Original Sin and the Sinful Nature, pt 2

In Romans 5 it talks about how sin brought death into the world.

It then goes on to say, on vs 17 that “If, because of one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ.”

Romans 6 talks about how we HAVE died to sin, and now live to righteousness. That we WERE slaves to sin, but have become slaves of God (see Rom 6:22, but notice how most of the chapter is in past tense – we HAVE died to sin. We have BECOME slaves to God.)

The section about being a slave to whom you obey (vs 16) needs to be seen in this past tense context, because the whole chapter is in past tense.

I want to say something significant here. Notice, we have died to SIN (Not sinful nature.) Second, notice how there is never a part in the Bible that commands us to kill (or mortify) or sinful nature, but rather the DEEDS of this ’sinful nature’ or this ‘flesh.’ Rom 8:13, “… if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.”

In my studies of original sin, I’ve stumbled upon the Eastern Orthodox view (called “Ancestral Sin”) which places death and satan squarely in the middle of the original sin problem. I’m not going to talk much about Satan (yet), and I’ll admit I don’t know all of the Eastern Orthodox view entirely, so I can’t say whether I agree with it or not. So what I’m going to discuss is death, and putting ‘death’ in the center of this issue right now.

Logically, and Biblically, speaking, I have a sense that they are on the right track. Think about this. In Genesis the sin resulted in death in to the world. What is death? Death is a corruption of something.

I think the key word in this original sin problem is ‘corruption.’ Corruption came into the world because of sin, and not just man but the entire creation has been subject to this corruption (see Rom 8: 19-25.)

Consider this, that also the sin of Adam meant that God was no longer in relationship with him. Perhaps, even, God withdrew his Presence or Spirit from him (which seems obvious, and also may explain why Gen 5:3 says Adam’s son Seth was in his own likeness.) God has not withdrawn his Spirit entirely, but certainly in an intimate way. Now, under the New Covenant, this has been undone with the indwelling and infilling of the Holy Spirit.

How do you match something like Psalm 139: 14 up with Original Sin? “I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”

Think of this : what happens when a being who was created to live eternally with God is now made mortal and no longer with God?

And think of this, what happens when a being who has a natural (and created) inbuilt ‘instinct’ for survival, has a limited number of days and does not have God inside them?

Is that instinct for survival wrong? No. God created us with a will to live. Would it have made sense if we were created without a will to live? Of course not. So, what happens when a being is created with a will to live but is, in fact, made mortal AND does not have the spirit of God from birth?
That being’s natural will to live goes haywire, and ’survival of the fittest’ certainly takes over. It becomes about me and my, and I’m going to have to clamour and tramp on everyone to get ahead. I need to live, and if you’re in my way, you need to get cut down so that I can live.

What if this is what the ’sinful nature’ is? What if everything that is natural about us isn’t evil? Say, our desires. I desire to live. I desire to eat. I desire to procreate. I desire to be loved. I desire to be happy.

Are any of these desires really evil? No. The desire to eat, for instance, isn’t evil. But what happens when this desire goes haywire? What happens when it becomes corrupt?

The simple, good, wholesome and godly desire to eat (remember, when God created human beings in Genesis, he said it was ‘good’) turns from something natural and good to something unnatural and corrupt – it turns into gluttony. There’s certainly nothing natural about gluttony. What has been natural here has been corrupted.

We’re not born, it seems, with this corruption entirely in place. We learn more corruption from a corrupted world (see 2 Peter 1:4, and 2:20.) But we are born without God, and we do inherit death which is what Romans 5 is telling us.

What’s the big deal here? The big deal is we are (mostly) taught that we are supposed to be killing the sinful nature as Christians, and – by implication – our desires are evil. This is not the entire truth, it’s a usage of words that (perhaps) is totally misunderstood. Our desires are GOOD, and NATURAL. Everything about me as a human is good and natural. These good and nature desires have been corrupted, and become more corrupted throughout my life. We are facing a disease of sorts on the human race, a corruption of what is natural and good.

