I don’t agree with the concept of original sin.
We might inherit a sin nature, a tendency towards sin. But we’re not condemed until we sin. It’s just we all sin, except for kids who haven’t reached the age of accountability.
If you look at Jesus’ reply to the Rich Young Ruler who asked how to have eternal life, Mark 10:17-27. Jesus basically said, keep the commandments and named 5 of them. The Ruler said he had kept them all from youth. And Jesus replied, you lack one thing, go and sell all that you have and follow me. Jesus’ answer showed the ruler that he was putting his riches before God, so he hadn’t kept the law.
If you look at Jesus’s reply to the lawyer, Luke 10:25-37, it’s even more direct. Jesus asked what is written in the law? The lawyer replied, ““You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” And Jesus replied “Do this and you shall live”.
If you keep the law, you shall live. But we know the law saved nobody. Nobody kept it. But if you did, you would live, which means you’re not condemed because of original sin. You’re condemned because of your own sin.
The Law is based on love. We have duties to God (the first four) and duties to our fellow man. We should strive to keep the commandments in their entirety but , being as we are weak, will fall short unless the Holy Spirit supplants our efforts. But the Law is eternal. It doesn’t save because that is not its purpose. It’s a yardstick to see where we measure up and see why we need a Savior.
Exactly right. The common conception of “original sin” is wrong. I stand condemned not because of Adam’s sin, or my father’s sin, but by my own sin. Even in the OT, God said at least twice: “the soul that sins, it shall die,” e.g., Ezek. 18:20, Jer. 31:30. The idea that each newborn baby is born with sins already “charged to its account” is unscriptural nonsense that arose, I suspect, after the post-Constantinian church started to agitate for universal infant baptism.
Many posts here are steeped in the sixty year old wisdom of CS Lewis:
“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him [that is, Christ]: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say.
A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic–on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg–or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse…. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come up with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher.
He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
👍🤪