What is "original sin" and the "sin nature"?

This is pretty simple, actually, if you have a biblical mindset of the relationship between parents and their children, but it vexes people a lot because of the modern mindset that has been learned in secular teaching.

If you were taught atheistic, Darwinian evolution and understand biology from that perspective, then human children are independent organisms that have no connection to their parents beyond inheriting physical, biological traits through their parents' genes.  And those genes are amoral, meaning they have no morality connected to them.  Certainly the color of your eyes, hair, skin, blood type, and the many other physical characteristics have no moral bias to them, either good or evil.  So, the thinking goes, upon conception the human child is an independent automaton with some sort of conscience that is not linked to the parents in any way.

It follows from this that people ask how we can inherit a sin nature from our parents.  After all, sin isn't physical, right?  And, as the thinking goes, we only inherited physical traits from our parents, right?  And if you do believe in creation and not evolution, that is, that we are descended from Adam and Eve and not from apes, then there is still the question of how some [quote]"original sin"[unquote] so far removed from us by thousands of years can affect us.  Certainly, we are not held accountable for the sins of our parents.  Ezekiel 18 elaborates on this explicitly.

To answer this, you first have to wipe the slate clean of all the modern evolutionistic philosophy and rethink everything, this time using the Bible, beginning with the book of Genesis.

We know that God created Adam and gave him a command.  It's in Gen 2:17, and I think it's easiest to read in the Koine Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament.  As literally as I can translate it, ου φαγεσθε απ αυτου η δ' αν ημερα φαγητε απ αυτου, θανατω αποθανεισθε, which when translated to English is "you[plural] will not eat from same, yet to which ever day you[plural] would eat from same, to death you[plural] will die."

So, now, God proclaims the destiny of death if Adam eats from that tree.  The thing is, only Adam has been created at this point.  Eve has not been created yet, and Adam does not have any children yet, of course.

I find it interesting that the Koine Greek has that "you" in the plural. The Hebrew Masoretic text does not.  It is singular.  That might seem a discrepancy, but when you understand what I am about to explain, it will be a moot point.

The next relevant thing that happens in the timeline is that Eve is created.  Eve is created from Adam's rib, or some part of his body out of his side -- whatever -- but the significant thing is that Eve comes from Adam's body.  That mean's Adam owns her, as much as he owns any other part of his body, and God does not take possession of her from him or send her off running in the wild, but gives her back to him, which means that she still remains his possession.

Don't like that?  Don't argue with me.  This is God's Word, not twentieth century feminism.  And it's all good anyway, because in God's plan the husband loves his wife as Christ loves his εκκλησια, his out-calling (traditionally referred to as the "church"), and gives his life for her, while the εκκλησια, his out-calling (traditionally referred to as the "church") submits to Christ (not the other way around), and belongs to him as his possession.  Anyway, that's a bit of a tangent, but it will help to understand the principle that the woman belongs to the man in the same way that children are the possession of their parents and belong to their parents, since they come out of their body.

Okay, so the next thing in the timeline is that Adam would have to, at some point, tell Eve what God said.  She wasn't there when he said it, remember?

Then, the next thing in the timeline is that the devil comes to Eve and tempts Eve, questioning what God said.  Eve succumbs to this temptation and eats the forbidden fruit, hearkening to the word of the devil instead of the word of her husband (telling her what God said).

Where's Adam in all this?  Well, it looks from the scriptures that he was right there.  So, what does the man do?  He hearkens to the word of his woman (Gen 3:17) instead of the Word of God (Gen 2:17).  The buck stops with Adam for this, and Adam, the father of all mankind, not Eve, is held responsible for this original sin, according to Rom 5:12 and :14.

God then declares the curses that you can read about in Gen 3:17-19, including that he is going to return to the ground from which he came. As in, die.  As in, decay.

So now Adam is cursed, including his body, and the earth is cursed.  By God.  And what is inside Adam's body?  All the rest of mankind.  That is the key.  And that is why I went to the effort of making this video, since people almost always overlook this point.  You and I and everyone else were a part of Adam's body at the time -- and I mean as a *seed* -- I am not talking about some Mormon doctrine of pre-existence of the soul here.  The word I used, which the Bible repeatedly uses, is "seed."

