By John Fast
The doctrine of original sin is a fundamental truth which has always been taught and accepted by genuine Christianity because it is the teaching of Scripture. Just as the world in its wisdom can never have a true conception of God, so those who neglect this doctrine can never comprehend the power and effects of this inbred evil in themselves and others. Even those who may have been taught in some measure the doctrine of it still know nothing of the power of it.
The great majority of people in the world knows nothing of this indwelling evil, and since it goes unknown and undetected it ravages the souls of most to their eternal destruction. Today the degree to which we are witnessing the effects and fruit of it – as seen in the mindboggling decay of our culture, the shameless practice and celebration of the most filthy and abominable sins (Is 3:9; Rm 1:32), the proliferation and popularity of, and preference for false teaching (2 Tm 4:3, 4), the dismal and deteriorating condition of the professing church (2 Tm 3:13), the apostasies of many, and the worldly lives and practice of most professing Christians – calls for a stronger and clearer emphasis of this neglected and almost now forgotten doctrine.
These studies were originally developed and taught for the benefit of the few faithful and hungry saints who make up Hilltop Bible Church, but have been expanded upon for the purpose of this study. They grew out of my own personal study of Scripture, the reading of the work of Puritan genius John Owen’s Temptation and Sin, and the conviction that this despised and disparaged doctrine is urgently needed today. The spiritual landscape of America continues to be desecrated and plundered by those who think godliness is a means of financial and material gain, who make a trade of God’s word and the church (2 Cor 2:17), who pander to the flesh, human pride, and human wisdom (2 Pt 2:18), who edit, dilute, and avoid doctrines which people have deemed too controversial (2 Cor 4:2), and who preach a different gospel and a different Jesus (Gal 1:6, 7; 1 Jn 2:18, 19).
In America there are now entire towns and communities where the remnant of true believers is deprived of a faithful, God-fearing, and Bible-believing church. God is winnowing the chaff from the wheat. Judgment always begins with the household of God (1 Pt 4:17-19), “Yet gleanings will be left in it like the shaking of an olive tree, two or three olives on the topmost bough, four or five on the branches of a fruitful tree (Is 17:6; cf. Is 24:13). God’s true flock is always a small and despised flock.
It is to this small, marginalized, and undistinguished remnant that we offer these studies for their help and encouragement in an age where most within the professing church will not endure sound doctrine, and so, to accommodate the masses on which their self-interests depend, sound doctrine is not taught. They are not intended for the casual reader and devotee of the latest pop-theology, or for those who are self-satisfied with their own spiritual condition. To such people these studies would hold little interest and be of no profit. Rather, they are for those who, with the Apostle Paul, feel the pain and despair of “not practicing what I would like to do, but I am dong the very thing I hate” (Rm 7:15).
Our prayer is that God in His sovereign providence will direct these studies where and to whom He wills. We trust that He will use them to the edification of other hungry and humble believers in this Christ-despising age who have never been taught these timeless principles, and stir them up to a renewed appreciation for the power, pollution, deceit, guilt, and sinfulness of sin, an abhorrence of its fruit, a greater watchfulness and diligence, greater faith and prayer, a commitment to “cleanse ourselves from all defilement of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God” (2 Cor 7:1), and to walk in a manner worthy of their calling (Eph 4:1).
THE PRESENCE AND POWER OF INDWELLING SIN
Study No. 1 – The Nature of Man
Any study of the subject of indwelling sin and the remainder of its effects in believers must first begin with an understanding of the nature of mankind. It was Jesus’ exhaustive knowledge of the nature of man which prevented Him from entrusting Himself in any way to the thoughts, feelings, and opinions of man (Jn 2:24, 25). Such is not the case with humanity. More often than not people entrust themselves to the thoughts, opinions, and experiences of other people rather than the clear, unambiguous testimony of God’s word.
Most people’s views concerning the nature of man, whether they realize it or not, have been shaped almost exclusively by the theories and dogmas of modern secular psychology, which has, as its fundamental presupposition, an evolutionary view of man. Today, through various means and methods, these beliefs have been heavily integrated with the Bible, taught to people as truth, and as a result have profoundly influenced the thinking of most professing Christians. Therefore, any true understanding of the nature of man must begin with the assumption that the Genesis account of creation and the fall of man into sin is true, literal, accurate, and authoritative history. It is not Hebrew poetry, allegory, or a story adopted from some other ancient culture in an attempt to explain the presence of evil in the world, but literal history. Without this assumption it will be impossible to have a true understanding of the nature of man, and all other attempts at understanding it must be based on human wisdom and observation rather than divine revelation. A person’s own understanding will deceive them no more than they trust in it, and when they do, it will never fail to deceive them (Pv 3:5; 28:26; Jer 17:5, 9).
