It started in the garden . . .

Adam ate the apple, or whatever that forbidden fruit was, and his disobedience became the attitude of every person since. This seems unfair, but I’ve been reading a book that describes how the negatives in the lives of the parents become part of the molecular structure of the children. That is, even the cells of our body are programed to respond to life afterward by what happens in the environment of childhood. Surely this includes the predisposition to sin.

The idea of original sin is offensive to some, but practically speaking, it cannot be denied. No one has to teach a child to resist authority, lie, disobey, or be selfish. This is our human condition. Adam and Eve were not like that before they disobeyed God, but after they did, they passed on that tendency to their children. While the world has always experienced the results of sin, it seems to me that lawlessness and selfishness are increasing with every generation.

Romans 5 compares the disobedience of Adam with the obedience of Jesus Christ. The first man ruined things, but the One the Bible calls the perfect Man came to repair the wreckage. Verses 19-21 put it this way:

For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so also by one Man’s obedience many will be made righteous. Moreover the law entered that the offense might abound. But where sin abounded, grace abounded much more, so that as sin reigned in death, even so grace might reign through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

These verses are a summation of spiritual history. Adam’s sin plunged humanity into spiritual darkness; the law of God brought to human attention that we cannot obey God as He intended; then the obedience of Jesus Christ brought light into that darkness. Jesus offers eternal life to those doomed to death and eternal separation from God. Instead of selfishness, lawlessness, lies and rebellion, sinners can be made righteous and enjoy the grace of God for now and eternity.

Apart from grace, that human tendency toward sin would have destroyed civilization long ago. It is not that sinful human beings haven’t tried to be good, but how many cultures have died because of war and disease inflicted by those who didn’t care about anything or anyone other than their own self-interests? How many individual lives have been ruined because they could not overcome a legacy handed to them by their upbringing (or lack of it)?

Yet grace breaks in, interrupting the downward spiral of sin passed from one generation to the next. Apart from grace, that spiral would go deeper and wider and create far more terrible havoc than it does.

Way back in my family, there was child abuse. Abusers create abusers, yet when one person in that branch of my family became a Christian, the grace of God brought an end to the chain. The abuse stopped and has not happened or been passed on in any of the three generations since. Grace reigns through righteousness because of Jesus Christ. He changes lives and human history.

Does God change individuals at the molecular level? It would not surprise me. The Bible says, “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new” (2 Corinthians 2:17).

That and other verses use the word “all” and it seems reasonable to believe that it does mean all. Every part of a believer’s life is regenerated, even the damage done in childhood. Of course, each person has to deal with his past. Resentment, unforgiveness, and repressed anger will be brought to the light and must be confessed and forsaken, but the grace of God reigns, and as God’s people live in that grace, He breaks the destructive power of sin, even generational sin.