The Sin Nature

Listen Online:

Transcript:

We’re going to be in Romans chapter 5 this morning, as I’ve already said. And I didn’t intend it this way because I didn’t think to look at the quarterly and see where we were going to be this week. But our message this morning goes along with what you heard in Sunday school, if you were here.

And at first I thought, oh great, they will have heard all this already. And then my second thought was, well, if some of this stuff that was being taught in Sunday school sounded familiar from my notes. And I thought, well, if Harold Henderson and I were on the same page, then we must be right.

But we’re going to talk about the sin nature a little bit this morning. And it was kind of ironic on Thursday. During the day, I was reading an article that was talking about the idea that some people have that mankind is basically good.

And as nice as it would be to think that, it’s wrong and it goes all over me because I know it’s not true. It’s not biblical. But a lot of people think we just want to stay positive and believe the best about everybody. And I do try to look on the bright side and believe the best about people.

But it doesn’t change the fact that we are not basically good. And so I was reading this article and getting my blood pressure up reading it. And come to find out just shortly after that, just a couple hours after that, you all probably heard about it on the news.

I was about a half mile from where there was a workplace attack that very day. And it was bad enough when I was watching the news Thursday night and before I went to bed, and it was a workplace attack, that would have been bad enough that some woman was stabbed and killed. I didn’t really listen to the news Friday morning, but I got out of school on Friday afternoon, and I was listening to a national radio program, and they were talking about an ISIS, possibly ISIS-connected beheading in Moore, Oklahoma.

And I thought, when did that happen? And it took a few minutes to realize that it was the same thing from the day before. And some depraved human being had walked into his workplace and killed somebody, possibly in the name of his religion.

And I thought, boy, the sin nature is alive. And the world wants to look at that and say, well, that’s an isolated incident. You know, there are some bad people or there are some people who do bad things.

Well, yeah, there are some people who do bad things. There are some bad people. And I believe the Bible teaches that we all, and please don’t tune out on this because you’re thinking I would never behead somebody.

I’m not saying you would. I’m not saying I would. But this is not only taught in the Bible that mankind is inherently evil.

It’s also borne out by science. They’ve done behavioral experiments too that just leap to mind every time I talk about the sin nature where the Stanford prison experiment and the Milgram experiment that they did, I want to say, back in the 60s and 70s. There was one, this prison experiment at Stanford University.

They wanted to understand why people, why there was so much violence in prisons, if it had something to do with the roles people saw themselves in. And so they hired people for an experiment. I believe it was supposed to last a week.

And they converted a basement of one of the university buildings there at Stanford into a makeshift prison. And they said to half of these people, you’re going to be guards and half of them, you’re going to be prisoners. And, I mean, they were free to leave at any time, basically.

But the prisoners started to internalize that role, and they became submissive to the officers and the men who were officers. Guys, all of these were just students. They didn’t go get criminal types and law enforcement types.

They put an ad up and said, we need X number of students, and then they randomly assigned them. Well, what they found was one side internalized their role, the other side internalized their role, and next thing you know, you have the law enforcement people, and I’m not saying this goes on all the time, but in this experiment, the law enforcement people began to abuse the prisoners, began to do everything they could to humiliate them, to torture them psychologically, because they had no restraints on what their behavior was or what they could do. And conditions deteriorated so badly during the course of this experiment that it was supposed to last a week or two, it ended up being called off after, I believe, only two to three days because they don’t identify the cause in the experiment papers, as far as I know, but the depravity of human nature reared its head.

And these people began to realize, I can get away with doing whatever I want to. They began to see them just as criminals. They’re less than I am, and I can do what I want.

And it really strikes a blow at the idea, even taught in psychology, that people are basically good. The other thing is the Milgram experiment that they’ve adapted, they’ve parodied whatever you want to call it on shows like Law and Order. It took place, again, in the 60s or 70s, where they got people to come in and they were trying to understand, okay, there must have been something wrong with the German people that they were willing to go along with Hitler.

