But is it really so mysterious after all? By embracing a few key facts about Adam, the apple, and sin in general, we can begin to understand how the first man wasn't really so different from his descendents, and eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil could indeed create a sin nature in all of Adam's offspring.
Sin Today
Before we can delve into the mysteries of original sin, we have to understand what exactly sin is and how it affects us today. A passage found in James provides perhaps the most easily understood definition of sin on a practical level: "So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin." (James 4:17 ESV) Seems self-explanatory enough, right? However, this passage gives us an insight into what sin is that many people overlook - a thought or an act that may be sinful for one person isn't necessarily sinful for another. In other words, sin is, to an extent, relative to each individual.
Of course, this doesn't give anyone free reign to do whatever they please, thinking that they are exempt from committing sin for whatever reason. Some things are not acceptable no matter who you are, like murder, adultery, greed, etc. But if there is something that is causing you to not do the right thing, then it is a sin.
For me, reading can be sinful. That's right, reading. If I get started on a book in the morning I will spend the rest of the day reading like an addict, to the detriment of my home and even my children. Dirty clothes will sit in the laundry basket, dishes will pile up, bedrooms will be destroyed, and I will put lunchtime off until I have read three more chapters and my boys are practically climbing in my face to say they are hungry. For me, to get started on a book before the house is spotless and the boys are safely tucked into bed can be a sin.
Why is Sin Unavoidable?
The easy answer, of course, is that we all sin because Adam first sinned. But there is more to it than that. Sin crawls in the food that we eat, in the air that we breathe; it is encoded in our very genes, in fact, and no matter how Christian and saved you may be there is no getting away from it completely while you live on this Earth.
Consider yourself at your very worst moments. When you snap angrily at your husband although he didn't deserve it, when an irritable impulse causes you to make fun of your children. When road rage blinds you to the fact that you are driving just as crazily as everyone else on the highway. Now consider why these things happen. Hunger, sleep deprivation, heat exhaustion, stress... they can all cause your mood to plummet faster than a failing economy. Consider your diet and your overall health. Fast food can literally cause malnourishment and obesity in the same person, which is a recipe for bad physical, mental, and emotional health. Hormonal factors, like PMS or the urge to have sex that overpowers almost everyone at some point in their lives, can easily lead to bad decisions and ultimately to sin.
Mark 7:20-23 says "And he said, 'What comes out of a person is what defiles him. For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.'” Sin comes from within - sin IS within - and even when you aren't actually sinning the capacity to, and the inevitability of it, is still lurking inside.
Thinking of sin as a software problem, or as something that can be fixed, is misleading. According to 1 John 1:8, "If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us." Sin is hardwired into our circuitry, and the way we take care of our bodies can exacerbate the problem immensely. In fact, from a medical standpoint, sin is remarkably similar to a mental health disorder. While a mental disorder, such as schizophrenia, addiction, or OCD, can seem like a problem with the brain's programming, or "software", it is really a hardware problem that invades a patient's genetic material and no amount of therapy or prescription pills can truly eliminate. With different forms of therapy, and medication in the most extreme cases, most mental disorders can be managed, but a patient will be stuck "managing" the disorder for the rest of his life.
In a similar fashion, sin can be managed. Communication with God is as fulfilling and helpful as communication with a therapist (although in some instances God's recommendation as your Therapist may be to refer you to a human specialist for additional help), and with practice, the impulse to sin can be quieted over time, but it will never go away. Your hormones will still fluctuate, you will still eat food that disagrees with your physical and mental health, and genetic predisposition will still influence how you respond to certain events. In other words, while the symptoms of sin can be managed, the disorder is one you will have to live with for the rest of your life. The hardware cannot be fixed while we live on Earth.
Adam in the Beginning
So naturally, as humans we wonder why this disorder has plagued us. Why exactly was the act of eating an apple the literal death of us? To answer this, we first have to examine Adam as he was before the apple, because once he ate the apple he became radically different.
