Born into sin

I was recently reading over one of my old posts and saw where I questioned the definition of nothing.

What…truly…is nothing?

Does it even exist?

In that post I mentioned that if you hold nothing in your hands…you hold air and light in them. I discussed the thought with my sister and daughter. My sister took the idea a bit further…is there nothing in our hands, or are we in nothing?

But…my mind still struggles with the very concept of nothing. For sure nothing doesn’t truly exist. Everywhere…there is air. In an empty bowl, there is air. In an empty envelope, there is air. My daughter added in that there are also dust particles even if we can’t see them. And so…truly…nothing does not exist.

The word nothing exists. We use it to differentiate between a cup or bowl that holds something and one that holds…nothing. Or is empty. Except…it truly isn’t empty because it still holds all the things we cannot see.

The day after I had that conversation with my sister and daughter I was looking through a book at a large book store and saw where a reformed preacher of old had an entire sermon on the topic of nothing.

Our minds truly cannot grasp the concept. We stagger under the stress of trying to define nothing. We struggle to explain what nothing really is and if it exists or not.

When someone asks you what you’re doing and you answer nothing…your heart is beating, your digestive track is working, you are standing/sitting/ lying, you are breathing, your mind is thinking. You are doing something even as you think you are doing nothing.

And so…does nothing exist?

People today are fascinated by origins. There are great debates about just how life came to be. Evolutionists come up with great theories to support their ideas that life came from…nothing. Christians understand that all of life came from the Lord, that it didn’t just happen, that it was created. And yet we must still go back to how the Lord created everything from nothing.

I recently had a conversation with two grade school children on that very topic. One of them said to me,‘it’s hard to understand that God was just always there when nothing else was.’

How simply this child captured what our human minds struggle with.

It’s hard to understand that the Lord was there…when there was nothing. We can’t understand the true concept of nothing because we have never seen nothing. Not once. There has always been something even when we think there is nothing.

Genesis chapter 1 tells us that God made everything. Prior to Him making everything…the beginnings…the origins…what was there? Nothing. The answer is…there was God and there was nothing. And then the Lord created a perfect universe…a perfect world…perfect heavens and earth.

Until He created them…there was true nothing.

But once created there was perfection. God called it good. He called it very good.

We no longer live in that perfect world. We no longer live in a very good world. Genesis chapter 3 tells us how sin entered the world. We are told not only of how one man and one woman sinned…we are told of how the birth of sin in every man was born…how it began.

Genesis chapter 3 gives us a very important part of the history of the world. It gives us a turning point in the world and in all of mankind. We are given the story…the history…for the reason why our world is the way it is and why men are the way they are.

It was the beginning of the world as we know it.

It was the end of the world as Adam and Eve knew it.

It was the day…the moment…when sin entered the world.

That thought is nearly as hard to grasp as the idea of complete nothingness. Can you imagine a sinless world?

Without sin there is no evil. Without sin there is no danger from men. Without sin there are no lies. Without sin there is no disobedience…no covetousness…no idolatry…no…anything but perfection.

In that day…in that moment…with one bite of fruit…Adam sinned and tainted forever the world that the Lord had called good. He stained the world. He ruined what it had been and made it something completely different. He changed it for all time.

It was a change decreed by the Lord but it was a change nonetheless. What God had called good…Adam changed. No longer was there perfection. There was now this…thing…this evilness…that would permeate all of the world throughout all time.

What’s worse…it wouldn’t live only in the world…it would live forever in the hearts of every person ever born…except for Christ.

Sin was unleashed on the world by a single action by one man.

And it created…forever more…a sickness that would live in the hearts and minds of mankind. From birth. Those perfectly innocent newborn babies…contain within them the evilness of sin.

Sin is a disease of the flesh that feeds and preys on us from the moment of conception.

That is another one of those nearly impossible to grasp thoughts. How can we even consider that a baby that has yet to see the earth can hold within their hearts the evilness of sin? How can we consider that a minutes old baby is sinful? Yet…Scripture says they are.

Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men…Romans 5:12

Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men… For as by the one’s man’s disobedience the many were made sinners…Romans 5:18-19

The many were made sinners by one man’s disobedience. Because Adam sinned he brought sin into the entire world…into all people for all time.

Because Adam sinned…all men are diseased in the heart from the moment of conception. Because Adam sinned all newborn babies take their first breaths as sinners.

As a mother…as someone that see’s newborns as being oh-so-innocent…I have a very hard time imagining that the tiny baby I hold in my arms, snuggle against my chest, could be sinful in any way. My human mind sees those babies as innocent but Scripture says they hold sin within them.

Because sin isn’t something we do…it’s something we inherit by being born. We have no choice in the matter, we simply get born into sin. Unborn babies grow inside their mothers until the moment that they are born into this world. The baby doesn’t chose to go from their watery world into our world, it is forced into the world through circumstances not of its choosing and is born into a big, wide, world where it will spend the rest of its life.

In a similar fashion that brand new baby is forced into a world of sin, sin that lives within them, even when they are too young to choose to sin. And they live and grow in sin because sin is the human nature.

We tend to think of so many things as being ‘only human’. So many, many things are ‘only human’ but so much of those ‘only human’ things are what we call human nature. And the nature of humans is sin.

We cannot help the longings in our hearts for things that take us far from Christ. As children we, in our human nature, want more toys, we want those popular shoes, or the in style clothes. Teenagers grow into sin almost as if it were some sort of epidemic disease. It is rampant and it breeds rapidly.

It takes the child its parents have known and loved for years and almost overnight turns that teenaged child into someone different. That teenaged child longs for the things of the world. They get caught up in idolatry, sexual immorality; stealing, coveting… the list goes on and on.

There is no way to treat the ‘disease’ that grows in children and spreads rapidly in the teen years. There is no cure for it. Because it is human nature and it is a sinful nature. It is the sin that they were born into growing into fruition and taking hold of their lives just as they begin to become truly responsible for themselves.

It is the sin that they were born into that is their…and our…human nature and it gains ground rapidly. Whatever they may become, whatever they are, sin rules them.

It ruled them in childhood too but it was…in most cases…restrained by their parents. To some extent anyway. But as they leave childhood behind and enter a time in their lives when their own thoughts and opinions and wants take over for the job that their parents once did…there is no stopping the roller coaster of sin that will bombard them. And that they will follow.

Because it is human nature.

Because human nature is a sin nature.

We are born into it. We grow up in it. We become adults in it. Even the regenerate live in it. There is no escaping it. No getting away from it.

Because of Adam we inherited sin much the way we inherit our parent’s eye color or blood type. It is passed to us through birth and fills us throughout life whether we want it or not.

Because we were born into sin.

Gone is the perfect world the Lord created and in its place is a sin filled world with sin filled people. The human mind generally has a hard time seeing themselves as bad, evil even, but the truth is…according to Scripture…we are all evil. We are all so filled with sin that we in no way deserve the Lord’s mercy or grace.

We live in sin because we are born into sin. You need never do anything considered evil by the human mind because the very fact that you cannot ever love God above all else makes you evil beyond comprehension. I fail every single day to love the Lord above everything…and everyone…else. And that makes me the worst kind of evil in the Lord’s eyes.

I don’t want to put anything before the Lord but it happens. It’s human nature. And that human nature is sin in the extreme. It is a sin nature that lives in me because I was born with it. I fail every single day to live up to the teachings of my holy God and therefore I sin every single day.

It is like a fault that is in me that I can never repair.

Because I was born into sin.