The Truth of the Fall

Romans 5:12 Therefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin, so death passed onto all men, for all have sinned.

Some today no longer believe we need God in order  to understand ourselves and our world. But we who do believe also often struggle to make sense of our own impoverished hearts, even toward those we claim to love.

Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound Wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. ~John Calvin

Some today would regard Calvin’s view of humanity and God to be merely a product of his times or worse, woefully ignorant and simply inaccurate. They say, “We do not need God to understand ourselves; indeed, God (if He actually exists) is an impediment to self-expression. Rather, we create our own identities and determine who we want to be, even our gender.”

Many insist that Science can determine human values and that we do not need God to define what is good  or to assist us with being good, or whole.

“What is good?” and “Why should we be good?”  are inescapably metaphysical questions that science cannot  answer—any more than reason can inspire us be kind to our enemies when we have everything to lose, including our lives.

All great questions of life have only one answer.  Conflicting and contradictory answers cannot be valid. Truth, by definition, is therefore exclusive and narrow. It has to exclude errors in order to qualify to be truth.

Genesis 4:7 If thou does well, shall you not be accepted? And if you do not well, sin lies at the door.

“We human beings are a mystery to ourselves. We are rational and irrational, civilized and savage, capable of deep friendship and murderous hostility, free and in bondage, the pinnacle of creation and its greatest danger. We are Rembrandt and Hitler,  Mozart and Stalin, Ruth and Jezebel.” ~Anonymous

The failure to adopt Scripture’s view of humans as being both made in the image of God and desperately wicked is important. We are chronically in rebellion by nature and by choice, and this has played no small part in the horrors of history.

Marxist theory says the individual person is not worth much: salvation lies in the socialist state. Communism taught that human beings are of little worth, but not intrinsically good or evil: they could be shaped by the state to become good—  the socialist New Man, easily liquidated if they stood in the way. History has now pronounced its verdict. The socialist New Man never arrived, and will not arrive.

Genesis 3 describes willful rebellion, not sociobiology.

Genesis 6:5 And GOD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

Jeremiah 17:9 The heart is deceitful above all things,  and desperately wicked: who can know it?

Sociobiology believes that human and animal behavior can be partly explained as the outcome of natural selection.

Genesis 3 does not think of evil primarily in horizontal terms, but in vertical terms.

Psalms 51:4 Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned and done this evil in Thy sight, that You might be justified when You speak, and be clear when You judge.

When we do finally think of evil, depending upon who we are, we tend to think of evil at the horizontal level. None of us here would want to deny that the Holocaust was evil. The Bible has all kinds of condemning things to say about horizontal evils— evils amongst ourselves, but in the Bible what is said to make God angry most frequently is idolatry.

Genesis 3 shows what we most need.

Genesis 3:21 Unto Adam also and to his wife did the LORD God make coats of skins, and clothed them.

If you were a Marxist, what you would need is revolutionaries and decent economists. If you were a psychologist, what you would need is an army of counselors. If you think the root of all malfunction and disorder is medical, then what you would really need would be something akin to endless numbers of Mayo Clinics.

If our first and most serious need is to be reconciled to God, Who pronounces death upon us because of our willfully chosen rebellion, then what we need the most—though we may have all these other derivative needs—is to be reconciled to Him. We need someone to save us.

We cannot make sense of the Bible until we come to agreement with what the Bible says our problem really is. The ultimate problem is our alienation from God, and our  attempt to identify ourselves merely with reference to ourselves. This idolatry de-Gods God, and puts man at the center.

Romans 5:10 For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by His life.

The truth is, when we look around at our world, we see there is a major problem that science and reason has not fixed. The truth is our only hope is in what God did through Jesus on the cross to fix us. We are the problem but God still loves us..