There must have been something psychologically wrong with them because good people are going to remain good no matter what the circumstances are, And it’s just a select diseased few who act out and do wicked things. Surely that’s got to be the case. And they did this experiment where they put somebody in a room, you couldn’t see them, but you could hear them, an actor, who was supposed to be asked a series of questions, and if they got the answer wrong to the question, the person they were actually testing is in a room with a person with a clipboard and told you’re supposed to flip this lever that will administer to them an electric shock.

and so they would ask him a question if they got it wrong they flipped the lever and the the actor would scream and they said each time the uh they were told it was going to be a learning experiment to see how how this sort of negative reinforcement would help people to learn and to retain things what they didn’t realize is it wasn’t the person who was answering the questions that was being tested it was actually the person who was flipping the switch and asking the questions it was a test to see how they would respond and how they would react to authority. Now they were free to leave at any time. They’re told with each wrong answer, the voltage increases.

If they don’t answer, you count that as a wrong answer. You keep administering the electric pulse. And so they would scream, the actor would scream that they were in pain.

And each time the voltage would go up, the people would continue to administer the shocks as the actor screamed louder and louder. And And the researcher would say, no, you need to continue with the experiment. You know, most people continued the experiment to its conclusion.

There were a few who said, no, I’m not doing this. But most people, normal people, ladies and gentlemen, people like us, continued the experiment to its conclusion in spite of the fact of the screams and pleas from the actor. They didn’t realize it was an actor.

In spite of the fact that the subject became non-responsive. As far as they knew, they killed them with the electric shock. And they continued because the person in the lab coat told them to.

And there was something within them that was willing to go along with that. Now whatever conclusions they were able to draw from those two experiments, I remember reading about them when I had to take psychology in college and just being horrified at what they had found out. Because whatever results they arrived at, whatever conclusions those two experiments led the researchers to, it reminds me that we all have within us the capacity to behave wickedly.

We all have within us a sin nature that enables us to do what we know we are not supposed to do. There’s nobody in here that I would look at and say, well, you’re just a horrible, awful human being. And certainly wouldn’t say it to your face, but I wouldn’t say it about any of you behind your backs either.

And yet, despite the fact that by human standards, everybody in here is probably a pretty good person. Despite that fact, we still, by God’s standards, are sinful, fallen human beings. We are not inherently good.

We can do good things. We can be nice to each other. But inherently, when we get down to what our nature is, we’re sinners.

And we’ve sinned against the Holy God. We’re going to look at a passage here in Romans chapter 5 and talk about what the sin nature is on this list of non-negotiables that we’ve been going through on Sunday mornings. These doctrines of Christianity that we either believe and maintain the integrity of the gospel, the integrity of the Christian faith, or we abandon and Christianity is no longer Christianity.

Folks, the sin nature is one of those because getting away from the sin nature undermines the very foundation of the gospel. But Romans chapter 5, starting in verse 6, says, for when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly. Now notice here, before we get too much further, it doesn’t say that in due time Christ died for nice people who did bad things.

He said that we were ungodly. And that’s exactly right. That’s exactly what we were.

In due time, Christ died for the ungodly. For scarcely for a righteous man will one die, yet peradventure for a good man some would even dare to die. And folks, on the face of it, this verse does not make sense.

I have puzzled over this verse for years, and I really had to study this week to try to come to some understanding. Okay, for a good man, some people might die. For a righteous man, nobody will die.

Don’t they mean the same thing? And what does that have to do with anything? What Paul is trying to do here is to illustrate the uniqueness of what Jesus Christ did.

That there is, not only is there nobody else who could die for our sins, Jesus Christ was the sole person, sole entity who could die for our sins and it be effective in the forgiveness of our sins with his being fully God and fully man. But even if we take out whether it was effective or not, there is the absolute uniqueness that nobody else would even be willing to die for bad people. It doesn’t work that way.

