SIN, ORIGINAL

A young boy and his father were walking in an apple orchard. The father pulled an apple from a tree and, cupping his hands around it, asked his son what he saw. The son replied, “A beautiful red apple. May I have it?” The father then handed the apple to his son for examination. The boy touched it and immediately dropped it. Why? Because the apple appeared to be perfect only when viewed from one side. You see, on the other side it had been attacked by an insect and was rotten throughout. Yet the skin on the first side still had wholeness.

All people are like that apple. They may appear to be beautiful, but, once we examine them thoroughly, we see that all of us are rotten and marred because of our sin nature.1273

Imagine that you have a lemon tree in your yard. All it can produce is sour lemons. If you wanted to grow oranges, you might decide to pull off all the lemons from your tree and then tie on some sweet, juicy oranges in their place. In a few minutes your tree could be covered with the sweetest oranges in town. Everyone would see your “orange tree”—but in reality all you have is a lemon tree with dead oranges on it. You have not changed the nature of the tree at all.

So it is that the reason we cannot perfectly keep God’s commandments is that we do not have the nature to act according to his will. We have no inner ability to keep God’s laws.1274

The Pelagians believed that sin spread from Adam to the whole human race, not by derivation, but by imitation. In other words, there was no original sin; man is good but chooses evil and thus becomes in need of salvation.

In contrast, Paul affirms that we are born with sin, just as serpents bring their venom from the womb, and thus we are in need of salvation.1275

Sin is like a man’s beard. Although we daily destroy its manifestations, it constantly reappears.1276

Your “death warrant” is, as it were, written into your own “birth certificate.”1277

Have you ever bitten into an apple and found a worm in it, and yet the outside of the apple showed no hole or entry point for the worm? How did the worm get inside the apple? Clearly he could not have burrowed in from the outside. No, scientists have discovered that the worm can come from inside. But how does he get in there? Simple! An insect lays an egg in the apple blossom. Some time later, the worm hatches in the heart of the apple, then eats his way out. Sin, like the worm, begins in the heart and works out through a person’s thoughts, words, and actions.1278

“A beautiful geranium plant that adorned the window was killed by the frost. Leaves and flowers withered, leaving only a mass of mildew and decay. What was the cause? Merely the loss of the sun’s light and heat. But that was enough, for those belong to the nature of the plant, and are essential to its life and beauty. Deprived of them, it remains not what it is, but its nature loses its soundness, and this causes decay, mildew, and poisonous gases, which soon destroy it.

“So of human nature: in Paradise, Adam was like the blooming plant, flourishing in the warmth and brightness of the Lord’s presence. By sin, he fled from that presence. The result was not merely the loss of light and heat, but since these were essential to his nature, that nature languished, drooped and withered. The mildew of corruption formed upon it; and the positive process of dissolution was begun, to end only in eternal death” (Abraham Kuyper, The Work of the Holy Spirit [Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1956], p. 90).1279