Jesus makes the link between sickness and sin when he says “it is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick” (Matt 9:12) when questioned as to why he dines with sinners.

What if we are only believing for half the story here? We believe that God will kill our sinful desires. But we think this in the context that God is changing our NATURE, our very make up and being, making us something more than what we are – perhaps something more than human. However, when we read the Bible, God promises to resurrect our BODIES and wants to make a NEW Earth and a NEW Heaven. Wanting to be something more than human is not a Christian idea– more like a Platonic one.

We believe God will kill our desires (through our willpower, perhaps, or through our submission and obedience) when in fact he may want to heal our desires instead. He wants to take what has been made unnatural – what has been corrupted – and make it natural again, make it uncorrupted.

There’s no single verse in the Bible that says God is going to change our nature. It always puts the ’sinful nature’ (which, now, may mean a corrupted nature) vs the Spirit (Gal 5:17, is a good example of this.) What if this is because your very nature, everything that makes you ACTUALLY human is perfectly good, holy, and wonderful. It is the corruption of this nature that Jesus saved us from through his death, having taken this sin and the corruption of this sin upon him by suffering what the corruption brought – death.

THEN, to show his victory over this corruption, he is raised on the third day. And, when we believe in Him, we die too to this corruption and are raised up with Him - spiritually speaking, now, but completely when He returns. The Spirit in infills us, to work towards our healing from the corruption of death, sin and Satan’s influence. The Holy Spirit heals us from our old thought patterns, our old bodily cravings (which are, in fact, just normal and good bodily cravings that have gone haywire and become corrupt.) I mean, he is more than just healing us of the issues in the mind - he is healing our entire beings. This healing process is called ’sanctification’ and it happens slowly throughout our lives, because we’re still in mortal bodies – and still corrupted.

See, Jesus set us FREE from the corruption occuring even more, and wants to heal us from it. But he hasn’t taken us out of the corruption, because all of creation needs to be healed too and probably a whole lot of other things (which we can maybe look at some other time.)

My point, for this post, is to say that there is a possibility we’re believing God for the wrong thing. We want him to change our NATURE, when in fact he wants to HEAL our nature and make us MORE natural, and more who we actually are as human beings. Everything about sin is unnatural – lust is unnatural, jealousy is unnatural, coveting is unnatural. God wants to make us natural again.

It is easier to trust for healing of what has been corrupted than to trust that God would change my nature. Why? Because it doesn’t make sense that God created me this way, and then wants to change me. This is a problem many non-believers have with Christianity. It’s just too ascetic. A non-believer sees his desires as natural – and they are actually right. The problem, is, however, that non-believers see their SINFUL desires (like, gluttony, for instance) as natural and the church has largely agreed with them here too. We’ve said that the sinful nature is ’human,’ because we’re all born with this ’sinful nature’, and God wants to take away our desires and replace them with… no desires at all? We haven’t said it directly, perhaps, but certainly by implication.

If even the Church calls these sinful desires natural, then God should accept me for who I am – because he created me. This is the argument non-believers use. And I think they’re right to think this.

It must be that my sinful desires AREN’T natural, but that sinful desires are the corruption of natural desires.

However, if my desires are natural but my living them out is unnatural – and my body, mind and spirit is in need of healing and becoming natural again… well, I think many non-Christians would agree that this is in fact something they would want.

Jesus didn’t change a single person’s nature, instead he healed people and made disciples who followed Him and changed slowly. Should we be trusting for our nature to change? Or the healing of our nature? Uncorrupting what has been corrupted? Mending what has been broken? Changing us back to His Children. The second seems to fit within the biblical framework. The life of Jesus may just show us what the life of a Christian is – it shows that God wants to bring us healing (and certainly, he wants us to bring this healing to others.) We are often quite focused on the DEATH of Jesus, but we forget there’s a RESURRECTION too – and it’s not within His death that we LIVE, but it’s in His resurrection – the old has been taken away, and the new has come. We are new creatures, living in the resurrection of Jesus, the anticipation of the entire full healing of our bodies, minds and spirits. Slowly, as we live, we experience this eternal life now – we are inheriting it. We are being saved, as much as we have been saved. God brings our salvation not just through justification, but through sanctification. We are justified once, we are sanctified in increasing measure through life. Salvation has a beginning, a middle, and a final glorious end. You can’t lose your salvation, but you are still BEING saved from sin and corruption. You are being healed.

