Dan Olinger

"If the Bible is true, then none of our fears are legitimate, none of our frustrations are permanent, and none of our opposition is significant."

Dan Olinger

Chair, Division of Biblical Studies & Theology,

Bob Jones University

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On Sin: I’m Guilty of Adam’s Sin? How Is That Fair?

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Part 1

In my last post, on the way to making another point, I briefly mentioned the biblical truth of original sin.

In its simplest terms, original sin is the sinful guilt that you came into the world with. Babies are born guilty. Specifically, they’re born guilty of Adam’s sin.

Babies? Really? But they’re so … cute, with their little round bottoms and their little pearly toes and their gas-induced smiles. We paint cherubs as babies just because they’re so, um, cute, and innocent, and stuff.

What do you have against babies, anyway? What are you, some kind of monster?

I can assure you that I like babies as much as the next guy. I worked with my wife in the church nursery for more than 20 years. And for what it’s worth, I learned there that I like my own babies better than other people’s, but I still like them a lot.

But like it or not, the Bible teaches that all of us, at birth, bear the guilt of Adam’s sin (Rom 5.12). We’re not just born with an inclination to sin; we’re born already guilty of having sinned.

I know what your response to that will be; everyone has the same response.

It’s not fair!

And, perhaps surprisingly, I’m going to agree with you on that. Back to that in a moment.

In the Mosaic Law, God said that a child could not be held guilty of his father’s sins (Dt 24.16). So why should I be guilty of Adam’s sin? How can that be just?

The answer—a partial one—is that Adam was representing us in his sin, just as a legislator can bind us with laws because his vote in Congress represents us.

But I didn’t vote for Adam! I never had a say in this!

True. Though I will note that you’ve spent your life demonstrating with your sinfulness that Adam’s apple didn’t fall far from the tree now, did it? So there’s that. Whether you’re held guilty of Adam’s sin or not, you’re still in deep, deep trouble, and Adam’s guilt isn’t going to make your outcome any worse. But that still doesn’t seem to justify holding you guilty for an act that you didn’t actually commit.

So why? Why has God set me up like this?

Ah, my friend, because what you’ve heard so far is not the whole story. When you were still a (sinful) child, you learned that waiting for the end of the story is always worth it.

So what’s the end of the story?

The official name for what we’ve been talking about so far is imputation. Adam’s sin has been imputed to you—placed on your account, like a credit-card charge—so that you are in debt for it.

But there’s more to imputation than just this.

In God’s gracious plan, your sin has been imputed, too. Your sin—every last bit of it—has been placed on the account of Jesus of Nazareth. He’s guilty of everything bad you’ve ever done.

That wasn’t fair, either.

And while you didn’t agree to receive the guilt of Adam’s sin, Jesus absolutely agreed to receive your sin.

How do you feel about the deal now?

And there’s more.

When Jesus came to earth, born as a man, he came as the Second Adam (Lk 3.38; Rom 5.18-21). Because the first Adam was your representative, you can now be represented by the Second Adam. And what benefit does that bring?

Well, when Christ willingly took your sins upon himself and bore their penalty, that wiped out your sin debt, but you were still broke. You went from owing a bazillion dollars to debt-free, but you still didn’t have any money in the bank.

The Second Adam changed all that.

In the third great act of imputation, all of Christ’s righteousness was placed in your bank account (2Co 5.21). All his perfect obedience to the Father throughout his earthly life is now your record. The Father has not only forgiven your sin, but the very record of that sin has been expunged. It’s not there. That’s why he “will remember it no more” (Jer 31.34). You are rich in righteousness, as rich as it’s possible to be. God sees you through Christ-colored glasses.

Now, you can complain about the unfairness of being guilty of Adam’s sin if you want, but that’s a stupidly short-sighted perspective.

Adam’s sin has traveled from him, to you, to Christ, who has burned it in the fires of eternal judgment. And what he has given us in its place is beyond reckoning.

Grace.

Part 3 Part 4

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

Created. Now What? Part 2: Implementing the Image of God

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Part 1

We’re six days into Creation week. God has issued orders, as a sovereign from his throne, and the universe is running like clockwork.

It’s all good.

But now, on day 6, God changes everything. He comments to himself that he’s about to do something qualitatively different; he’s going to make someone “in our image” (Gen 1.26).

And he rises from his chair.

Why do I say that?

The account in Genesis 1 is tersely straightforward: God makes man in his own image (Gen 1.27), as he had said he would. But Moses, the narrator and cinematographer, has kindly given us a close-up shot of the same scene in the next chapter:

Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature (Gen 2.7).

Unfortunately, we’ve become so familiar with these words that their significance escapes us.

This is physical, not verbal, language. God is not speaking Adam into existence; he’s sculpting him, forming him, shaping him, with his hands. He’s “rescue breathing” into him, with his lungs and mouth.

This is shocking language. God is a spirit (John 4.24); he has no hands, lungs, or mouth. What’s this all about?

I’d like to engage in a little biblically informed theological speculation for a moment.

