Seeking Path · Lesson 5 of 7 · about 5 min
From The Christian Life Catechism, Q15
Are we born good, or born sinful?
Behold, I have only found this: that God made mankind upright; but they search for many inventions.
Ecclesiastes 7:29 · WEB
From The Christian Life Catechism, Q16
If everything God made was good, where did sin come from?
Now the serpent was more subtle than any animal of the field which the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Has God really said, ‘You shall not eat of any tree of the garden’?” The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees of the garden, but not the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden. God has said, ‘You shall not eat of it. You shall not touch it, lest you die.’” The serpent said to the woman, “You won’t really die, for God knows that in the day you eat it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took some of its fruit, and ate. Then she gave some to her husband with her, and he ate it, too.
Genesis 3:1-6 · WEB
From The Christian Life Catechism, Q17
What does Adam’s sin have to do with me?
Therefore, as sin entered into the world through one man, and death through sin, so death passed to all men because all sinned.
Romans 5:12 · WEB
Last time we said that God became man and went to the lowest place. Why was that needed? To answer, we first have to take an honest look at ourselves.
Chinese children grow up reciting ‘At birth, human nature is good.’ Yet we have all had the experience of knowing we shouldn’t lose our temper and losing it anyway, or knowing we should tell the truth and then changing the words as they leave our lips. The problem seems to be not just that we ‘don’t know’, but that we ‘can’t do it’.
The Bible neither says that people are born only good, nor that they are worthless. It says, “God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31)—people were good to begin with; and also that “God made mankind upright; but they search for many inventions.” (Ecclesiastes 7:29) Made well, but gone astray.
The Bible calls this going astray ‘sin’. It does not mean breaking the law first of all; it means the relationship between people and God is broken: “your iniquities have separated you and your God.” (Isaiah 59:2) Jesus said something very weighty too: “everyone who commits sin is the bondservant of sin” (John 8:34)—we are not in control of it; it is in control of us.
You may feel uncomfortable reading this. This lesson is not saying that you are worse than anyone else—the Bible says “death passed to all men because all sinned,” (Romans 5:12) and that includes the person who wrote this lesson. It is simply naming a sickness honestly; the sickness is named so that it can be healed. Next time we look at the way of healing: why the cross.
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