A practical way that the doctrine of "Original Sin" really goes against God and sets us up for relationship struggles and disease...
If you park a car on your foot, God has designed your body that you will feel pain. That pain is not God punishing you for making the error of parking a car on your foot. The pain is not God putting pain on you to teach you a lesson. The pain is a natural physical protective system that God has built into us to protect us. If you are responsive to the pain in your foot you will remove the car and save yourself further pain and damage and possible crippling. If you are not sensitive to the pain, or take drugs to make the pain go away, you will end up crushing your foot, ruining your foot, making yourself incapable of walking, or ending up with some sort of infection from the broken bones and dying.
SO…when you do something like start looking at porn on the internet. God has also set up a natural system to alert you to this danger. You get sick. It is not God punishing you for the sin of looking at porn, nor is it God "putting that sickness on you" to teach you a lesson. It is a natural system designed to protect us by warning us that there is a spiritual car on our spiritual foot and that if we don't remove it, we could suffer great consequences. If we focus on making the "disease" go away, so we can feel better, we are not supposed to fear that which can destroy our body but that which can send us to hell, and so if we make the pain go away, we can persist in our sin and can end up "in hell"...
God has designed our bodies to send us messages for our good when anything attacks us or threatens our well-being.
Now, if you look at the doctrine of "Original Sin"…that doctrine says that our flesh yearns for sin…tends toward sin… What is that REALLY telling us?
For one thing, for example, if I believe that "you" are a liar that you just lie lie lie all the time; I'm not going to believe a word you say. And, so, if I believe my body wants to sin, desires to sin, lives to sin, loves to sin, and is naturally sinful...because it came firing into this world as one big sin-seeking missile...I'm not going to trust the messages my body sends me.
And, if I believe that sin is what nailed Jesus to the cross...that sin is God's enemy... what is that going to teach me about "me" if I believe my body just comes out of the womb yearning for and tending toward sin and that sin flows in my veins?? How will that effect how I treat "me"? How I view "me" and how I love "myself"? Remember that Jesus said the 2nd greatest commandment was to love your neighbor "as you love yourself". How in the world can I love the world then if I see myself as a big pile of sin that nailed Jesus to the cross?
And, what am I going to believe about what my body tries to tell me? What am I going to think of mySELF if my body is God's enemy? What am I going to think of mySELF if my body is MY enemy? How is one to separate the sin that is "in me" from "me"? How am I to "hate the sin" and yet love myself? How am I ever to trust myself when sometimes my body tells me to do things that feel good…things that are actually good…how am I to trust that if it feels good it's OK to do it if I think that my body craves sin?
I believe that believing that my body is born yearning for sin that it will make God a liar because God says that the truth is on my heart. God says that He's put eternity on my heart. God has constructed my body to be able to warn me when I enter into sin and if I accuse my body of being "sinful" I am making God a liar and I have cut off one major form of communication between me n' God…
Not trusting the signals our own bodies give us will lead women to ignore their "instincts" and allow their baby to cry themselves to sleep even though everything about them is screaming to pick up that baby. A lady will outside her baby's closed bedroom door listening to that baby cry its tiny heart out and she won't go to it because someone taught her not to and she will tell herself not to "give in to her flesh". She sees her flesh as "weak" and "sinful" and desiring only to pleasure itself and so the communication that God is sending that woman thru the body He created her with will go ignored...and both she and the baby will suffer for it.
I believe that believing that my body is born yearning for sin that it will make God a liar because God says that the truth is on my heart. God says that He's put eternity on my heart. God has constructed my body to be able to warn me when I enter into sin and if I accuse my body of being "sinful" I am making God a liar and I have cut off one major form of communication between me n' God…
Not trusting the signals our own bodies give us will lead women to ignore their "instincts" and allow their baby to cry themselves to sleep even though everything about them is screaming to pick up that baby. A lady will outside her baby's closed bedroom door listening to that baby cry its tiny heart out and she won't go to it because someone taught her not to and she will tell herself not to "give in to her flesh". She sees her flesh as "weak" and "sinful" and desiring only to pleasure itself and so the communication that God is sending that woman thru the body He created her with will go ignored...and both she and the baby will suffer for it.
Not trusting the signals our own bodies give us will lead well-meaning parents to hit their kids "in love". Though every time they walk away from having spanked their child they feel "icky" inside and feel like they need to "justify" their actions...they will continue to do what their body is signaling to them is wrong because they believe that their child was "born sinful" and has to have that sin controlled...and they will believe that they too must not "give in to their flesh" and NOT whack their kid.
Most Christians would see total revolution in their way of seeing the world and seeing God if they were to simply "if it doesn't feel good...don't do it!" Our bodies alert to us when we're entering into sin. When we even THINK about sinning we feel "icky". If only we were to listen to our bodies we would avoid so much ill in society.
Just the simple act of ignoring the communication of our bodies telling us to pick up that screaming baby...have ramifications into many future generations. Every baby suffers when they are ignored and there is a wide range of ways that they cope. All of the babies/children/adults express their experience of being left to cry-it-out differently, but all of them without exception suffer and ultimately it is God who suffers the most. From the one who simply struggles to trust himself, others, and God...to the one who ends up in anti-social criminal behavior...all of the effects of that one simple thing hurt God.
For children who are purposely hurt (by spanking) by those they love and trust the most...eventually will see that as God. When something goes wrong in their life (or satan comes and steals, kills and destroys in their life) who will get the blame for it? The one who they look up to in place of their parents now; God. Surely they have done something wrong and deserve to be punished. God gets the blame. All because the parents of that grown-child did not respond to their own body's signals that to tell them that spanking their child was wrong...
God speaks to our hearts, don't we all agree? He has that still small voice and we just "feel" it? How much of that communication is also interrupted or cut off because we do not know how to hear what our bodies are saying to us?
God is the ultimate suffer-er from the sin that's caused by the belief that our bodies are born sinful. :(
Some points to remember if you investigate this:
- If you look into it do not use an NIV or many of the other modern translations. There is a very popular verse in the NIV (Psalm 51:5) which in the original text (as well as in the NASB and the KJV and others) says, "in sin did my mother conceive me." David's mother was not the mother of his 12 other brothers. The NIV has it translated, "I was sinful from the time my mother conceived me"...This is a complete twisting of the original text.
- The ancient and modern Jews did not and do not believe babies are born sinful...they believe we become accountable for our sin at age 13-14. They "wrote the Bible". They would not have put a teaching of "sinful from birth" in their writings as they did not believe that.
- Jesus reached an age of accountability... Isaiah 7:14-16
- Sin is something you do in your heart...not with your body...paralyzed people can sin...even have sexual sin...because it is in the mind/heart not your body which you sin with.
- You must have the ability to reason and choose to sin...because sin is a choice to do what you know is wrong or not do what you know is right.
- The truth is on your heart...and is evident in nature (Romans 1)...
