Are We Born With Sin Itself, Or With A Sinful Nature?
Q: How should we understand the difference between being born “in sin” because of Adam and Ezekiel 18:20 saying that a son does not bear the father’s iniquity? Are we born with sin itself, or with a sinful nature?
Ezekiel 18:20 – The soul who sins shall die. The son shall not bear the guilt of the father, nor the father bear the guilt of the son. The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself.
A: This is a really good question. I’m going to give you some of my thoughts on this, but in the next few weeks, God helping me, I’m going to interview an author named Lumen Wing who has written a book on this exact subject. I can’t wait for us to talk about this idea of original sin and inheritable sin. Lu Wing is a brilliant scientist and knows all about epigenetics. So that’s for later, but right now, let me give you a quick summary of this idea.
Yes, we inherit a sinful nature from Adam. This is how you know that we have inherited a sinful nature from Adam: every person who is born is subject to death. If a person is not under sin whatsoever, they’re not subject to death. I recognize that I may be speaking to somebody who has some real life pain about this topic, but every baby that dies is a demonstration that that child was under sin, or in biblical terms, that their sin was inherited from Adam.
However, I think this is where the Ezekiel 18 portion comes in, when we find God judging sinners. As I understand the Scriptures, we don’t see God judging people for the sin that they inherited from Adam. People are only judged for the sin that they themselves commit. That seems to be the basis of God’s judgment throughout the Bible. God isn’t judging a person for their father’s sin, but sin can be passed down from generation to generation, from Adam all the way down through the human race. That provides a good understanding of it for me.
But that doesn’t mean that inherited sin is the basis of God’s judgment for sinners. When He judges them, God can acknowledge, “You are under sin because of what Adam did, but My judgment of you is based on what you have done.”
We sin because we have a sin nature. What we receive from Adam is the fallen human image that’s been marred from the original image we were created in. We have the capacity to sin, and we do sin, in fact. But again, God does not judge us for our nature. He judges us for how we live out our nature.
I can’t think of a biblical passage that tells us that God judges us for the sin we’ve inherited.
There is a sense in which we’re under death because of that sin received from Adam, but that’s different. And that death is physical death; it’s not necessarily eternal death. That’s the distinction I would make, and how I would connect Ezekiel 18 to it.
There’s an important principle here on the other side of this issue that people can miss. They feel that it’s unjust of God to hold us accountable in the sense of receiving Adam’s sin. They may argue, “I didn’t do anything to deserve this. Why am I responsible for Adam’s problem?” But we ratify it every time we do sin, because Adam serves as our representative before God as a human being.
However, we can also be represented by another human being who, in fact, lived without sin. It’s a doctrine called the federal headship of Christ. It’s the idea that there have only been two real human beings in all of existence, as God intended: Adam, before the fall, and Christ, who lived without sin. We choose which one of those two representatives are going to represent us before God: Adam, who fell, or Christ, through whom we can become righteous. This is a super important biblical principle, and Paul spells it out very clearly in Romans, especially in Romans 6. It is fair that I can be made just and righteous by the work of another Man, Jesus, because I was first made a sinner by the work of another man, Adam. I think that that shows and completes the sense of God’s justice.