Sin is the transgression of or lack of conformity to the law of God. Scripture teaches that God is NOT the author of sin (Job 34:10) and that He is holy (Is. 6:3) and absolutely righteous (Dt. 32:4; Ps. 92:16). “He positively hates sin, Deut. 25:16; Psa. 5:4; 11:5; Zech. 8:17; Luke 16:15, and made provision in Christ for man’s deliverance from sin.”[1] We know that sin began in the angelic world with the fall of Satan (see John 8:44; 1 John 3:8). Satan is the author of sin (Eph. 2:1-2).
But according to the Bible, the origin of sin in the history of humanity began with the first sin, the voluntary act of transgression of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. And because they committed this first sin, God ordered among other things that all the progeny of Adam and Eve would have imputed to them the guilt of the first sin. We refer to this imputed guilt as original sin. In this state, all human beings are destined to eternal death. This fallen nature that God imputed to human beings is referred to as the fall.
After the fall of humanity, all human beings from birth have the absolute inability to not sin. In their original state, their nature is a sinful one and they have no ability to seek God. Humans cannot change this nature without divine assistance.
However, by the grace of God, He had in place a plan of redemption that would save His chosen ones, the elect, from eternal death. The redemptive plan is applied to individual elect persons beginning with God’s monergistic act, through the instrumentality of the Holy Spirit, of regeneration (see John 3). The individual’s conversion begins with being born again (i.e., regeneration) and proceeds through repentance and God’s gift of faith to belief in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. By Jesus’ death on the cross, and on the ground of His merited righteousness due to His life of perfect obedience, God then deems the believer righteous (i.e., justification) and adopts the believer as his child and heir (i.e., adoption), which carries with it God’s promise of the eternal inheritance in heaven and He provides the Holy Spirit as the seal and guarantee of that promise (Eph. 1:11-14). God forgives all the believer’s sins, past, present, and future with a promise of salvation which is finally consummated on Judgment Day at the second coming of Christ.
So, after God has done all this for the Christian, why do Christians continue to sin? This is a question that most Christians have struggled with and some Christians even question their salvation because they continue to sin.
In order to understand why Christians continue to sin, we need to understand what happens to the believer when he or she is justified. God deems or counts the believer as righteous or free from sin (Gen. 15:6). This is a legal act of God external to the believer’s spirit whereby God legally imputes righteousness to the believers sin account. God does not make the believer righteous. He just changes the believer’s legal state to one of righteousness. Some Christian denominations believe God infuses Christ’s righteousness into the believers spirit, an internal act, thus making them righteous. But this is not supported by Scripture (again see Gen. 15:6). If believers were righteous, they would not sin. And we know that all believers still carry that corrupt inclination to sin because of their original sin and they all do actually sin. Through faith, Christians have been freed from the penalty of sin but for the rest of their lives, they are progressively freed from the power of sin though never completely freed.
Paul often speaks of the “old man” and the “new man.” The old man is considered by many to refer to the carnal nature with all its propensities but this is not really correct. The old man refers to the person the Christian was in Adam, that fallen, carnal nature that had no desire for God. That old man for Christians was crucified on the cross with Christ (Rom. 6:6). Christians are now a new person in Christ; the old person is not in us. Our problem with sin after we become believers is that we continue to think like we are the old man because of our corrupt nature as a result of original sin and we behave accordingly.
Paul teaches that the physical body is the sphere in which sin reigned (see Rom. 6:6; 7:24). Paul wrote “For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do” (Rom. 8:3). Romans 7:25 states “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.” And we are told to not present our bodies to sin as instruments of unrighteousness when Satan futility attempts to regain dominion over us but we are instead to present ourselves to God as instruments of righteousness (Rom. 6:12-14).
Christians are legally counted as righteous and are freed from the penalty of sin, though we are not actually righteous and continue to sin and fight the power of sin. Sin no longer has dominion over Christians but because of original sin, believers still have the inclination to sin and are thus susceptible to Satan’s temptations to sin.
In Part 2 of this article, we will look in some detail at Romans 7:15-20, which is Paul’s teaching about the war Christians wage against sin.
[1] Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (The Banner of Truth Trust, 2012), 216-17.
