The Day Everything Changed
War, disease, broken homes, and graves all trace back to one choice in a garden. So does the struggle inside your own heart. If we want to understand why the world is the way it is, and why we are the way we are, we have to begin where Scripture begins.
Paul built the Gospel on that story: For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive (1 Corinthians 15:22). The Bible's answer to the Fall is not self-improvement but a second Man. Jesus is the last Adam (1 Corinthians 15:45), and He came to undo what the first Adam did. To understand the rescue, we must understand the ruin.
We believe every person is born with an inherited sin nature received from our common ancestor, Adam. Because of that nature, every person is a sinner by choice, and no one can reform himself or stop sinning by his own power. Our only hope is to turn from sin and trust Jesus Christ as the only Saviour.
“Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned:”ROMANS 5:12 · KJV
The Nature of Sin asks what sin is; this topic asks where it came from. Adam: The Figure of Him That Was to Come shows how Christ answers Adam point by point.
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For Deeper Study
- The Spiritual Condition of Infants: A Biblical-Historical Survey and Systematic ProposalAmazon Adam HarwoodA non-Calvinistic Southern Baptist surveys Scripture and sixteen theologians and argues that infants inherit a sinful nature from Adam but are not guilty until they sin.
- Anyone Can Be Saved: A Defense of “Traditional” Southern Baptist SoteriologyAmazon David L. Allen, Eric Hankins, and Adam Harwood, eds.Non-Calvinistic Southern Baptists explain and defend the 2012 Traditional Statement on sin, grace, and the free response of faith.
- Adam, the Fall, and Original Sin: Theological, Biblical, and Scientific PerspectivesAmazon Hans Madueme and Michael Reeves, eds.Evangelical scholars, most writing from a Reformed perspective, defend a historical Adam and the traditional doctrine of original sin. Not all contributors hold a young earth. Scholarly.
- Searching for Adam: Genesis & the Truth About Man's OriginAmazon Terry Mortenson, editorYoung-earth scholars make the biblical, theological, and scientific case that Adam was a real man whose fall brought sin and death into God's very good creation.
- Foxe's Book of MartyrsAmazon John FoxeThe classic Protestant record of those who died for the faith, from the early church to the English Reformation.
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The Nature of Sin
Sin is lawlessness: rebellion against a holy God in thought, word, and deed, and a condition as well as a choice.
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