We know that the active agent of creation was the Son (John 1.3; Col 1.16; Heb 1.2). We also know that the Son is the person who later, in God’s eternal plan (Heb 10.5, quoting Ps 40.6-8 LXX), became incarnate, permanently united with a human nature, including a human body, which he retains to this day (Acts 1.11; Col 2.9) and apparently will forever. We’re also fairly confident that Jesus appeared in bodily form repeatedly in the Old Testament, before the incarnation, as the “Angel of YHWH.” In Genesis 18 Abraham has an extended conversation with God, apparently this same “Angel of YHWH,” after sharing a meal with him in his tent—a very physical activity indeed. (Centuries later, Jesus would ask for a piece of fish to eat [Lk 24.41-43], specifically to demonstrate to his disbelieving disciples that he was indeed with them physically.)

So here’s what I imagine.

The Son, Jesus, is the one speaking all things into existence. In embodied form, he rises from his chair and steps to an area of clay. Kneeling, he begins to work the clay with his hands—physical hands—and fashions a body—a recumbent statue—that looks like him. (Isn’t it more appropriate that our body is in the image of the Son’s than that his is in ours?) When the sculpture is complete, he leans back on his heels and surveys his work, not to inspect it for flaws but simply to take joy in it.

It’s good.

But it’s not complete. It’s not human. It’s not alive.

The Son leans over the lifeless form and, placing his lips on the clay mouth, he exhales.

Once? Twice? Several times?

One thing we know. There is none of the desperation that accompanies CPR today: Come on, buddy; breathe for me now. Don’t die on me, man. Breathe for me!

The Son exhales with sovereign authority, and this statue, this clay mass, pinks up. It comes to life.

And there, sitting in the clay, is a living, breathing image of God.

Adam.

Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9

Photo by David Marcu on Unsplash

Billions of Years? Part 9: Theological Issues

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Why I’m Still a Young-Earth Creationist, Even Though It’s Getting Increasingly Lonely over Here

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8

So far I’ve laid out my thinking regarding the biblical creation account and the evidentiary weaknesses in the competing evolutionary account. There’s one more area to address: the theological one.

The Bible’s theology of sin is rooted squarely in Adam (not in Eve, despite the allegations of some feminists—but that’s a topic for another post, preferably in the far, far distant future). According to the Scripture, Adam was a real, historical figure, whose willful sin—disobedience to a specific divine command (Gen 3)—had three results. First, since he stood as the representative of the human race—their “first father” (Isa 43.27)—the guilt for his sin was imputed to all his descendants (Rom 5.12, 18-19). Second, his nature was corrupted by his choice, so that for the rest of his life he was inclined in the direction of sinfulness rather than righteousness. This change in nature has been inherited by all his descendants as well (Rom 3). And finally, as God had warned (Gen 2.16-17), Adam and his descendants became susceptible to death (Rom 5.12).

Consequently, any theory of origins that claims to be biblical must address two theological issues that arise from this biblical view. First, the theory must account for biological death in the way that Scripture does. And second, the theory must account for the redemptive work of Christ, the “second Adam” (1Cor 15.22, 45), in the way that Scripture does. Both of these issues deserve a deeper examination.

Scripture asserts that sin entered the world through human agency, specifically Adam’s, and that death is a consequence of that event (Rom 5.12). Any theory of origins, then, must date fossil evidence—the one thing you can say for certain about fossils is that they’re really most sincerely dead—after Adam’s sin, and thus, obviously, after Adam.

Old-earth creationists would respond that since the Romans 5 passage is clearly talking about only human death, then the fossils in the geologic column would not be included in that passage and thus were free to die millions of years before Adam. But that seems to mean that hominid fossils must not be related to Adam, since they died before he did. Further, it’s not so clear that the Romans 5 passage refers only to human death; Paul speaks elsewhere (Rom 8.18-22) of “all creation” groaning under the consequences of Adam’s sin. My colleague Kevin Bauder has artfully and soberly captured the problem of the old-earth creationist view on this matter.

[Sidebar: This question on the reference of the word death does present an interesting opportunity for meditation. We know that Adam and Eve were free to eat fruit; since digesting a mango would result in cellular death in the fruit, it seems that Paul’s use of “death” in Romans 5 would not include that. It’s worth noting, I suppose, that the tree survives the “death” of its fruit. How about root vegetables? Did Adam and Eve eat carrots before the fall? That would kill the plant, after all. Most young-earth creationists would draw the line not there, but at organisms “in which is the breath of life” (Gen 7.15), which God chose to protect through the flood, by which he decreed that “everything that is in the earth shall die” (Gen 6.17). I’m inclined to think that this definition of death should be considered in interpreting Romans 5. And if that’s valid, then nothing in the fossil record that respired could have died before Adam’s sin.]

The presence of fossils as evidence of death before sin, it seems to me, remains a problem for old-earth creationist.

The second problem is the meaning of the work of Christ. Paul finds the significance of Christ’s work in the undoing of what Adam did (Rom 5.17-19; 1Cor 15.22). If there was no historical Adam, then there’s nothing for Christ’s work to undo, and the evolutionary view simply cannot be squared with biblical theology. Suggesting that Adam is a symbolic everyman really doesn’t get you there; we’d think it was silly if Paul based the work of Christ in undoing the sin of the boy who cried wolf or some other fabulous figure. Nothing in the text of Scripture, in either Testament, inclines us to believe that Adam was merely symbolic. You don’t list symbols in genealogies.

So the significance of Christ’s redemptive work hangs on the question of whether a particular man disobeyed God, and whether we—all—are the biological descendants of that man. I can’t find any of the other choices appealing.

Next time, we’ll summarize and draw some conclusions.

Part 10

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