No Original Sin

Re: Paul, Original Sin, and Rabbinic Theology

It’s not as if the Hebrew people were poor, benighted bumpkins who never really understood God, and that somehow only after the church embraced western rationalism did the truth finally come out. If the Hebrew people did not know God, then there is no God and Scripture is just senseless drivel. Jesus was the Son of the Old Testament God; Jesus taught the Old Testament as it was meant to be understood. He warned His people that their leadership had long left behind the revelation of God for a batch of legalistic fables. Legalism is not inherent in the Old Testament.

The biggest mistake western readers make is clinging to their western mental frame of reference to understand the words they read in Scripture. They unconsciously link the concept of “sin” to crime.

The biblical definition of sin is arguing with God. It need not be any kind of confrontation so much as dismissing His testimony when you make certain decisions. The point is that you do not now stand before God condemned by some corpus of legislation and judicial precedent. Rather, you stand before your Father embarrassed at disregarding His will for you. The whole thing is very personal and feudal. You owe Him personally. You must make amends personally, and it’s really up to Him what it takes to recover that relationship.

Thus, in Heiser’s review of Leviticus, he explains that the whole point of the ritual sacrifices was not paying for sin. Rather, it was covering up the sacred space with blood so that your mortality doesn’t contaminate that space. The blood was splattered on the sacred space, not the person making the offering. The blood didn’t cover sin; it wasn’t paying a price. All the other types of sacrifices were designed to meet the minimum protocol for being in God’s Presence. You live as a tributary of the Sovereign, so you bring tribute. It wasn’t buying Him off; it was recognizing that He owned you and everything about you.

You might be family, but it’s a very formal setting in the company of the rest of the family, along with a lot of folks who aren’t family. Jesus didn’t argue with making blood sacrifices to enter the Temple, despite being sinless. He was playing by the rules, observing the protocols because He was in a mortal body.

While there was a lot of goofy speculation among later rabbis, the Pharisees in particular, the earlier material reflected a direct extension of Old Testament thinking. We have to be discerning about Second Temple teachings.

In early Second Temple literature, there is no discussion of Original Sin as a doctrine. Rather, there is simply the recognition that mortal flesh has a tendency to sin. It’s the nature of mortality, not the result of some single event or series of events. If we are born in flesh, then sin is already in us. We were born into a fleshly form because Adam disagreed with God about the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. That choice made Adam and Eve mortal and it was passed onto all their progeny, including you and me. You need not do anything to get the fleshly nature; you are born condemned. That is, your fleshly nature is condemned to die, sooner or later.

In that sense, sin does not keep you out of Heaven. It keeps you out of the Covenant while you live here on earth. It’s all about the Covenant. We say the Covenant is “Law” but not in the modern western sense. Rather, the Covenant is Law in the sense of it being the manifest will of your Father. Under Moses, the Law was not just a burdensome body of obligations. It was a collection of precepts that gave shape to the Father’s character. He expected people to make mistakes in their fleshly form. He also expected people to appear before Him in His sacred space and seek to restore peace with Him after embarrassing Him.

Your sinful nature is simply a feature of your mortality. You don’t start out innocent and become a sinner (Romans 5). That kind of thinking comes from the pagan background of Western Civilization. Your fleshly nature is doomed, so the only question is whether you also have a divine nature. If you are Elect, then your fleshly nature isn’t the real you. If you aren’t Elect, then the flesh is all you have and it’s the real you.

This same concept of sin also stands in the New Testament. If you insist on reading modern western jurisprudence into the Gospels and the Apostles, you will be woefully misled. As stated above, the concept of “sin” should not be equivalent to “crime”. Your fleshly nature belongs to the Devil, so it’s only natural that, once you hear/read the Scripture, your sin nature wants everything God says is wrong (see Romans 7). How does that surprise anyone?

Without being acquainted with divine revelation, your sin nature is not provoked to argue with God. Thus, defilement that keeps you from God’s Presence is not an issue. But once you learn about God and His revelation, you have both an obligation to seek Him and a disability from doing so. You feel defiled because your heart is awakened by moral truth and knows to condemn your fleshly nature. But there’s nothing the flesh can do to escape that torment of guilt. Until you submit to the power of God to escape the dominance of the flesh, you have no hope of seeking peace with Him. The blood of Christ satisfies far better than the whole of the ritual law of Leviticus.

Mortality belongs to the flesh; Romans 5 doesn’t mention guilt but death as the result of Adam’s fall. If your spiritual nature is alive, then you still have to deal with the problems of the flesh, but you realize that any guilt is false, along with everything about the fleshly existence. Once you understand the necessity of living by the spirit and not by the flesh, the guilt no longer holds you back. The spirit must enslave the flesh, however bad a slave it might be. We can denounce our flesh before the Lord and seek peace with Him in our spiritual natures. We are accepted into the Covenant.

Thus, Jesus died on the Cross to bring us into the Covenant, which is now in His name. How did people go to Heaven before the Cross? The same way they do now: Divine Election. Jesus mentioned, at least in theory, someone in the “bosom of Abraham” under the Covenant of Moses – a symbolic reference of being invited to dine in God’s Presence in Heaven. Just about everything He and His followers said about Heaven was almost totally a matter of parables and symbols. What holds us together under His Kingdom is our spiritual identity.

If you can accept the definition of “sin” as disagreeing with God, then it should be obvious that sin is the flesh choosing the Devil – the original source of arguing with God – over your Father. It’s a partisan move, straying into the feudal domain of the Enemy. Coming back – repentance – means forsaking anything you might have gained from such betrayal and going through the protocols of restoring peace with the Father. The idea that sin is like a crime, wherein you stand condemned before some code of law, is from the Devil. It’s designed to alienate you from God, keeping the focus on your flesh. As long as you wallow in that false sense of guilt, you cannot come before God as His child.

There is no Original Sin, no “age of accountability” and no innocence to lose. Mortality of the fleshly nature is the problem that only our Risen Lord can overcome.