That makes us cursed from the beginning, at enmity with God, and having a human nature that gives us a propensity to sin.  Even babies, although they are cute, adorable and precious -- beneath that seeming innocence is a human being that is totally carnal, cares nothing for God or anyone but itself, views the world as revolving around itself, wants whatever it wants whenever it wants, and will quickly have its parents at its beck and call if they comply with every demand of the child, producing a correspondingly self-centered, demanding baby and self-centered, demanding child, and ultimately a self-centered, demanding adult, a phenomenon we see exacerbated in western society now in this age of parental permissiveness and lack of parental training and discipline. In any case, bad parenting or better parenting, that's why we need God to regenerate us anew and give each of us a new identity in Christ as adopted sons of God, which we receive by faith in what God did to redeem us through Jesus Christ, who, by his blood, pays for our sins.

Now, let's flip this back around.  If you understand that the physical things are a type and representation of the spiritual things, let's get back to what I said in the beginning, when I pointed out the common, popular view that people only have a genetic link to their parents.

Since the time of Adam and Eve, the whole human race has been genetically devolving (not evolving), due to the presence of genetic mutations in the human genome, mostly through transcriptional errors, copy/paste errors, exacerbated by environmental (chemical, radiological) effects, as this tainted, corrupted genetic information -- noise actually -- is passed from parents to children.  If you mate a mutant gene with the same corresponding mutant gene, you get a mutant, not the original, which was lost to this corruption.

This also, by the way, explains why sisters and brothers should never marry and have children now, because the corrupt genetic information will more likely line up to produce unhealthy children, whereas natural genetic error-correction schemes will tend to eliminate the corruption when very distantly related children marry.  Both geneticists and computer engineers such as myself understand this principle of error correction methods in data transmission.

The error detection and correction mechanisms would take too long to explain in a short video such as this, but at this point you will understand why Adam and Eve's children could marry each other and produce healthy offspring -- because there was not yet time enough to produce any genetic corruption.

Okay, why is this relevant in principle?  Because in learning about the genetics we learn about corruption that is lost and irretrievable.  So it is with what we call original sin and the fall of man.  It would take a creative and regenerative act of God to restore what was lost.  And that is exactly what Jesus did.  Without faith in God, we are doomed, being sinners both by nature and by deed.  We live under the curse of Adam until such time as God saves us from our natural, cursed destiny.

Aging and death also teach us this principle.  Back then nine hundred years was considered a good old age.  Now, ninety years is considered a good old age.  After that, a person is buried in the ground and rots there.  Correspondingly, the fall of man produced not just physical death, but spiritual death as well.  The terrible consequence of spiritual death is an eternity, not just as a body rotting in the physical grave, but as a life (ψυχη, traditionally translated, soul) separated from God and condemned to hell.  Not good.  For each of us, all this started with this inherited [quote]"original sin"[unquote], but we continued to build upon it, sinning all the way on our path to the grave, until we realized our sorry state, understood the price that Jesus paid to reverse this curse, and chose to be regenerated by him and saved from the wrath of God to come.

So, you're still asking, "How does this work in the spiritual?"  Well, we can't take *spirit*, put it in a laboratory, and analyze it the way we do with biological and genetic science, using physical laboratory tools.  So, we are still not going to be able to fully conceptualize this in a satisfactory way.  We just understand enough to know that what Adam did meant that we as his children were doomed to failure from the start as [quote]"sinners"[unquote] with a [quote]"sin nature"[unquote], that originated with the fall of man, Adam's sin, the [quote]"original sin"[unquote].

In fact, the usual word that is translated "sin" in the New Testament is αμαρτια, which fundamentally means failure.  In context, spiritual/moral failure.  No, it does not mean [quote]"missing the mark"[unquote], and I did a separate video to elaborate on that silly phrase.  Adam's "failure" resulted in "failure" for all of his descendants, "failure" from the beginning, and doomed to "fail" from conception.  Spiritual, moral failure.  It is when we understand the hopelessness of the human condition that we reach out to God for a way out, and that way is through faith in Jesus, who said, "I am the way, the truth and the life," and who redeemed us from the curse.