I have been thinking about sin. My ideas come from many books I have read, many sermons I have heard and formal studies I have been required to do but they must not be regarded as church doctrine or Christian doctrine. They are merely the result of my personal reflections on the matter and the accumulation of impressions that have made sense to me.
I believe God made the universe perfectly. He built into it various laws that hold it in place. These are not only physical laws, like the law of Gravity or the law of thermodynamics, but also spiritual laws. What we regard as the phenomenon of cause and effect is our observation of these laws in action. God made us, humans, in love, out of love and through love. He made us for Himself - to express His love and He made us for Love - to love Him, to be in a relationship with Him and with each other. Not wanting love from mere automatons, God gave us the greatest gift He could - free will. We could choose to love Him, or not. We could choose to obey Him, or not.
Whether the Garden of Eden is literal or figurative, the message is the same. The devil, who is against God and all He stands for, set out a choice before man. "If you eat of this fruit, you can be like God..." In other words, you don't need to obey God. You can make up your own rules.
You can be your own god. That is what man chose.
The result was a cause and effect thing. God created the whole universe for man that He had created to be in a relationship with Him and as a result of man's decision, there was a subtle shift in the fabric of creation. Creation fell and was no longer a friendly place for man. In other words, the relationship between man and creation that was supposed to be, was broken.
In the same way, Man fell. As a microbiologist my best picture is of a nucleotide poison that entered his body (spirit? will?) and got into his DNA. There it inhibited some of the perfect functions of the genetic material so that various imperfections came about. The body would no longer last forever, but get old, die and decay. Abnormalities could arise. These abnormalities were not any immediate change but rather a potential for the future. The worst effect, however, was a breaking of the relationship with God. Fear came in for the first time. The change was a change in tendency, a new direction alignment. So instead of focussing on God, loving Him and relying on Him as God, the default setting was now to focus on ourselves as god.
The third effect was in breaking the relationship between man and man. What was meant to be a community of love, encompassed by God's all-embracing love, became a collection of little gods, all wanting the best for themselves and not caring about the effect of others. Instead of love, there was now suspicion and fear. Man was now a flawed creature. That is sin. The actions that follow from this flaw eg murder, anger, slefishness, they are sins.
These changes were in the very fabric of nature, possibly even in the atoms or quarks and because they were in the genetic material, they were carried over into each new generation.
God choose a people for himself and made a covenant with them. He gave them the 10 commandments. If they followed them perfectly, they would not commit the sins that result from the flawed nature and the relationship with God could go ahead although not in the originally intended love community. The first one is "You shall have no other god before me". That deals with the broken relationship with God. The other 9 have to do with how we treat other people.
Jesus summarised the commandments by saying "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and you should love your neighbour as yourself." The problem is, all these commandments are actions but the basic flaw is a tendency.
Little children do not need to be taught to be selfish. That is their tendency. They do not need to be taught to grab a toy away from another child. It is inherent. They are gods and the world is there to serve them. Left to themselves, they would grow up not much better than animals, relying on basic instincts like hunger, self preservation, sexual instinct.
However, still in man is a genetic memory. He was created for God and there is a God-shaped vacuum inside him. Something deep inside him knows what is right. We instinctively know we should be truthful and feel hurt when somebody lies to us. We know that courage is to be admired and selfishness is to be deplored but we don't have the necessary ingredient, perhaps it is strength, to be able to always do what we know to be right. We make resolutions and sometimes have a bit of success but it is always a battle against our default setting. Most people find it easier to lie than to tell the truth. We have to teach our children to share and to be kind to others. So often we know what is the right thing to do but we don't do it - then we berate ourselves afterwards. This the human condition - sin. It leads to the feeling of "wherever I go, I go too and spoil everything." Paul described it as "..what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do" (Rom 7:15)
This tendency leads to the actions of sin. In an extrovert, it is easy to pick up the tendency in conversation. The entertaining conversation consists of what I did, how I felt, how I told the so and so what's what. Long stories where I am the hero because I am my god. In introverts it is much more subtle and might go unnoticed. I think people are talking about me, I am hurt, I am over-sensitive. The centre of my world is still me. Again I know what is right. I must forgive.
I must not hold onto grudges, I must not keep remembering the hurt that was done to me so many years ago but my natural tendency resists. We live in a constant tension of not being able to quite come up to the mark. That is one definition of sin - missing the mark.
The better of us spend our lives striving to do what is right. We probably do not murder, commit adultery, lie (well not much anyway) or steal. Maybe we covet, but coveting never hurt anybody, did it. Maybe we don't abuse people but we ignore them or treat them as of no importance, or just, in our preoccupation with ourselves and our own little problems, we don't even notice them.(after all, we are the gods here) However, if we look at humanity as a whole, we see the outward expressions of the inward tendency. Our newspapers are full of the outward expression of the human condition - corrupt politicians, hijackers, murderers. The bottom line is we have broken God's laws. Even if we have kept 9 out of the 10 commandments 90% of the time, we have still broken the conditions of the contract. We have still broken God's law. That means we are sinners - whether we like the title or not. We like to compare ourselves to others and there are many people who we think are much greater sinners than we are. We are not rapists, serial killers, child abusers, thieves or corrupt despots. Neither are we Mother Theresa. Although Mother Theresa was a very good woman, she would have been the first to admit that she was not perfect and that she was a sinner, falling far short of God's requirements. Where does that leave us?
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