God.
Genesis 3.6-8; Genesis 3.13; 2 Corinthians 11.3
Q14 // What is sin?
A // Sin is any failure to measure up to what God requires, or any disobedience to his commands.
Leviticus 5.17; James 4.17; 1 John 3.4
When God created the world He declared all things good. This included the people whom He created: Adam and Eve. They were in perfect relationship with God and one another, with the perfect world they inhabited, and with themselves (lacking nothing). They were also good in relation to choice. Adam and Eve were free to choose good or bad; we call this free will. Free will includes both the liberty to make choices, and the ability to truly choose good or evil; Adam and Eve were completely free in regards to the one rule God had for them: ‘do not eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.’
When Adam and Eve made the choice to control their own lives and to disobey God they opened the door for sin into this world; you could say that they, in that moment, created sin. As this sin came in to this world it left nothing unscathed. In regards to humanity, it brought shame, tainted our view of good, and aimed our desires inward. All people since Adam and Eve have had this sinful nature (called original sin) which is what causes us to pursue sin in everything (both in the bad we do and the good we don’t do).
This is the state of very person (Romans 3.10-18). Something happens when God makes us His; when He gives us His Spirit; when He rips out our heart of stone and replaces it with a heart of flesh. What happens is that we are remade into what we were created as. God’s work in us reverses the results of sin:
SHAME | because we are loved, approved, and adopted by God, we no longer have to worry about being good enough. We are not defined by how others see us or how we see ourselves. We are brought back into relationship.
KNOWLEDGE | the knowledge of evil was not just an addition to our knowledge. In it, we also lost the ability to truly know good. In the gospel, we were given a clear picture of God and His goodness. In Scripture, God reveals His goodness to us. Through the Spirit, we can once again understand good by submitting our ideas to God’s. We are conformed to His wisdom.
DESIRE | our inability to see beyond ourselves is part of being in a first person body. Through the Spirit, God allows us to see that because He is goodness, re-centering our lives on Him is the ultimate good. Our desires shift from being about our ultimate good to His. We are remade into worshippers.
The process by which the results of sin are reversed is a lifetime event. We never experience a moment in this life where we are fully free from the burdens of the flesh, but this is not an excuse not to grow into the people God promises we will be.