There’s so much more I would love to say here, but this post is already too long! Perhaps we should move to a pt 3 next week… would love to hear comments on these ideas, and see if the Spirit speaks to anyone through what I’m saying here ?

Original Sin and the Sinful nature, pt. 1

I worry about myself sometimes.

Really, I do.

I notice that there are certain well accepted doctrines within Christianity that really bug me, and my propensity to find alternative answers can put me on the border of heretic, or – at the very least – hetero-orthodox or something.

I take no real pleasure in being controversial, to be honest. Although, I love making people think because I enjoy thinking. And I take pleasure in being free, and seeing others free, which is what I hope my writing would do.

So why do these issues bug me? Because they greatly affect the way I relate to God, and they greatly affect the way in which I live out my Christian life – the way I love, and what makes me sin.

One of these issues is hell – which took me about two or three years to come the conclusion that I believe in the (eventual) annihilation of the wicked. I am not dogmatic about my belief, but my studies of the Scriptures has brought me to this conclusion.

I hardly voiced my opinion amongst friends for some time due to the reason that I feared being seen as weird and heretical. I’m a Deacon at my church, and Deacons ought to have their theology straight (apparently.) At least, though, my salvation is still OK and I’m in the company of some great theologians (John Stott, Michael Eaton, and others.)

Eschatological doctrines are the other one, and if I tell people that I don’t believe in a pre-trib rapture, a great deal of them still look at me funny. But it’s ok to have different eschatological views these days.

My biggest dilemma, however, is one that can place me in a very dangerous position. This one has more implications for me, personally, than my belief in hell or eschatology. Those things can still be discussed within most circles without much of an eyebrow being raised. But my next issue involves the doctrine of Original Sin (as it’s taught, or how I’ve understood it) and any denial of this doctrine has other implications.

For instance, if I say that original sin is all false then I would have to relook at my doctrine of the virgin birth. Not only that, but I also have to then look at the atonement. Why did Christ have to die? Something like Penal Substitution would come up, and any denial of that would place me out of reformed circles by a long mile. Now, I don’t see anything wrong with Penal Substitution, because I don’t think the atonement ought to be limited to one theory, but certainly the way I look at original sin would greatly affect the atonement – the cross and the resurrection – and the atonement is the crux, the center, of the Gospel message.

Why does this doctrine bug me?

Because this is basically what the doctrine says (in various forms) : Adam and Eve sinned, and because of this I have inherited a sinful nature, and am unable to do anything about it. I will sin, because sinning is part of who I am, a part of my very make up and being.

My very being rejects God, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

Well, the doctrine says that Christ has come to set us free from this. But my problem with this doctrine is that I still sin. If Christ came to set me free from my sinful nature, why do I still sin? Because I choose to? But the very ‘choice’ of choosing to sin is the very thing the sinful nature makes me do. How can God hold me accountable? Not only that, but is there ANY promise of being free in this life? What if I’m not actually a part of the elect?

Just from the above sentence I have problems. Firstly, there are issues of sanctification – and this leads into issues of eternal security, or – subsequently – issues with the Gospel message itself.

Paul talks about this in Rom 7 and then says “who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ our Lord!” This can either mean that Jesus HAS rescued us, or he still WILL rescue us. If the latter, then the Gospel is only ‘half-good news’ because we are unable to enjoy anything of the Eternal Life we’ve been given now (an idea that is starkly against what the Bible is saying – and the doctrine of the indwelt Spirit.)

