We have seen that God is holy, and that the same holiness pervades the law of God. So, where does that leave us?
Romans 1-3 has a very carefully laid out answer to this question. It can be paraphrased this way: in deep doo-doo. That’s where we are, in deep trouble.
In order to flesh out this answer, we need to look at a concept that is vitally important to the doctrine of justification, and that is federal headship. Adam is our representative. When he sinned, condemnation came upon all people of the earth (see Romans 5:12-21 and 1 Corinthians 15 for the biblical position). This means two things about our sin (and remember that sin is defined as any lack of conformity to the law of God). The first thing it means is that the sin of Adam is reckoned as if we had done it. This may seem unfair to some. However, if you think of a nation and its king, for instance, you can readily see that whatever the king does reflects on his people. If the king does well, it reflects on his people well. If he does poorly, then the people will suffer. Adam represented all of us, since we all come from Adam. The technical term here is that Adam’s sin is imputed to us. “Imputed” means “reckoned.” Even though we have not actually committed Adam’s actual sin, the guilt of Adam’s sin passed on to everyone whom he represented.
The second result of Adam’s sin when connected to federal headship is that Adam’s sin nature is also passed on to us. Just as blue-eyed blond haired Norwegian parents give birth to blond haired blue-eyed children, so also Adam and Eve gave birth to sinful children, who in turn gave birth to sinful children. The proof of this is in Psalm 51: in sin did my mother conceive me. This does not refer to the act of conception, but to the fact that he was sinful from the moment of conception.
So, there are two problems with humanity. One is that the guilt of sin is imputed, or reckoned to all of Adam’s descendants. The second problem is that sin has us in its grip such that we also sin. These are the two problems that have to be corrected. In the next post, we will see that justification takes care of one of those problems, namely, the guilt of sin. We won’t ignore what takes care of the other problem, but we will note just here that justification does NOT take care of the sin nature problem except insofar as a person is forgiven for having a sin nature (which is, of course, in itself sinful).
Lane Keister
Posted by From What Does Justification Free Us? « Eggus Blog on March 31, 2009 at 7:16 pm
[...] to the readers, and especially to Bill for waiting this long for the next post on justification. My last post dealt with where our sin problem leaves us. It leaves us with a two-fold problem. The first aspect [...]