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Death and Man’s Sin
July 19, 2009In my attempt to study for my lecture exam on tuesday, i fell asleep. I was distracted, worrying about all the possible problems i could dig up. You know it is not that easy to just let go of the circumstances which you know grapples with you and which you know will always win. I’ve been fed up and burnt out lately and despite the attempts to calm myself because i know i am at the midst of this struggle for spiritual maturity, at some point i failed. I sinned. It is human nature to give up i say, but i can also debunk it easily by saying it is not the right thing to do.There are choices. You can choose not to sin. You can choose to live up to that faith.
I was inspired by chapter 5 of Little’s book, which i mentioned on the previous posts. It talks about how sin destroyed man , how life became this hard because of sin and how God chose to save us than to leave us dying. It is a common teaching that sin originated from the Garden of eden when Adam and Eve chose to disobey and ate the forbidden fruit. And as a result, original sin came into life. For the devouts, it is the original sin that is being washed away whenever a child gets baptized. For the crowd, original sin is something normal, something historical which is obscurely not the right way to interpret it.
It is true that original sin came from the failure of Adam and eve to obey. It is also true that it is what separates us from God. SOme of us might ask, if GOD controls everything and He knows every detail of what’s gonna happen, then why did He not tell Adam and Eve about their possible disobedience?Sometimes we question the ability of God to control the situation which is not the right way to interpret the scenario in the garden of Eden. God knew all about the temptation. He knew that the couple would eat the fruit but He did not interfere with it because He doesn’t want Adam and Eve to be puppets, to be robots. He wants them to enjoy free will. They had the choice. To quote a famous phrase ; “man did not have inability to sin;he had ability not to sin. He choud choose.”
God knew Adam and Eve will be separated because of disobedience and that fact was painful enough that His decision to let that happen is ‘worth the risk’. We should not take this disobedience mistakenly by saying that God planned and made all of these happen including Sin. God is not the author of sin. Had Adam and Eve did not commit the sin, then God would not have entered our world and lived as a human.
Today, we face the reality that people do sin. Always. That we do not have the right anymore to assume position that if we were Adam and Eve, we would not disobey. We do not have the right to tell this because it is palpably true that we sin in every possible way, every day, at every possible moment. Our tendency as a human is to assume that because our first parents sinned, we are also to sin and sin is inseparable to our human nature and this is the reason why we do bad things. We believe that we are totally depraved in every area of our life. But the truth is, we are totally depraved but we are not totally bad. The word ‘total’ here only emphasizes the grace we need in order to be redeemed, that without the surmounting grace of God, we would be forever apart from Him. We would be forever lost. We must remember the clear difference between sinning and a sinner in nature. To quote Paul Little,” We are not sinners because we sin- we sin because we are sinners. An apple tree is not an apple tree because it bears apples; it bears apples because it has the nature of an apple tree. Sins are the acts (or apples);sin is our corrupt nature (the apple tree).”. And to quote the scripture, “this is the verdict; Ligth has come into the world , but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil” (John 3:19).
Sin regardless of its gravity brings consequences we could never imagine. it kills us. For the wages of sin is death (Rom. 6:23). There is no such thing as Big and Small sin. All are the same. All are made against God. When we sin, we do it against Him and when we sin, we hurt Him. Because of sin, we are ought to live in the fires of hell. we are to be condemned. But praise God for the grandeur of His grace that He sent his only Son, Jesus to die for our sins , and so whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life (John 3:16)
God loves us more than anything else. We are His most wonderful creation for we are made according to his image and likeness (Gen.1:26) and yet we sin. Life is all about choices. God gave us the wisdom to decipher what is good and what is not. We can choose to sin and we can also choose not to. Our trace of moral rectitude had been lost when our first parents fell but we are not to live like this. God always waits for us to come back home. He rans towards us whenever we call unto Him. He literally yearns for us to live in faith and be with Him rather than be separated from Him forevermore.
So to end, i will choose not to sin.:)
