Misrepresentation #2

Original sin

This idea suggests that we are all born sinners from the start as babies, but it is false.

Adam was made sinless and then exchanged the truth about God for a lie. Every time we do this it’s a sin. I’m not sure how many times you have been unjustly told that you were a liar but I have been called that several times in the past two weeks. I work at a middle school. It wasn’t true on all accounts and hurt me on the inside, then it turned to anger towards them. Eventually I had to forgive and forget because they are prideful ignorant brats. Jesus is the interceder for us against God’s wrath.

Matt. 18:2-3 He called a little child and had him stand among them. And he said: “I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”

God is the one who makes us innocent again. So if children are innocent then they can’t be sinful.

Here is something my friend Liz wrote:

God’s vision even before the creation of the world was that he chose human beings above all the other natural creatures that he made to share in his holiness—his uniqueness—and that his pleasure was not to create creatures he could control or dominate but could give them the gifts by which they could conform to the image of his Son—to make them holy, blameless and loved—the vision that God has for us—by faith expressing itself as love.  (Romans 8:28-29).  The message of Christ is that we can become this vision and that the creation of man as a natural creature was just the beginning, but human beings are made complete when they learn to love God because he first loved them.  God’s will for us can only be accomplished because of Christ’s love for the Father and the Father’s love for us expressed in the sacrifice of his son to make us holy as he is holy.  (1 John 4, Hebrews 10).  God’s will for us can only be accomplished when we learn obedience through the suffering of temptation (even Christ had to do this as a man—Hebrews 5:7-9), which is love for God.  Every time we choose to act on his words and sacrifice our own understanding, it is an act of love—that is why God calls obedience “love” not following rules.  When we still fear punishment (1 John 4) we have not been made complete in love. 

The purpose to seek to please or to obey his will is because we know by faith that we will have, do and become more than we could ask or imagine on our own or by our own effort.  For God’s will to be accomplished in our body is to be holy, blameless, loved, eternal.  That is why we obey—not because of fear of punishment (that is only the beginning—to know that our survival depends on God) but because of what he is pleased to do for us if we let him.  His word cannot enter our body and do its will without our permission.  That is the work of faithful obedience.  To let perseverance finish its work so that we are mature and lack nothing.  (James 1)