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The Fall of Man: Sin and Its Punishment Man, as he came from the hand of God,
his creator, was upright and perfect.
The righteous law which God gave him spoke of life as conditional
upon his obedience, and threatened death upon his disobedience.
Adam's obedience was short-lived. Satan used the subtle serpent to
draw Eve into sin. Thereupon
she seduced Adam who, without any compulsion from without, willfully broke
the law under which they had been created, and also God's command not to
eat of the forbidden fruit. To fulfill his own wise and holy purposes God
permitted this to happen, for he was directing all to his own glory. By this sin our first parents
lost their former righteousness, and their happy communion with God was
severed. Their sin involved
us all, and by it death appertained to all.
All men became dead in sin, and totally polluted in all parts and
faculties of both soul and body. The family of man is rooted in
the first human pair. As Adam
and Eve stood in the room and stead of all mankind, the guilt of their sin
was reckoned by God's appointment to the account of all their posterity,
who also from birth derived from them a polluted nature.
Conceived in sin and by nature children subject to God's anger, the
servants of sin and the subjects of death, all men are now given up to
unspeakable miseries, spiritual, emporal and eternal, unless the Lord
Jesus Christ sets them free. The actual sins that men commit
are the fruit of the corrupt nature transmitted to them by our first
parents. By reason of this corruption, all men become wholly inclined to
all evil; sin disables them. They are utterly indisposed to, and, indeed,
rendered opposite to, all that is good. During this earthly life corrupt nature remains in those who are born of God, that is to say, regenerated. Through Christ it is pardoned and mortified, yet both the corruption itself, and all that issues from it, are truly and properly sin.
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