Biblical emphases: Original Sin

Sermon for Midweek of Invocavit – Lent 1

Romans 5:12-14  +  Mark 7:14-23

This evening we begin a five-week catechetical series of sermons in which we’ll explore together five important emphases of the Bible, five teachings that run throughout the Holy Scriptures and that affect our lives as Christians every day, all the time. They’re all familiar to you, I’m sure, as Lutherans, but they’re so foreign to most people, and even to most Christians, that a little review will certainly do you good, and that’s a main purpose of the season of Lent: to ground you in your Baptism and in your baptismal faith.

The five emphases are: Original Sin, Justification by Faith, the Means of Grace, Vocation, and the Piety of the Cross. So we begin this evening with the first: Original Sin.

Did you know that Lutherans don’t have the same numbering of the Ten Commandments as the Reformed and Evangelicals do? They split our First Commandment into two—You shall have no other gods, and You shall make no graven image—and they combine our Ninth and Tenth Commandments into one—simply, You shall not covet, whereas we have, You shall not covet your neighbor’s house, and You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his servant, maid, cattle, or anything that is his. Without getting into all the reasons, there’s an important reason why we split up the two commandments not to covet.

The Ninth Commandment forbids an actual desire, a specific sinful desire for something that belongs to your neighbor. The Tenth forbids sinful desires in general, for all sorts of things. It’s that broad sinful desire or longing, sometimes called “concupiscence,” or “Original Desire,” which we include in our definition of Original Sin.

What is Original Sin? It’s a disease and corruption of human nature, passed down from parents to children, all the way back to Adam and Eve. There are two parts to this corruption of our nature. It includes “original desire,” that broad sinful desire for things that God considers evil; and it includes the general sluggishness or slowness to desire that which God considers good and righteous.

In the beginning, God made man (male and female) in His own image and likeness. People have gone crazy trying to define the image of God. But if they would just listen to St. Paul, they wouldn’t struggle so much. You have put on the new man who is renewed in knowledge according to the image of Him who created him; and, having put on the new man which was created according to God, in true righteousness and holiness. True knowledge of God, true righteousness and holiness. That was the essence of the image of God in which He originally made Adam and Eve. Like this piece of paper, perfectly smooth and straight.

When Adam and Eve sinned, they twisted and corrupted their very nature, like crumpling up a piece of paper. Once you do that, there’s no going back. There’s no fixing it or repairing it or undoing the damage. It’s done. Adam and Eve no longer naturally desired what God considered good and no longer naturally shunned what God considered evil. Now it was just the opposite. They wanted what God didn’t want and they didn’t want what God did want. And their newborn sinful desires gave birth immediately to sinful actions. The actual taking of the forbidden fruit, the actual lust for one another in their nakedness, the actual hiding from God because their knowledge of Him was now impaired, the actual refusal to confess their own guilt when God confronted them.

And the punishment for it was exactly the punishment God had warned Adam and Eve about ahead of time: death, both temporal and eternal. A death sentence that was passed down to all of Adam’s children born of a man and a woman, because the twisted nature passes down, like a genetic disease, except this disease is of the soul itself, causing all people to be born spiritually “dead in sins and trespasses,” “at enmity with God,” and “blind” to the things of God, as the New Testament describes. Behold, writes King David, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin my mother conceived me.

You were dead, Paul says, in trespasses and sins, in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience, among whom also we all once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others.

Again, the carnal mind is enmity against God; for it is not subject to the law of God, nor indeed can be. So then, those who are in the flesh cannot please God.

And again, But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.

The result of Original Sin—the corruption of the heart—is what Jesus described in the second lesson tonight: from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lewdness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within and defile a man. The sin against the Tenth Commandment—Original Sin, Original desire—is the wellspring of all other sins against all the other commandments—the contaminated wellspring of a contaminated human heart.

This is why no one can ever do enough good works to earn back God’s favor. This is why no one has the ability to make a decision for Jesus or to believe in Jesus Christ my Lord or come to Him by my own reason or strength. This is why no one has a free will by nature. This is why it isn’t surprising to see so much violence, godlessness and corruption in the world. Everyone’s born with an incurably diseased heart. And just as you can’t draw a cup of pure water out of a bucket of dirty water, so no one can produce even one pure and righteous work out of a person who is, by nature, sinful and unclean.

And the proof of all this, as St. Paul wrote to the Romans in tonight’s first lesson, is human death. Through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned. The evolutionary theory would tell you that human death is a natural and necessary part of the evolutionary process. But according to the Bible, human death is not natural. It is the direct result of Adam’s sin—a sinfulness that has been passed down and spread to all of us. St. Paul shows that from Adam onward, even before God gave His holy law on Mount Sinai, everyone died. They hadn’t broken a single God-given law. But they had all inherited a sinful, diseased, corrupt nature—a sinful flesh—from their parents, going back to Adam and Eve. As Jesus said, That which is born of the flesh is flesh.

It’s not until we grasp just how depraved and doomed our race was that we can truly appreciate the need for a Savior, a Savior who was sinless, for a Savior who was born, not of man and woman, but of woman only, by the miraculous working of the Holy Spirit, so that He could be born without original sin and so be capable of leading a sinless life, which none of us could ever do.

The remedy for Original Sin is nothing less than rebirth. Unless one is born again—born of water and the Spirit—he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. The Gospel of Christ, the sinless God-Man, calls all sinners to repentance and faith in Him for the forgiveness of sins. That same Gospel is applied to us individually for the remission of sins in the waters of Holy Baptism. Baptism is the remedy for Original Sin.

But Baptism doesn’t erase Original Sin. It doesn’t heal our corrupt nature so that it’s no longer corrupt. What it does— it washes away sin in the sense of removing your guilt before God, sending your sins away from your legal record. Like having your criminal record expunged, both the guilt of having a corrupt nature and the guilt for the crimes that flowed from that corrupt nature. Faith in God’s promise made to you in Holy Baptism is what keeps Original Sin and actual sin from condemning you. It’s what makes you, who are, by nature, sinful and unclean, both sinless and clean in God’s sight.

Now, in the baptized, God has created a new man in His own image and likeness, a new man who dwells side by side with the Old Man in every Christian. Now the two—the New Man created by the Holy Spirit and the Old Man with which we are born—are at war with each other and must be at war. The New Man has holy desires. The New Man wants what God wants and shuns what God shuns. The New Man can actually do good works—not works that can save us, not works that can earn God’s favor, but works that are pleasing to God our Father. As Paul wrote to the Ephesians, For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.

So understand Original Sin. It’s a main emphasis of the Bible and of the Lutheran faith, very poorly understood outside of our confession. It’s the “enemy within” that rules every unbeliever and that threatens every believer. Know your enemy! But know also your Savior, Jesus Christ. He has given you now the victory over your enemy in the form of forgiveness. And He will one day give you the final victory over your flesh, when He takes you from this world to the sinless life of heaven. Amen.