THE question everyone who professes to be a Christian must ask and answer is: DID GOD ORDER OR ALLOW SATAN TO  INFECT EVERY HUMAN BEING EVER BORN WITH ADAM’S SIN. Because one’s answer determines one’s reaction to temptation, one’s eternity will depend on one’s  answer. Acts 10:34 assures us that “God is no respecter of persons.” Adam and Eve were persons. They were no different from the billions of people ever born relative to Satan’s temptations and man’s reactions to them. Adam and Eve were given FREE MORAL AGENCY. They, like their descendants, have two choices relative to temptation. Satan could not force them, and cannot force us, to follow his lead. If he could force people to sin he would not need to tempt them. Nothing in the Scriptures hints that our original parents were created with sin or with the impulse to sin. They were created in the image and likeness of God, which does not include sin. We know this because the apostle whom Jesus loved wrote: “for there is no darkness (sin) in Him at all” (1 Jn. 1:5). Following creation week during which He created Adam and Eve, God proclaimed that everything He had created was “very good” (Gen. 1:31). God does not call sin “very good.”

Like the angels before them, our original parents were given the opportunity to choose between God’s Word and Satan’s word. They CHOSE to obey Satan and disobey God. Until they touched the forbidden fruit they had the power to reject the devil’s temptation. The Scriptures tell us that Eve had never seen the forbidden tree before approaching it following her conversation with Satan (Gen. 3:6). “And WHEN THE WOMAN SAW that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise ….” Notice the word “when,” meaning that this was her first view of the tree. At that point she could have turned back. But she CHOOSE to not only approach the tree, but to eat of it, and to involve Adam in her sin when she “gave (the fruit) to her husband WITH HER and HE DID EAT (by choice).” Adam choose to accompany her to the forbidden tree in the center of the garden and to eat of it. Satan could force neither of them to walk to the tree, nor to view its splender, nor to eat of its fruit. Neither can he force any other person to sin. Man sins because he chooses to sin. God is no respecter of persons. All human beings have free moral agency and two “voices” from which to choose. SIN IS A CHOICE. If, as the church proclaims, we have no choice because Adam’s sin leaves us helpless before the devil, then God lied to us in Acts 10:34. This means that though Adam and Eve were not sinners at creation, each of their descendants have carried their sin gene from conception. Nowhere in Scripture can this be found.

The passage upon which “sinners saved by grace” hang their “Adam’s sin nullifies my power of choice” hat is Romans 5:12 which states: “For by one man sin entered the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that (because) ALL HAVE SINNED.” Note it: death reigns over all men because all HAVE SINNED, not because all inherit sin at conception. We are told that Jesus of Nazareth “learned obedience” by suffering temptation and overcoming it (Heb. 5:7,8). Being a human being like all other human beings, there was a time in His life when He did not know good and evil and therefore could not “refuse the evil and choose the good (Isa, 7:14-17). Note that Jesus had to learn to choose to obey God’s “voice” and to refuse Satan’s “voice.” If sin had been infused into Him through His mother, then sin entered His life at conception and remained within Him until His death because He was a man LIKE ALL OTHER MEN AND “WAS TEMPTED AS ARE ALL OTHER MEN–YET WITHOUT SIN” (Heb. 4:15). If Jesus had retained any part of His Godness, this would be a ridiculous statement, as would 1 John 2:6 where we are told that in order to be saved we must “walk as He walked,” and 1 John 3:6 where we are commanded to be as pure as He is pure, and Revelation 3:21 where Jesus tells us that in order to sit with Him on His throne throughout eternity we must “overcome (Satan’s temptations) as I overcame (them).” Jesus was killed. A god cannot be killed. For proof of Christ’s manhood see Jesus of Nazareth: God, Man or Godman?

Let us return to Romans 5:12 where we are told that through Adam sin entered the world and therefore “sin passed upon all men.” Adam introduced sin to mankind, but mankind does not have to embrace sin. Otherwise, man has no free moral agency and is no more than a puppet of Satan. This makes Satan the hand and the person its glove. One might be born into a family of thieves, but that does not make him a thief. In our judicial system we do not arrest children when the parents are caught breaking the law. Children are not guilty by association. Everyone in one’s family might have influenza. But one is not automatically infected because everyone else is.  Because sin is in the world does not mean that I must embrace it. I can CHOOSE not to do so. We are innocent until proven guilty. Romans 5:12 tells us that all human beings past the age of accountability are sinners because “ALL HAVE SINNED,” not because all were infected with sin at conception. It is true that we were all “born in sin.” I was born in a cotton patch. That makes me neither cotton nor a patch. My parents were sinners. I became a sinner only WHEN I CHOOSE TO SIN. Sin was my choice. No one, not Satan and not my parents, forced me to sin. I thank God that He revealed this Truth to me early on in life. Though I sinned, I KNEW I DID SO BY CHOICE. Never did I blame Adam for my sins.

Nowhere are we told that God allowed Satan to inject Adam and Eve with sin. And being no respecter of persons, God did not allow him to inject their descendants with sin. Recall that of their first two children, Cain sinned but Abel was “righteous” (Mat. 23:35). How could he be righteous if he had sin within him? One is either righteous or a sinner, and is so by choice. Cain chose sin; Abel chose righteousness. There are no righteous sinners. One is either righteous or a sinner. The two are diametric opposites. This is brought out graphically in 2 Corinthians 6:14-18 where we are told that Christ and Satan, good and evil, light and darkness DO NOT MIX. For as leaven always leavens the loaf, sin always corrupts righteousness when they are combined. For this reason God commanded the Israelites to keep themselves physically separated from the Gentiles (goiim–heathen). Israel’s fall was the result of mixing with Gentiles, learning their ways and serving their gods. Israel sinned by choice and were therefore defeated, enslaved and scattered throughout the world where they remain to this day and are called the Lost Tribes of the House of Israel. With the exception of God’s tiny remnant, the children of Israel, now numbering in the hundreds of millions, do not know they are Israelites. See Who and Where is Israel Today? In the same way, “sinners saved by grace” are separated from God as He states in Isaiah 59:2. So-called “sinners saved by grace” have deceived themselves (Jam. 1:22) by listening to the voice of Satan who, as we are told in Revelation 12:9, “deceives the whole world.” L.J.