Original sin is not the same thing as the first sin. The following discussion of both terms will help the reader clearly understand the difference.
During creation, God created two individuals, a man and a woman, Adam and Eve, in a state of righteousness, though not the perfect righteousness believers will have in heaven at the end of the age. This righteousness would eventually lead to perfection and glory at the end of the age, or to a fall from that state. God gave Adam and Eve the ability to choose to sin or not to sin. He also created Adam and Eve to live forever, meaning that death was not necessarily a part of their nature, and this immortal nature would continue as long as they did not sin. Barring sin in their life, Adam and Eve would live in holy Communion with God forever, but if they committed sin, they would see themselves separated from God.
THE FIRST SIN
God created a paradise and placed Adam and Eve in it (Gen. 2:8, 15), and He commanded that they could eat from any tree in the garden except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and He warned them that if they did eat of that tree, they shall surely die (Gen. 2:16, 17). Scripture goes on to tell us in Genesis 3:6, “So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.” This verse describes the first sin Adam and Eve committed.
Adam and Eve committed the first sin, and at that point God, in his perfect righteousness and justice, had every right to destroy them at that moment. But God foreordained this, knowing the nature of human beings, and he did not exercise his wrath and condemn them to eternal death; instead, he exercised a different kind of wrath against the actors in this transgression.
Therefore, sin came into the world as a result of Adam’s voluntary transgression (i.e., the first sin) against God by eating of the forbidden fruit.
ORIGINAL SIN
Original sin does not refer to the first sin Adam and Eve committed. Instead, it refers to the result of the first sin: the guilt passed down to successive generations. This guilt, derived from Adam and Eve’s first sin, is passed to every individual descendant at birth and is the internal source of all volitional sins in life. So, human beings’ sinful natures came down through the generations from one man (Rom. 5:12). Human beings are born sinners because of Adam’s first sin.
However, one should note that the fact that we are born sinners does not mean that God created human beings with a sinful nature because that would imply that God created humans as sinners, and He certainly did not. Sinful ancestors passed this sinful nature to human descendants as a consequence of the imputed guilt of Adam’s and Eve’s first sin. In the beginning, God created the human nature free from a sinful bent. The guilt of Adam’s and Eve’s first sin saddled the human race with their sinful nature and passed it on to their progeny through reproduction.
None of Adam and Eve’s descendants actually committed the first sin; they only have the imputed guilt from it. Berkhof writes:
Guilt in this sense may be removed by the satisfaction of justice, either personally or vicariously. It may be transferred from one person to another, or assumed by one person for another. It is removed from believers by justification, so that their sins, though inherently ill-deserving, do not make them liable to punishment… The guilt of Adam’s sin, committed by him as the federal head of the human race, is imputed to all his descendants. This is evident from the fact that, as the Bible teaches, death as the punishment of sin passes from Adam to all his descendants. Rom. 5:12-19; Eph. 2:3; 1 Cor. 15:22[1]
Human beings, in their depraved state prior to regeneration and conversion, have the absolute inability to seek God and to do good. However, this does not mean the unregenerate cannot do good in some sense. They can do civil good. For example, they can aid a person in need, even though they are not a Christian. They may treat people kindly, and help the poor and infirm. But these are not “good works” in God’s eyes because they are not prompted by the love of God to His glory.
In his Systematic Theology, Louis Berkhof gives a good summary of absolute, or total, inability.
When we speak of man’s corruption as total inability, we mean two things: (1) that the unrenewed [sinner] cannot do any act, however insignificant, which fundamentally meets with God’s approval and answers to the demands of God’s holy law; and (2) that he cannot change his fundamental preference for sin and self to love for God, nor even make an approach to such a change. In a word, he is unable to do any spiritual good. There is abundant scriptural support for this doctrine: John 1:13; 3:5; 6:44; 8:34; 15:4, 5; Rom. 7:18, 24; 8:7, 8; 1 Cor. 2:14; 2 Cor. 3:5; Eph. 2:1, 8-10; Heb. 11:6.[2]
In summary, the first sin committed by human beings, Adam and Eve, refers to the actual first human sin against God in the Garden of Eden. Original Sin, on the other hand, refers to the results of that first sin: the guilt imputed to all humanity.
[1] Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (The Banner of Truth Trust, 2012), 245.
[2] Berkhof, 246.