In reading Romans 6-8 carefully, as well as many other scriptures, it seems to me that the victory Christ made over the sinful nature is quite final. Romans 6:22 says that I WAS a slave to the sin nature, but am NOW AM a slave to God. It speaks in absolutes – I DIED with Christ, and was RAISED with Him. So, how can I go on sinning?

The fact that I have both the Spirit and the sinful nature still operating within me puts me in a divide – a sort of dualism within. Truthfully, I haven’t been told by the Bible that God has given me a new nature – but His Spirit seems unable to FULLY get rid of the sinful nature within me, and this internal dualism is both confusing and a little depressing to me (if I’m going to be honest.) I have problems with thinking of myself with this dualism, because I am a saved man – Christ lives within me. God Himself. Surely that counts for something?

My other issue, which goes hand in hand with the above, is that God created me, and I am made in the image of God. But if this is so, why do I have a natural inclination to sin? I will be told that this inclination is an inherited nature from my parents – but the problem is the word “NATURE.”

This means that sin is ‘natural,’ but any reading of the Bible places sin in the category of ‘un-natural’ because sin goes against what is good, and God called creation ‘good’ in Genesis 1. Sin cannot be natural – otherwise, it would mean God created evil. Surely it is the most unnatural thing in the world to go against your Creator. It’s the most unnatural thing in the world to hate instead of love.

Just because we hate easily doesn’t make it natural. But what it DOES mean, I don’t know.

In essence, I am fighting a fight against NATURE. Must I live my entire life with my very own body beating against me to fulfil its evil desires? The result of such thinking makes nature (or the body) sinful, and anything that is spirit good. Another form of dualism. And this in itself sounds more like greek philosophy than Christian thought – that material is bad, and spiritual is good.

My life is now all about fighting against what is human within me, until the day when I am made no longer human but some spiritual heavenly being.

Yet, the Bible says my body will be resurrected. Yes, a new body, but nevertheless a BODY. Not only that, but God created me as a human – why am I fighting against what is human?

Is the sinful nature human? Or what is it exactly?

How we see the creation is paramount for understanding what is holy and what is not, and how we are to live our salvation out. I need to know what to trust God FOR. Do I trust Him to change my nature? If so, why can’t he seem to do it in certain areas of my life? Or, why do I have to wait for Him to do it? Is it because he is teaching me patience? Alright, but in the meantime the sin could be hurting others in my life. Does he not care about that? Can he change what is part of my very make up and being? Does this mean he wills for me to be something other than human?

Why is he teaching me patience any way? Why doesn’t he just kill my nature in the beginning and allow me to live a life that’s free from such hinderences, and that allows me to take the Gospel out more effectively? Why is he happy to let the sinful nature do what it wants, and greatly taint the Gospel message due to bad testimony of people’s lives?

Can God really blame me for something my parents did, as well as to hard code me with the inability to do anything else – and then give me His Spirit which doesn’t appear to be able to defeat this thing within me? But rather requires a process? There was no process in attaining this nature, why a process in defeating it?

Does anyone else see that it appears that, within this doctrinal view, death and sin seem like quite the victors? Even though I am going to heaven, death and sin still reign in my mortal body, and God insists I don’t let it. But how? His Spirit? In this view, the Spirit is there to help KILL what is natural. But the Bible doesn’t really say that, it says that we have died to sin (past tense, not current tense!) So, again, why do I still sin?

The only answer : ascetism. Laws. Rules. How else do I kill this nature? By the Spirit? But, what does that mean exactly? And then, Gospel says we’re saved by Grace and not Law.

I’m being dead honest about the honest questions, and I know that I know the Bible is God’s Word. My problem is our interpretation. Some of these questions I have some answers on, some of them not. But join me as I look at the doctrine of Original Sin and form my own premise as to what original sin REALLY means, biblically, and with the Holy Spirit. And pray that I don’t veer away from the Gospel of freedom into false teaching that will inevitably bring only more death and not life.