While the secular and “scientific” world has long rejected and openly mocked the biblical account of creation, the overwhelming majority of professing Christendom today either denies a literal six-day creation and literal fall of a literal Adam and Eve, or dismisses it as a non-essential and unnecessarily divisive doctrine. What most fail to realize is that there is no such thing as a non-essential doctrine. There is no such thing as unauthoritative Scripture. No doctrine exists in isolation from other biblical doctrines. You cannot reject one doctrine without impacting a host of others because they are all linked together in one long chain of truth. There is no biblical or theological reason to reject the Bible’s account of creation. The only rational is to accommodate the billions of years required for evolution; in other words, to accommodate the opinions and wisdom of man.
For instance, to assert that death and destruction existed for millions of years before man came on the scene, as does evolution, is to place death before the fall. So now death is no longer a consequence of sin, but a natural process. But this completely denies the testimony of Scripture, that it was “through one man sin entered into the world (Rm 5:12). Before Adam’s sin, sin was not in the world, but as a result of his sin, sin has now “entered into the world, and death through sin.” So death is a consequence of sin, “The wages of sin is death” (Rm 6:23).
To place death before sin is to destroy the efficacy and reason for Christ’s atoning sacrifice which not only frees believers from the fear of death and grants eternal life, but frees us from the power of sin in this life (Rm 6:1-13). In order to overcome this and other obvious dilemmas, instead of simply accepting the Bible’s account as literal history, all sorts of creative and scholarly-sounding subterfuges are proposed in an attempt to evade the obvious meaning. All these wily word-games simply create a whole new batch of problems and are evidence of the presence and power of the indwelling sin from which all these evasions spring.
What sets mankind apart from other creatures is that only man was created in the image of God (Gn 1:26, 27). What is this image? Of what does it consist? The image of God is not our physical body because God is spirit (Jn 4:24). God created two different physical bodies, male and female. What sets mankind apart from other creatures is not our physical, material nature, but our immaterial nature. Only man has an immaterial nature, an eternal soul. As Jesus told His disciples, “Do not fear those who kill the body, but are unable to kill the soul; but rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell” (Mt 10:28).
What does it mean to be created in the image of God? It means that man was created with the capacity to have fellowship with God. Man was created as a moral being. He was created as a good moral being (Gn 1:31). He was created as a good morally free being, which means he was created as a morally responsible being capable of trusting, loving, knowing, obeying, worshiping, and communing with God, unlike any other created being. Fellowship and communion relates to things and persons. There is a joint participation in the things which they hold in common, whether good or evil. Because man was created in the image of God, that is, he was given an immaterial, spiritual nature, and that nature was very good, he could have and enjoy spiritual communion with a holy and good God who is spirit.
Mankind alone was created in “the image of God”, but the Bible does not delineate exactly how we are like God. Similar wording is used in Genesis 5:3 where we are told that Adam “became the father of a son in his own likeness”. Adam’s eating of the forbidden fruit not only introduced sin into the world, it also altered his very nature. His nature became infected with sin. Adam’s nature underwent a transformation when he sinned. His nature was no longer “very good”, but corrupted by sin. Instead of a sinless nature he incurred a sin nature, and it was this nature he transmitted to his son and to all who came after him.
Since the entrance of sin into the world, by nature, no person has any communion with God. He is by nature light, we are darkness, and what communion does light have with darkness (2 Cor 6:14)? He is by nature life, and we are dead in our transgressions (Eph 2:5). He is by nature love, and we are hostile in mind (Col 1:21). Two cannot walk together unless they are in agreement (Am 3:3). This distance between God and man prevents their walking together in any sort of spiritual fellowship and communion. Man can have fellowship with other people because they share the same nature, but because of sin no one is able to have fellowship with God
Adam was created in the image of God, but that image was marred by sin and no longer representative of the image of God. It is this soiled image, this “likeness”, which Adam passed on to all his progeny. As a result, all mankind are “by nature children of wrath” (Eph 2:3), because we are all sinners by nature, not just by actions. People are not sinners because they sin, but they sin because they are sinners by nature, therefore all they do is in keeping with their nature. Thus, the Apostle Paul confessed, “For I know that no good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh” (Rm 7:18), that is in his sin-corrupted nature. The image of God in man was permanently marred by sin.
