The power of sin is so deeply rooted in the hearts and souls of mortal people that it is impossible for us to not sin.

We are so sinful by nature that we cannot expect ever to find a person who lives their entire lives without sinning.

The only person who ever accomplished a sinless life was Christ. And this inability to not sin in theology, we call the moral inability of human beings.

You may be familiar with the Apostle Paul's description of humanity in Romans when he says, all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

But that raises a question. You may have someone in your life that when you think of them they're very sweet and kind.

Do they fall into that category? Are they a sinner? Hi, I'm Nathan W. Bingham and thank you for joining us for this Saturday edition of Renewing Your Mind.

Today we're continuing Dr. Sproul's series foundations and he's going to take us back to the Garden of Eden and answer the question, what really happened in the fall?

And how do we respond to people who deny the universality of sin?

Whenever we talk of the fall of the human race and the nature and origin of sin, we are immediately pushed to contemplate the extent and scope of that sin and its impact upon us as human beings.

And that introduces us immediately to the whole question of the doctrine of original sin.

Now the doctrine of original sin has a lot of misunderstanding that attends it and also quite a bit of controversy surrounding it with respect to people who do understand what it refers to.

But so often a popular misunderstanding of the concept of original sin is that original sin refers to the first sin that Adam and Eve committed.

But that's not what original sin means. Original sin does not refer actually to the first sin but it refers to the consequences or the results of that first sin.

Original sin in fact in and of itself is not an actual sin. In fact we make a distinction between original sin and actual sin. Original sin describes our fallen sinful condition out of which actual sins progress.

And as I've said many times the scriptures tell us that we are not sinners because we sin but rather we sin because we are sinners. That is we have a fallen corrupt nature out of which flows the actual sins that we commit.

And so original sin then describes the fallen condition of the present human race. And virtually every church in church history has developed some doctrine of original sin because the scriptures are so clear that indeed there is something inherently now innately wrong with our character.

And as Jonathan Edwards remarked in his treaties on original sin if the Bible didn't tell us that there is a problem with our moral disposition by nature which the Bible clearly does.

We would have to affirm it just on the basis of rational observation because of the pervasive presence of evil in the world of human beings.

The universality of sin screams for an explanation. I mean even in the pagan world there is a tacit acknowledgement that no one is perfect. But the immediate question that that begs is the question why not.

If we are by nature good or if we are by nature even neutral we would expect a certain percentage of people to maintain their natural goodness or even their neutrality and be able to live their lives without succumbing to this problem that we call sin.

Some respond to that and say well that's pretty hard to do given that we live in sinful surrounding and that we have a sinful climate in which we live because culture is fallen and civilization is fallen and society is corrupt.

And of course that begs the question why is society corrupt and why is culture and civilization sinful because those things are made up of human beings. And again if we were naturally good and unblemished if we came into this world even morally neutral with no prior disposition to sin whatsoever you would expect at least 50% of the civilizations to be absent from curation.

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