Of all the tactics Satan uses to draw people into his religious system, the “fact” of “Original Sin” ranks among the top. According to this doctrinal “truth,” he arranged it so that Adam’s sin is automatically injected into the spiritual dna of each and every human who has ever been conceived. According to this theological principle, sin is inherited from one’s parents, who inherited it from their parents, and so on back to the Garden of Eden. We are told from pulpits and podiums, from t.v. screens and radio speakers, from street preachers and door knockers that sin is as much a part of Christian life as breathing, that spiritual failure is as permanent in man’s life as eye color and body height. According to Bible scholars, we were infected with sin nine months before we drew our first breath. Though Original Sin is only one of many false “truths” embraced by salvation seekers, it is among the most powerful and most deadly.

Early on in life I became aware that I was being lied to by those who were supposedly telling me God’s Truth, which Jesus said was His Word (Jn. 17:17). To the best of my recollection, the “fact” that I was a sinner years before I became aware of sin was the first Satan-generated “truth” I came to recognize as a lie. That Truth came to me through revelation from on high. I had never heard a preacher contradict what “everyone knows” to be “Bible truth.” Everyone was a sinner and would always be a sinner due to Adam’s miracle. Knowing this, Jesus died so that the “saved” sinner could sin and get away with it. Romans 6:23 did not apply to people in THE church whose wages of sin was not death, but rather eternal life in heaven with Jesus. This did (does) not even make carnal sense, much less spiritual sense if God is telling us the Truth.

Original Sin was proclaimed repeatedly from thousands of pulpits on thousands of Sunday mornings and evenings and Wednesday nights with zeal and volume. Old time preachers were judged by their ability to deliver “hell fire and damnation” sermons designed to persuade people to “walk the aisle” to the front of the congregation to where they would “get saved.” HFAD preachers were known as “Bible thumpers” because of their tendency to pounded the Bible with their fist as they yelled out the lie that was supposedly printed inside it.

As I continued to ignore church truth and to “study to show thy(my)self approved of God” (2 Tim. 2:15) by learning His Truths, He began to reveal church lie after church lie to me. Over the years He continued to reveal what was going on within Catholicism/Protestantism and to show me exactly what that body is and who was in charge of it. Over time God continued to expose blatant, Scripture-denying, God-rejecting lies that were being, and continue to be put forth as Scriptural truths. Throughout my enlightenment He used Herbert Armstrong, Gerald Flurry and Robert Jinkins to help me along my learning walk. I have repeatedly exposed Satan’s false prophets for what they are through my web and YouTube sites so I will not do so again at this point.

The Lord proclaims that man is a sinner, not because of Adam’s fall, but BECAUSE MAN CHOOSES TO SIN. As did the first man and woman, men and women have the power of choice. Jesus telling the prostitute and the man at the Bethesda pool to “… sin no more” prove that they had a choice. His telling Cain that he could resist Satan’s temptations proves that he had a choice. The fact of “righteous Abel” proves that he had a choice. God is no respecter of persons. He did not allow Satan to force Adam’s sin into Cain, Abel, the prostitute and the man at the pool. Each had chosen their respective walk and could choose to either reverse that walk or continue on it proves that THEY HAD NOT INHERITED THEIR SINS AND WERE NOT PREDESTINED TO SIN. So where did the idea that sin is inherited from Adam originate?

To answer this question we must return to a North African city named Hippo where lived a priest named Augustine who would be instrumental in turning men away from God’s Truth and to the counterfeit truths of the Counterfeit Church where such “truths” continue to be the foundation stones upon which Satan’s end-time church rests. One of those truths concerns the concept of Original Sin–the belief that Adam miraculously injected his sin into the spiritual dna of his descendants. Let us see how Satan pulled off this soul-destroying ruse.

There was a time in Hippo when children were dying at an unusual rate. Their parents, not wanting them to die without being baptized, asked their priest–Augustine–to baptize them. To his credit, he knew that the children had not broken the Law of God, which constitutes sin (1 Jn. 3:4). But to appease the people, he devised a “truth” that would allow him to baptize the children. He simply declared that everyone ever born had inherited Adam’s sin, and that baptism washed those sins away, and that Christ died so that they could continue to “do what comes naturally” with impunity. It was from Augustine’s lie that the church gained a new truth. The rest is the Counterfeit Church’s Satan-dictated history. L.J.