We get a glimpse of what this image of God is from the New Testament. The regenerate person, the one who has been given a new nature – a “new self” – at salvation is commanded to “put on the new self, which in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth” (Eph 4:24). The Apostle Paul writes that “the new self is being renewed to a true knowledge according to the image of the One who created him” (Col 3:10). It is by His precious and magnificent promises that “you might become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world by lust” (2 Pt 1:4). So, this image of God includes a true knowledge of God, true righteousness, and true holiness, partaking of the divine nature, fellowship and communion with God, all of which were lost as a result of the fall.
The purpose of mankind being created in the image of God was so he could enjoy God and glorify Him forever. But how do we do this? Only by being in a right relationship with Him. How does someone enjoy another person? We enjoy someone when they are the supreme object of our love, desire, and affections. This is what was lost at the fall. Man’s love for God was transferred to something else. Something else became the supreme object of his love, and that something else is his idols – principally his idols of self and the world. So rather than seeking their chief enjoyment in God, mankind looks for it in other things, which the Bible tells us is futile, “For who can eat and who can have enjoyment without Him?” (Eccl 2:25). David discovered “In Thy presence is fullness of joy; in Thy right hand there are pleasures forever (Ps 16:11). The psalmist Asaph wrote “Whom have I in heaven but Thee, and besides Thee, I desire nothing on earth” (Ps 73:25). The Apostle Paul considered the loss of all that he had at one time valued as rubbish in comparison to “the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (Phil 3:8).
Towards God this enjoyment expresses itself as worship. He is the supreme object of our service, devotion, fear, reverence, obedience, adoration, thanks, dependence, trust, praise, and love. In the garden God gave man a means by which he could express his love and trust, thanks and praise, and worship and enjoyment. God gave man work, he was to “cultivate and keep” (i.e. watch over; guard; protect) the garden (Gn 2:15). And God gave man a command – a means of showing his love, trust, dependence, and obedience – not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Gn 2:17).
Adam and Eve were deprived of nothing. They lacked no advantage. Everything was in their favor. They were in a perfect environment. They could freely eat from any tree in the garden except one (Gn 2:16). They had an abundance from which to choose. They had every reason to obey and trust God. He had shown man nothing but love, care, kindness, and bounty, and in return they were to love, trust, worship, and obey God in perfect fellowship and communion with Him. They had no necessity or compulsion to sin. There was nothing in their nature that would predispose them to sin; rather, they had a sinless nature. They had sufficient warning and motive not to sin, “for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (Gn 2:17). There was nothing lacking on the part of God. He had given Adam and Eve every incentive to love, trust, and obey Him supremely, as well as the greatest deterrent to sin. So why did they sin?
Some wickedly blame God for the fall of man and the subsequent entrance of evil into the world. But as we have just shown, there was nothing lacking on God’s part. How can God, by any stretch of the imagination, be blamed for introducing sin and evil into the world? Some want to blame Satan for causing the fall of man, and even indirectly blame God for allowing Satan to tempt Eve. Again, we must understand the biblical account of the fall as literal history. Satan is a literal being, and, while he provided the occasion and opportunity for mankind’s fall into sin, he was not the cause of man’s original rebellion. Eve, while not having a sin nature, did have a sinless human nature, and it was her human nature – her nature as a rational, moral, dependent being – to which Satan plied his deceptions.
Satan tempted Eve to eat of the forbidden fruit, but he did not cause her to eat. She was not a hapless victim of a shrewd serpent. Satan’s temptation provided Eve with the opportunity to demonstrate her love, trust, obedience, reverence, and thanks to God, her dependence on Him, and her subjection to her husband Adam. An untested and undemonstrated love and trust is at best a dubious love and trust. Eve ate because she allowed herself to be deceived, a deception she freely admitted, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate” (Gn 3:13). As a free, morally good, rational, and responsible creature Eve had no one to blame for being deceived but herself.
How did Satan carry out his deception of Eve? All deception begins in the mind, and this is the nature of temptation – it presents things to the mind as something other than they really are in order to draw the mind and heart of a person away from the love, devotion, and obedience God requires and deserves. Eve’s mind was “led astray from the simplicity and purity of devotion” she owed to God (2 Cor 11:3).
Satan deceived Eve by first planting seeds of doubt in her mind as to the nature and character of God. He claimed that God had ulterior and sinister motives behind His command not to eat of the forbidden fruit (Gn 3:5), and in so doing he maligned and cast doubt on the character and nature of God. By misrepresenting God he deceived Eve into imagining God to be something other than He really is. Rather than rejecting Satan’s slanderous suggestions as utterly false and inconsistent with her own experiential knowledge of God’s nature, she, at the very least, considered the possibility that Satan’s lie held some merit.
