Howdy!
As we continue to look at the Catechism this week we will be thinking about the wider effects of the fateful decision of Adam to eat the forbidden fruit and how we as the Church should go about helping people flee from the wrath to come.
Here are this week’s questions:
Q. 16. Did all mankind fall in Adam’s first transgression?
A. The covenant being made with Adam, not only for himself, but for his posterity; all mankind, descending from him by ordinary generation, sinned in him, and fell with him, in his first transgression.
Q. 17. Into what estate did the fall bring mankind?
A. The fall brought mankind into an estate of sin and misery.
One of the key things to understand about Adam is that everything he did, he did as the covenant head of all humanity. Now, that in itself can be a little hard to grasp. How does one man represent all of the people who would descend from him by ordinary generation? (Ordinary generation means what you think it means).
Without getting into too much technical language it simply is a legal standard by which the First Man stands in on our behalf in the covenant of works made with God in the garden as we read in Genesis 2:15-17. Whatever Adam did, we did. The great blessing of covenant headship is that in the covenant of grace whatever Christ has done we have done as well. Paul lays this out for us in Romans 5:17:
For if by the one man’s offense death reigned through the one, much more those who receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the One, Jesus Christ.
Adam as our representative plunged all of creation into the evil world that we experience today. The reason why our news reports are filled with death, man’s inhumanity to man, and the changes in the weather is because Adam listened to the counsel of his wife and what she had been told by the serpent. It would have been an act of love for him to correct the false words she was told and redeem her unto himself. This also he failed to do.
However, despite Adam’s introducing tribulation into the world it is worth considering that what we see is not as bad as events could be. A thing to be thankful for is God’s restraining mercy. While we are totally depraved in our sin we are not utterly left in the destitution of what men will encounter in Hell. It may not seem like much, but it is a blessing not to be forgotten. We don’t all kill each other because of the holiness and the goodness of our glorious King.
After defining sin and how it came to be the writers want to help us in the 16th and 17th questions of the Catechism to understand not only what sin is, but what it does. Sometimes Bible words can lose their weight and power because we use them all the time, and because we apply them in ways that either neuter their purpose or trivialize God’s intent in employing them. Sin is most definitely in that category. Much like grace and mercy when used to cover over things that we don’t want to deal with sin is every now and then applied to stuff that just annoys us or breaks cultural norms. If we hold that it is transgressive to wear white after Labor Day or root for Clemson or Notre Dame then when we start talking about things the Lord actual does call sin it can sterilize the argument as people can rightly call us out for not just hypocrisy, but unseriousness.
This is part of what exorcised Jesus so much about the Pharisees. They left their parents to be wards of the State while picking at the disciples for not washing their hands before they ate. A classic example of the log and speck problem; except in this case there wasn’t even anything in the eyes of Peter and John. It was a figment of Caiaphas’s imagination. They had taken something that was good (washing hands) and given it religious significance that neither the Old Testament nor Christ had taught. In doing this they substituted the good things of God for the commandments of men. There was a keen lack of respect for the Pharisees by the crowds because they had placed a burden on them that none of them could bear. There is great freedom to only having the Ten Commandments be our guide and not the random attempts of Legalists to add to the word of God in an attempt to be smarter than our Lord. Any time the leaders of the Church either forsake or change what the Holy Spirit has revealed in the Scriptures it causes pain in the life of the people and it damages the witness of the gospel. What we have in the Bible is more than sufficient to provide for us an understanding of what God requires of all men.
If we are going to call the world to repentance, then the actions and thoughts we are calling those still under the covenant of works made with Adam to turn away from better be grounded upon the Word and what is revealed in the Bible. Our yes needs to be yes and our no better be no. The last thing we need to be doing is introducing confusion into the minds of unbelievers. Sin has caused them to be in misery and we need to be pulling them out if it as fast as we can. God’s solution to that is honesty. If a person is violating the law then they need called out on it in clear tones. If we love them then we don’t want to see any individuals continue to experience the ravages of sin. Here is why we must neither excuse sin nor misrepresent it because it is such a serious matter to deal with.
We also need to make sure that we are offering the free gospel of grace, and not a gospel which can lead to people being confused about what they need to do to be relieved from the weight of their transgressions before the Lord. The only answer is given to us, and we’ll close on this, by our Lord Himself:
Jesus answered them, “Most assuredly, I say to you, whoever commits sin is a slave of sin. And a slave does not abide in the house forever, but a son abides forever. Therefore if the Son makes you free, you shall be free indeed.
Here is some more reading:
https://banneroftruth.org/us/resources/articles/2009/overcoming-sin-misery-and-death/
Blessings in Christ,
Rev. Benjamin Glaser
Pastor, Bethany ARP Church