In some ways, pre-apple Adam was a lot like us. He was, after all, human. It is clear that he had free will, because he exercised it when he chose to take the apple from Eve. Look, however, at his genetic material. Many creationists (myself among them) believe that for Adam to have sired the entire human race, he must have carried all the genetic information that exists today in his own DNA. Mutations may have appeared to create new traits and new gene functions, but Adam was created with the genetic information necessary for these mutations to take place. Dominant and recessive, usual and unusual, he would have carried them all. So your blonde hair and blue eyes, as well as your natural talent for art, were inherited from Adam just as your brother's black hair, green eyes, and mathematical mind were. This is a seriously simplified explanation of Adam and Eve's genes; you can go in-depth about the implications of Adam's genes here.
Now let's take a look at what Adam didn't carry. We know that he didn't sin. He had no hormonal imbalances that would lead to fits of anger or rash decisions. He had no genetic mutations at all. He had no physical impairments, like poor eyesight or bad teeth, that would make him worry about his appearance or detract from his natural physical prowess. He didn't have any trust issues with God, because he had never lost a child to illness or accident, and in fact had never even known what the word 'hungry' meant. There was no need for "survival of the fittest" instincts, which today causes unneccesary competition on the most primitive levels (I'm stronger/faster/smarter/prettier/more capable than you). And of course every drop of food that Adam ate was fresh, local, non-genetically modified, chemical-free, and far more organically grown than is possible today.
So Where Did the Sin Come From?
Adam passed down everything that exists today, including sin. Since it simply didn't exist before Adam ate the apple (which, I might add, was probably not really an apple. However, for simplicity's sake, I'll refer to the fruit as an apple since we can't be sure exactly what kind of fruit it really was.), sin must have existed inside the apple.
Perhaps that sounds a little "fruity", if you can pardon the bad pun, but consider how your food affects you. Obesity, currently a rampant epidemic in the United States, is due entirely to food (both the quality and quanity of it) and lack of exercise. Obesity is the leading cause of a myriad of problems, including heart diseases, joint problems, respiratory problems, circulatory problems, infertility... the list goes on and on. Food can be used to treat illnesses - many common herbs and spices are antibacterial, antiviral, anti-inflammatory, anti-oxidant, and so on - and food can even contribute to the severity of a mental illness. Many patients with disorders like chronic depression, anxiety, and even autism find that cutting genetically engineered food from their diets and losing extra weight can help make their symptoms far more manageable. When you throw the astounding prevalance of synthetic drugs, including OTC drugs and hormonal birth control, into the mix, then you have a recipe for worldwide disaster.
But genetically modified food didn't even exist until 25 years or so ago. It's been only a century since mainstream Western medicine was to be found in pharmacies and bathroom medicine cabinets across the world. Surely, you may be thinking, you can't possibly blame the existence of sin on these things. Of course not, for as we have already discovered, sin is within us. I blame the growing acceptance of sin as "normal" on these things, at least in part. But my point is merely to show that what you eat can have an affect on how you respond to the flaws in your hardware. This can help to explain why God spent so many chapters in Leviticus discussing what a person could and couldn't eat.
Finally, we can look to the fruit that Adam ate as the original source of our original sin. This is where all the religious and scientific debate in the world must dissolve into "what if?", or into a matter of faith, because there is no verse in the Bible that says "The fruit that Adam ate contained something which causes cells to die, genes to mutate, and the immune system to become susceptible to disease." But it must have, because after Adam ate it, that is precisely what began to happen. Adam's cells began to die, so that aging and death were not only possible but inevitable. Adam's genes, or at least the ones that he started passing down to his offspring, began to mutate, causing birth defects and inherited illnesses. His immune system, once impervious to all kinds of environmental factors, weakened over the generations to the point that even a very useful and necessary type of bacteria could make one sick when they gathered in the wrong place in his body.
We can't lay all the blame on the fruit, of course. We can't even lay all the blame on Adam - it was, after all, Eve who enticed him into eating it, and Satan who tempted her. We could say that all sin starts with Satan. We could say that Adam (and Eve) made the choice to bring sin into the world. We could say that their food was the real reason for sin. But in reality, all of these things are true, and they all played a role. Like a mental illness, sin is a genetic reality that can't be avoided. However, we can make the choice to fuel it with poor diet, lack of exercise, and an all-around bad attitude, or we can fight it by improving our health and our lifestyles, and spending time talking to the Ultimate Therapist.
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