Second, Satan denied the authority of God’s word, “You surely shall not die” (Gn 3:4). He directly contradicted the clear and unambiguous warning of God and justified his contradiction by suggesting an ulterior motive for God’s command. Satan provided Eve with an excuse to question the nature of God and the authority of His word, an excuse of which she took full advantage. She freely chose to believe Satan’s lie rather than God’s unambiguous warning. If she had truly believed God’s warning she could never have believed Satan’s lie. Unbelief had entered her mind.
And lastly, he emphasized the benefits to be derived from disobeying God, “your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” Satan always shows the bait, but never the hook. He presented the sin so as to make what was forbidden seem desirable, as advantageous and an improvement over her present condition, and even necessary for her future happiness and well-being.
Satan deceived Eve by fixing her thoughts upon the object which God had forbidden, maligning the nature and character of God, denying the authority of God’s word, and suggesting benefits to be gained by sinning. He artfully diverted her mind from what she should have known and considered and introduced thoughts she should have rejected. He contrived to make her discontent with her present life and intimated there was something greater and better. If Eve’s heart had been fully devoted to God, then Satan’s lies would have had no effect on her. Nothing could have tempted her to violate the command or doubt the goodness, wisdom, and sincerity of the One she loved supremely.
Eve’s heart was prepared before Satan presented the opportunity, so when preparation met opportunity, she was ripe for deception. Before she took the first bite she had fallen into sin. She had plunged headlong into a course of alienation from God. Her mind, affections, and will were driven by her lust, not the love and obedience she owed to God. The primary object of her love had shifted from God to self.
Instead of something to be avoided, what God had forbidden now became the object of her lust and something to be desired, both for itself, “that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes”, and for its perceived benefits, “that the tree was desirable to make one wise” (Gn 3:6). Rather than thinking of sin as she should, she allowed herself to be deceived into thinking as she should not. Rather than seeing the horror, treachery, wickedness, and sinfulness of sin, she imagined there were personal benefits to be gained from sin. In order to gain the imagined benefits she chose to ignore and disbelieve the real consequences.
Eve’s sin was the result of deception, but Adam’s was a deliberate rebellion, the nature of which resulted in a change in the nature of man. Adam’s sin was a complete moral revolt against God. It was a rejection of God’s authority and an assertion of his own. It was his declaration of independence, a statement of his autonomy, and his assertion to live a life of self-determination. Adam and Eve immediately began to act according to their new, sinful nature. The effect was immediate and devastating, “Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loin coverings” (Gn 3:7).
Before their fall Adam and Eve had no knowledge of evil and its shame and guilt. After their fall, however, they had an immediate experiential knowledge of good and evil along with an awareness of the guilt and shame which always accompanies sin. They became so aware of their shame they tried to cover their disgrace and guilt by sowing fig leaves together. Their perfect, innocent, pure, and unashamed fellowship with each other was immediately corrupted. Their fellowship with God was broken. Rather than having perfect fellowship with God, they now “hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God” (Gn 3:8).
The force of this statement, “the man and his wife hid themselves”, in the original Hebrew is dramatic. Adam and Eve were not cowering together behind a bush. Instead, Adam hid himself and Eve hid herself “among the trees of the garden”. It was every man for himself. The verb is in the imperfect tense indicating this was something they were continuously doing. They were both continuously trying to hide their guilt and shame, not only from each other, but from the presence of God. Self now became the dominate concern, not the glory of God or communion with Him. Fellowship had been replaced with aversion, hostility, and enmity.
Darkness always hates the light and will not come to the light lest its deeds should be exposed (Jn 3:20). Adam and Eve now had a nature that tried to hide its sin in the shadows, and that tried to cover their guilt by blaming anyone but themselves – even if it meant blaming God, “The woman You gave to be with me, she gave me from the tree, and I ate” (Gn 3:12). Adam tried to extenuate his guilt by blaming both the woman he was to love, cherish, and protect; the woman lovingly given to him by God as a helpmate, as well as the God he was to worship. Pure, holy, and loving thoughts of God were now replaced with hard, slanderous, and suspicious thoughts. Instead of communion there was alienation of heart and mind. Despite their best attempts Adam and Eve could not avoid or mitigate the inevitable consequences of sin – guilt, shame, fear, and separation. The effect of sin on the nature of man was immediate, ruinous, and total.
