What does the Bible say about the fall and original sin?

• Genesis 3:1-7, the serpent's deception
• Genesis 3:8-13, human's sinful response to God
• Romans 5:12-17, the pervasiveness of sin
• Romans 6:23, the consequences of sin
• Romans 8:20-21, the effects of sin on creation

Sermon ideas about the fall and original sin

The real human predicament, as Scripture reveals, is that inexplicably, irrationally, we all keep living our lives against what's good for us. In what can only be called the mystery of iniquity, human beings from the time of Adam and Eve (and, before them, a certain number of angelic beings) have so often chosen to live against God, against each other, and against God's world. We live even against ourselves. An addict, for example, partakes of a substance or practice that he knows might kill him. For a time he does so freely. He has a choice. He freely starts a "conversion unto death," and, for reasons he can't fully explain, he doesn't stop until he crashes(Patrick McCormick, Sin as Addiction, Paulist, 1989, p. 152). He starts out with a choice. He ends up with a habit. And the habit slowly converts to a kind of slavery and, ultimately, a death that can be broken only by God or, as they say in the twelve-step literature, "a higher power."

According to Genesis 3 and Romans 5, our whole race "has a habit" where sin is concerned. Near the beginning of our history, we human beings broke the harmony of paradise and began to live against our ultimate good, our summum bonum. As Genesis 3 and Genesis 4 reveal, we rebelled against God, and then we fled from God. We once had a choice. We now have a near-compulsion — at least, that's what we have without the grace of God to set us free. Over the centuries we humans have "ironed in" this near-compulsion, with the result that each new generation enters a world that had long ago lost its Eden, a world that is now half-ruined by the billions of bad choices and millions of old habits congealed into thousands of cultures across all the ages. In this world, even saints discover in exasperation that whenever they want to do right, "evil lies close at hand" (Rom. 7:21). We are "conceived and born in sin," as Calvinists sometimes put it when they baptize an infant. This is a way of stating the doctrine of original sin — that is, that the corruption and guilt of our first parents have run right down the generations, tainting us all. As the author Garry Wills writes, none of us has a fresh start:

"We are hostages to each other in a deadly interrelatedness. There is no `clean slate' of nature unscribbled on by all one's forebears. . . . At one time a woman of unsavory enough experience was delicately but cruelly referred to as `having a past.' The doctrine of original sin states that humankind, in exactly that sense, `has a past'." (Garry Wills, Reagan's America: Innocents at Home, Doubleday, 1987, p. 384)

The history of sin and corruption keeps moving on down the ages in a cast of billions Each new generation and each new person reaps what others have sown, and then sows what others will reap. This is true not only of goodness (much-loved children can offer a sense of security to their own spouses and children), but also of evil, which each generation not only receives, but also ratifies by its own sin. Terrorists, for example, do not think of themselves as others think of them — irrational zealots consumed by some nameless malice that has turned them into enemies of the peace established by decent people. They think of their violence as retaliation. (James T. Burtchaell, The Giving and Taking of Life: Essays Ethical, University of Notre Dame, 1989, pp. 219-220.) And because they have long memories, terrorists may think of themselves as redressing grievances that are decades or even centuries old.

The glory of God's good creation has not been obliterated by the tragedy of the fall and of original sin, but it has been deeply shadowed by it. Thehistory of our race is, in large part, the interplay of this light and shadow.