Truth 3: Original Sin
Truth 4: God Became Human
September 27, 2018
Truth 2: God Exists
September 11, 2018
Biblical Truth #3: Original Sin
The Bible documents the first sin which took place in the Garden of Eden. Adam & Eve were persuaded by Satan to take a bite of the forbidden fruit and disobey God. That choice, that taste of rebellion, was the original sin and in effect was a spiritual takeover. Man chose to govern the world without God, setting himself up as king. In his disobedience to the creator, man stripped himself of God. He now could die physically, the animals now rush to kill him, and the world’s elements broke down causing earthquakes and storms and other pains. More sobering, all human offspring would now be born with a sin nature, which results in us being born spiritually dead and separated from God. Below are some examples of the evidence of man’s and the world’s brokenness.
Anger and Murder
Have you ever felt pure rage? If you have, you know it can be an intoxicating experience. The face turns blood red, the mind focuses on a single point, and you do things that you might normally consider harmful. In the Bible, the second story of brokenness is a sin of rage. Two brothers seek favor from their creator after their parents allowed sin and death in the world. One brother succeeds in pleasing God with an offering from the abundance of his heart. The other brother, fails, and in his failure turns jealous of his brother’s success. He compares himself to his brother and in so doing, decides to end his brother’s life so that he will be the only one that God can find favor. After he does so, God exiles him for his sin, and the parents are left to weep for both sons, one lost to murder, one lost to sin.
This story still happens today. Humans compare and contrast ourselves and our businesses to each other. We are not content in our own accomplishments unless we are better than another’s. If we aren’t, we get angry. We seek recompense. We kill men in our hearts, and sometimes that anger manifests enough to kill them outright. It is a sad story of how far humanity has fallen.
Slavery
My friend and I were talking a few nights ago about the concept of slavery. “How is it that a whole race of humanity can be enslaved, treated as property, and no one seemed to view that as wrong? That goes against everything in me.” In reply he said, “because they wanted to ignore it.” In the Bible, we see a group of people that did the same thing. The Egyptians enslaved the people of Israel for the purposes of building their empire. They cared more for the city of Egypt than the inhabitants of the city. Pharaoh had children murdered, work toil increased, men beaten, all to keep a race underneath another race. It was a belief in superiority, that all men are not created equal. Some deserve more than others. This angered God so much that he sent ten devastating plagues on Egypt which destroyed their economy.
Sin and Brokenness
At the core of both of these sins is a willingness of the self. It is humanity saying he knows better than the system of morality God had originally set up in the world. When things do not go as humanity wishes, he takes a life, he enslaves a soul, he sets himself up as the new God. As a result the world has evil, it has pain, it has brokenness. When we look at the world, we see two things, beauty and ugliness. We can be both an optimist of the beauty of life and God, and a pessimist about the failings of humanity.
