For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.
ROMANS 5:19
In the very good world God created, He gave only one prohibition: “And the Lord God commanded the man, ‘You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die’” (Genesis 2:17-18).
When the serpent—Satan—twisted God’s words and called His motives into question, the first man and woman, Adam and Eve, chose to rebel against God’s just and rightful authority. “When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it” (Genesis 3:6).
With this disobedience, sin entered the world, and with it, the penalty of death—not merely the ending of our earthly, physical life, but eternal separation from God. Since that time all of creation has been cursed (Genesis 3:17) and subjected to frustration (Romans 8:20), and all people are born into sin.
Because of Adam’s sin, sin has spread to all of humanity (Romans 5:12), like a spiritual cancer we all have by heredity. “Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me” (Psalm 51:5). The image of God within us has been marred.
As sinners, we have all turned our backs on God by believing, like Adam and Eve, that we know best. Instead of seeking God and His best for our lives, humans cover and deny our sin as they did, or attempt to shift the blame (Genesis 3:7-13). When faced with the inevitable consequences of our sin, we distrust God and try to fix our own problems. God said in Jeremiah 2:13, “My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.”
Because our sin separated us from God (Isaiah 59:2), we cannot, in our own power, save ourselves, nor can we even approach God to be saved (John 6:44). On our own, ensnared by the power of sin, we refuse to see that we even need saving.
What we need is rescue from the outside. Sin is powerful, but God’s grace is stronger.