--As we explained yesterday, original sin really refers to two connected things. On the one hand, it refers to the ruined condition all people inherit from their parents in our origins, so to speak. But it also can refer to the original event which unleashed this ruination upon Adam and Eve and upon all of us, their descendents. So, you might say that the original sin of Adam and Eve inflicted the condition of original sin on all of us.
--That event is referred to as “The Fall,” which covers our loss of moral perfection, our loss of innocence, and our loss of God’s grace and companionship by entering our new sinful or “fallen” condition.
--The importance of this doctrine historically has been that no human being is in a position to rescue himself through good behavior. Because everyone is born in the condition of sin, separated from God and ruined, we all universally need salvation through Christ regardless of what we individually do after that.
--This has led to fierce debates among Christians about the status of children with God. It’s the main reason that most Christians have historically believed in baptizing infants, so as to rescue them from sin in case they die. Those who reject this solution instead propose that even though children carry sin in them, they are not judged for it until some later age of personal accountability. This is a very complicated issue, but the one thing both sides agree about is that no human being enters the world with anything other than a sinful nature.
--A living being can only ever reproduce something that is the same or worse than itself, and so sinful parents cannot produce non-sinful children.
--So how did Jesus come to be born and yet be perfectly sinless as a human being? I’ll explain that tomorrow.
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