And what he’s illustrating here is the uniqueness of that, and he plays on something that they probably would have understood the church at Rome being, at least in part, comprised of people who were Jewish converts to Christianity in Rome. I’m sure there were Romans who converted as well, but they would have understood, and I didn’t think to write down the quote, but there’s a quote talking about the difference between goodness and righteousness, a Jewish quote that they would have understood, the good man and the righteous man, and the righteous man basically is somebody who does the right thing, who obeys God’s law, at least outwardly. A good man is somebody who’s generous and giving, and the commentaries talk about how you can be good but not righteous and righteous but not good in this use of the word.

Folks, it’s not talking about righteous the way God is or good in God’s perspective, but talking about in this human perspective. There can be righteous people by this perspective who do the right thing, who mind their P’s and Q’s, so to speak, don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t break the speed limit. I mean, they’re very scrupulous about following the rules and yet they are stingy and mean toward other people.

They can be righteous by that definition, but not good. They can also be generous and kind and loving and caring, but also wild and run amok when it comes to the rules. They can treat other people nicely, but then they can violate every rule there is.

And so by that definition, they can be good, but not righteous. And so what he’s saying here is nobody’s going to give up their life. People don’t just go and give up their lives and say, well, he’s a good man.

He follows the rules. I’m going to give my life for him. And he says here, occasionally you can find somebody who’s willing to lay down their life for somebody who is good by that definition.

Someone who has shown so much love and generosity and caring toward other people and toward the community that people think that’s somebody I’d lay down my life for. You might find that, but even that’s rare. So he says, for scarcely for a righteous man will one die, yet peradventure for a good man, some would even dare to die.

You’re not going to find somebody, you’re not going to find people willing to lay down their lives because he should get to live, he follows the rules. On rare occasions, you might find people who are willing to say, that person has brought so much joy and comfort to other people and generosity to other people, spare them and take me. He said it’s such a rare or non-existent occurrence for these good people by human standards for somebody to die for them.

You never ever hear somebody say, oh, he’s terrible. What an awful human being. Let me take his place.

Take me and not him instead. Really? Where are the people?

Where are the people whose loved ones were killed lining up to have the life spared of the man who’s on death row for killing their loved one and saying, take me instead? We don’t see that. And yet that’s exactly what Jesus Christ did.

Because from God’s perspective, remember, we won’t even really die for people who are good from our perspective. It’s not a common occurrence. And we certainly won’t die for people who are bad from our perspective.

From God’s perspective, we are sinners. We’ve violated the law. We’ve spit in his face.

We’ve sinned against him. We’ve declared ourselves on the side of Satan as a human race, wicked and depraved. And yet God looks at us and says, God the Son says, I’m willing to die for them.

You will not find that anywhere else. You will not. That is something unparalleled in the course of human history.

That has never happened before. And it doesn’t happen today. And so he says in verse 8, But God commendeth his love toward us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

It’s rare that somebody would die for good people, and yet God commended his love toward us. God demonstrated his love toward us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Not that after we had come and cleaned ourselves up and made ourselves lovely and acted right, then God sent his son to die for us.

He says while we were yet sinners, while we were still in the act of sinning, while we were there red-handed, God loved us enough and demonstrated his love to us by sending Jesus Christ to die for us. Much more than being now justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him. As these depraved sinners, we are deserving of God’s wrath.

We are deserving of God’s wrath. We deserve, we deserve death. We deserve eternal separation from God and the fires of hell.

We deserve all the torture, all the torment, everything that comes along with it. We deserve God’s wrath. That’s not something you’re going to hear in a lot of churches this morning.

And quite honestly, it doesn’t feel good for me to say it either because I’m one who’s deserving of God’s wrath as well. It’s not fun to say. It’s not fun to preach, but it’s in God’s word.