Every aspect of man became corrupted by sin – his thinking, reasoning, will, affections, desires – nothing was left untouched. Mankind’s entire nature was irrevocably corrupted by sin. Since the fall the nature of man is totally depraved, “every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually….the intent of man’s heart is evil from his youth….Indeed, there is not a righteous man on earth who continually does good and who never sins” (Gn 6:5; 8:21; Eccl 7:20). Notice, all of man’s intentions, including his intentions for good, are corrupted by sin making even his intentions evil. Contrary to popular belief, mankind is not basically good; rather he is basically and intrinsically evil. All that prevents him from being as wicked as he desires to be and could be is God’s common restraining grace (Gn 20:6; 1 Sm 25:26).
Due to the fall of Adam and Eve mankind is now a sinner by nature and in all he does or thinks he now thinks and does according to his nature. Since the fall there has been only one person who reflected and represented the unmarred and uncorrupted image of God, the man Christ Jesus, “He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature” (Hb 1:2). Jesus told Phillip that, “He who has seen Me has seen the Father” (Jn 14:9). Obviously Jesus was not referring to His physical nature. Jesus revealed the spiritual nature and image of God because He Himself possesses the nature, essence, and attributes of God. He is “of one substance with the Father”. Only God can have the attributes of God. Only God can reveal an” exact representation” of the nature of God. No created being, no angel, could ever precisely represent the nature of God because no creature has a divine nature. They could never say, “He who has seen Me has seen the Father”. For a creature to try and represent the divine nature would be a misrepresentation, not an exemplification of God’s nature.
This is why the world hated and still hates Jesus (Jn 15:18). Darkness hates the light. Their natures are incompatible. The unregenerate world’s hatred of Jesus is simply a reflection of their hatred of God, “He who hates Me hates My Father also” (Jn 15:23). And the reason they hate God is because God is opposed to all they love – their idols of self and the world. All mankind is now enemies of God because it is impossible for people to serve two masters (Mt 6:24). No one can love, serve, worship, adore, and be devoted to their idols and to God.
So, man invents a god who will accommodate their idols – a god who just wants them to be happy, even at the expense of His own worship and glory, who exalts man and delights in their own self-gratification, who leaves their pride, independence, and self-determination intact, who makes no demands on their life, and does not meddle with their self-righteousness. All idols are simply an image of whom and what the mind which fashioned the idol imagines God to be. All false conceptions of God reveal more about the mind and heart of the person imagining them than about the nature of God. Their error is their god.
People invent their own forms of worship which correspond to their own image and conception of God, which is usually like themselves, “you thought I was just like you” (Ps 50:21). Even the atheist deifies himself. They invent different forms of self-salvation, all of which simply reveals and proves their hatred of the one true God. All sin which people commit is service to their idols. All is to some false god. So, people deceive themselves that they are worshiping God when they are really worshiping themselves and their idols (Am 5:25, 26), which is why most are unaware of and deny their hatred for the one true God, the God of the Bible. This is what the nation of Israel did and we have the same hearts and nature they had.
No one believes themselves to be an idolater. The nation of Israel didn’t. The Pharisees didn’t. Cults and false religions do not. Yet, the god they love is the god of their own creation, not the Creator revealed in the person of Jesus Christ, and it is this fact to which most of mankind is blinded by the god of this world and by the power and presence of indwelling sin.
God is an enemy to what fallen, natural man treasures the most – his own autonomy, independence, self-determination, and self-righteousness. The greatest need mankind has is his need for a new nature which he cannot get for himself by any religious self-effort. He must be born again, born from above, which is the exclusive prerogative of God to bestow on whomever He wishes (Jn 5:21). It is only by means of a new birth we can say, “indeed our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ (1 Jn 1:3). All true fellowship with Jesus Christ will include a fellowship in His sufferings (Phil 3:10; cf. 2 Tm 3:12). If the world hated Jesus it will hate all who bear His image, “Do not marvel, brethren, if the world hates you” (1 Jn 3:13; cf. 1 Pt 4:12, 13). The fallen world is by nature unrighteous, whereas God is by nature righteous, and “everyone also who practices righteousness is born of Him” (1 Jn 2:29). Darkness still hates the light, “For this reason the world does not know us, because it did not know Him” (1 Jn 3:1).
The world does not know God because it cannot know God; it has no ability or capacity to know God. This is what we will look at in our next study where we will examine the noetic effects of the fall, that is, the effect which indwelling sin has on the mind of man.