Genesis 3:13

Genesis 3:13

I. The record before us is the history of the first sin. It needed no revelation to tell us that sin is, that mankind is sinful. Without, within, around, and inside us, is the fact, the experience, the evidence, the presence of sin. It is sin which makes life troublous and gives death its sting. The revelation of the fall tells of an entrance, of an inburst of evil into a world all good, into a being created upright, tells, therefore, of a nature capable of purity, of an enemy that may be expelled, and of a holiness possible because natural. From man's fall we infer a fall earlier yet and more mysterious. Once sin was not; and when it entered man's world it entered under an influence independent, not inherent.

II. The first sin is also the specimen sin. It is in this sense, too, the original sin, that all other sins are copies of it. Unbelief first, then disobedience; then corruption, then self-excusing; then the curse and the expulsion, turn the page and you shall find a murder!

III. The original sin is also the infectious sin. The New Testament derives this doctrine from the history, that there is a taint or corruption in the race by reason of the fall; that it is not only a following of Adam by the deliberate independent choice of each one of us which is the true account of our sinning; but this rather, an influence and infection of evil, derived and inherited by us from all that ancestry of the transgressor. Not one man of all the progeny of Adam has drawn his first breath or his latest in an atmosphere pure and salubrious. Before, behind him, around and above, there has been the heritage of weakness, the presence and pressure of an influence in large part evil. Fallen sons of a fallen forefather, God must send down His hand from above if we are to be rescued ever out of these deep, these turbid waters.

C. J. Vaughan, Half-hours in the Temple Churchyp. 55 (also Good Words,1870, p. 331).

References: Genesis 3:13. J. E. Vaux, Sermon Notes,1st series, p. 32; J. H. Newman, Oxford University Sermons,p. 136; Clergyman's Magazine,vol. xviii., p. 83.