We are deserving of God’s wrath, and yet we are justified by his blood and saved from the wrath we deserve through him. We’re saved from that wrath because of what Jesus Christ did, because of his shed blood. We think to how awful the crucifixion was, how awful his trial was and everything he went through before the cross and on the cross.

And we think, and I don’t know if you’re like me, you may think from time to time, why did it have to be so bloody? Why did it have to be so painful? Why did it have to be so.

. . Well, folks, not only did he purchase our forgiveness by the shedding of his blood, but I believe everything he went through, I believe God’s wrath was poured out on our sin in Jesus Christ. It says that he was bruised for our iniquities.

I’m sorry, he was bruised for our transgressions, that he was crushed for our iniquities. And by his stripes, ladies and gentlemen, the stripes on his back, everywhere he was whipped and the blood leaked through. It was for us.

And God poured out his wrath on sin that we deserved when Jesus Christ was crucified. And the wrath that we deserved, he took. The judgment we deserved, he took.

For if when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his son, much more being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life. And I want to talk about the reconciliation and I want to talk about the life, but there’s a very important first part to verse 10 that we can very easily overlook. That we were enemies of God.

Chapter 5 starts out saying, Therefore, being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. The reason we have peace with God is because of Jesus Christ. And I’ve always sort of read between the lines there and said, well, that means we weren’t at peace with God before. We were at war with God before. We were enemies of God before.

But I forget that later on in the chapter, I don’t have to read between the lines. It’s actually spelled out later in the chapter when it says we were enemies. So we were sinners against God.

We were ungodly. And the Bible says that we were enemies of God. And yet we were reconciled to God because of what Jesus Christ did.

We had sinned against God in such a way we had divided, separated ourselves from God in such a way that even if we were inclined to that sort of thing, there was no way we could come back and say, God, we’re sorry. Will you forgive us? There would still have to be a punishment for our rebellion against God.

The only reason there was reconciliation possible is because of what Jesus Christ did. He took the punishment that we deserved. And so it says in verse 10, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his son.

Much more being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life. He died for us when we were his enemies. He didn’t wait until we tried to come and make peace.

That would never have happened. But while we were God’s enemies, he loved us enough to send his son to die for us. And not only so, but we also joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom we have now received the atonement.

The atonement simply means a sacrifice that was provided so that we could be reconciled to God. They did it in the Old Testament. They would have the sacrifices for atonement, which really were just a picture looking ahead in time at what Jesus Christ would do.

But Jesus Christ was sacrificed on the cross so that we could be reconciled to God. And now we can rejoice because we’ve received this atonement. It says in verse 12, he wants to remind us what the basis is of this salvation.

He says, wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world. Who was the one man whereby sin entered into the world? Anybody?

Adam. It was Adam. He sinned in the garden.

We talked about that a little bit in Sunday school. You mean to tell me he ate a piece of fruit and God condemned all of humanity? Guys, it wasn’t about the fruit.

It wasn’t about the fruit. It was the act of rebellion. God said, you realize God said, there’s one rule here.

We look at God and we look at the commandments and say, well, that sounds really hard. And the world looks at God and says, well, God’s such a downer. He’s given us all these rules that we’re supposed to follow and it’s just hard and God wants to spoil our fun.

Are you kidding? This isn’t what God’s plan was. I mean, God knew that we were going to sin.

But God didn’t sit down in the beginning and say, now let me give you the 613 rules that you have to follow in the Garden of Eden. He told them, go, enjoy, have dominion, be fruitful, multiply, All of these things. Enjoy everything I have in the garden, but stay away from this one tree.

Guys, we couldn’t even do that. It wasn’t that he ate fruit and God’s so vindictive that I told you not to, so now all of humanity is cursed. It was the fact that they had rebelled against God.

They had doubted God’s authority and said, we’re going to do things our own way. Wherefore, by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin, and so death hath passed upon all men, for that all have sinned. So Adam and Eve, through that act of rebellion, died spiritually and from that moment on began to die physically.

Our bodies decay over time, don’t they? And I’m not talking about in the ground, I’m talking about now. They break down over time, unfortunately.

And when sin entered the world, it messed everything up, it marred everything, it infected everything. And far from people who believe, you know, first of all, I don’t see evolution when I look at science and when I look at the cell and all that. But I look at the long view of history, and I don’t see that we’re evolving as a species.

Really, I think we’re heading backwards. You know, I like the picture that I saw on Facebook one time that had a picture on one row of men like Washington and Adams and Jefferson and Madison and Ben Franklin, some of the founding fathers, and then had a lineup of some of the politicians we have today and said, still believe in evolution. That’s great.

I think we are heading in many ways, despite our technology, despite our advances when it comes to morals, maybe when it comes to intelligence, when it comes to all sorts of things, I think we’re devolving as a species since the days of Adam and Eve. God created the perfect man and woman, and as the point was made in our Sunday school lesson this morning, they could have lived forever in the garden if sin hadn’t messed it up. Their bodies were made where they could have lived forever, but sin marred everything.

Death entered into the world by sin, and yeah, it took about 900 years to catch up with them, But eventually it did. And as you read through Genesis, you see this sort of downward trajectory where we stopped living quite so long. And we’ve gotten to where in times past and in other places, people might be lucky to live into their 30s.

Now, because of technology, we’re sort of going the other way. And yet we still can’t seem to break 120. That’s about the ceiling.

We still can’t seem to, you know, most people are going to be lucky to make it into their 90s. We can’t seem to get away. And even then, our bodies still deteriorate.

We can’t get away from the effects of sin. It’s there. It mars everything.

It affects everything. He says, death by sin and sin, death passed upon all men because all have sinned. We got it from Adam.

We sin, we die, we inherited that from him. For until the law, sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed when there is no law. Nevertheless, death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam’s transgression, who is the figure of him that was to come.

Now the importance of Moses in there is that was when we were given the law. And he says there was sin even before the law, but you don’t know what all the sins are. But you know what, even if we didn’t have the law, even if we didn’t read the Old Testament and know what the law was, the Bible says that the law of God is written on our hearts.

We have that conscience where some things we know are just wrong. And he said, and so death reigned over all the people, even those who didn’t sin the same way Adam did. And it says not after the similitude of Adam’s transgression.

That means we didn’t do the exact same thing that Adam did. We didn’t go into the Garden of Eden and pick the fruit and sin the same way. And yet we sinned.

And so death was passed on to all of us. But not as the offense, verse 15, so also is the free gift. For if through the offense of one, many be dead, much more the grace of God and the gift by grace, which is one man, Jesus Christ, hath abounded unto many.

So he says, through the offense of Adam, death and sin passed down to every successive generation, to all men. And he said, but in the same way, the grace of God and the gift of Jesus Christ are available to all. God’s forgiveness for this sin, this sin that is passed on to all, God’s forgiveness and God’s grace toward that sin is available to all through one person.

Adam messed it all up and Jesus Christ fixed it. Because of Adam’s sin, we all inherited sin. Because Jesus Christ died, we can all inherit his righteousness.

And not as it was by one that sins, so is the gift. For the judgment was by one to condemnation, but the free gift is of many offenses unto justification. For if by one man’s offense death reigned by one, much more they which receive the abundance of grace and by the gift of righteousness shall reign in life by one Jesus Christ. Therefore, as by the offense of one judgment came upon all men to condemnation, Even so by the righteousness of one, the free gift came upon all men unto justification of life.

Okay, and so he’s restated several times a few different ways, I think for emphasis, but really the same point over and over. Adam sinned and messed things up for everybody, and so by one person it was fixed, and that person was Jesus Christ. And then he says in verse 19, For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous. righteous.

It was Adam’s disobedience that caused all of this in the beginning. That doesn’t mean that we’re not responsible for what we do, but Adam’s disobedience caused all of this in the beginning and Christ’s obedience to the will of the father settled the account and fixed it. We have this sin nature in the meantime.

We’re going to talk just a little bit about what the sin nature means. It means first of all, that we are sinners by nature. It means we’re sinners by nature.

I got, I made some people upset at me and that that’s okay. I’m preaching this in Fayetteville We are born sinners. Now, it’s not that that was against what the church believed, but some of the ladies didn’t like to think about little babies being born sinners.

I don’t like that thought either. I look at my kids when they’re first born and think, oh, you’re so perfect. No, because how quickly that sin nature rears its ugly head.

And I didn’t teach them at three months old how to be able to throw. I never realized until I had kids at three months old. They can be stubborn.

And you can, you know, it’s not time for you to have food again. You’ve had two bottles already ten minutes ago. It’s not time to eat again.

And yet they throw the fit and they’re stubborn. Even at three months, that stubbornness and that selfishness can rear their ugly heads. And that’s not fun for us to say and to think about.

But nobody teaches us how to do wrong. I’ve said for years that the greatest confirmation up to that point that I’d had until I had kids of my own, The greatest confirmation I had of the sin nature was working in preschool with my cousin. Many of you know Stacey Ray up at Unity.

I substitute taught with her for a week, filled in for the pre-K teacher where she was. And oh my goodness, nobody taught those kids to say those words. I didn’t even know some of those words.

Nobody taught those kids to push each other down on the playground. You know what? It comes naturally from the sin nature.

And my Bible tells me that we are conceived in sin. From the moment of conception when that life begins, and I do believe from the Bible and from science that life begins at conception, but from the moment of that conception, we are sinners by nature. We’re sinners by nature.

Some things are just passed down. My dad and mom were sinners, are sinners, so I’m a sinner. They’re sinners because their parents were sinners.

It’s not a difficult concept. My grandpa is Choctaw, so my dad was Choctar. nature.

Why is it so hard to believe that the sin nature is inherited? When the Bible teaches that, and experience bears out the fact that so many things are passed down in our nature. I’m not saying everything about us is genetically predetermined.

I don’t believe that either. But the sin nature certainly is. Nobody teaches us how to do wrong.

We just know it’s instinctive. And the Bible says, it gives the reason for that in verse 12, wherefore is by one man sin entered into the world and death by sin, so death passed upon all men for that all have sinned. Sin entered into the world and we all sinned as a result of catching that inherited sin nature from Adam.

So the sin nature means that we’re all sinners by nature. I mean that it’s right there in the title, sin nature. Second of all, it means that we sin because we are sinners.

I grew up thinking because I’ve sinned, I’m a sinner and I’ve messed up with God because I’ve done this wrong. I’ve lied. I’ve not listened to my mom and dad.

What it took me years to realize is even if I hadn’t done those things, which would be impossible anyway, I was still a sinner by nature and was still condemned before God. I don’t become a sinner because I sin. I sin because I’m a sinner.

There are certain things that, well, I walk on two legs because I’m human. I speak because I’m human. I’m not human because I can speak.

I’m not human because I can walk on two legs. You could go find a two-legged dog and that wouldn’t make him human. You can train a bird to say words, but that doesn’t make it human.

See, a lot of times the behavior follows the nature. And he tells us in verse 14, nevertheless, death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam’s transgression. Not everybody sinned the exact same way Adam did.

Not everybody went and, as I said earlier, went and got the fruit out of the garden and ate it when God said not to, and then they became sinners. No, but they still sinned because they had that inherited sin nature. It’s not like Adam taught classes and said, now we’re all going to go down to the garden and get the fruit we’re not supposed to, and everybody did it after that.

Even after Adam was long dead, people were still following in his footsteps of sinning. We sin because we are sinners. Third of all, the sin nature means that we are separated from God.

In verse 10, it talks about us being enemies. That’s a pretty strong word. You know what?

There are some people, I know this is not very pastor-like