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Originally Posted by Sons to Glory!

Good point that ALL the trees were good for food. So how does sin get in the flesh? (as per Romans 7:17-20) We certainly appear to be born with it even before we sin . . .

Originally Posted by Cal

Paul says plainly, "Through one man's sin, sin entered the world." Sin corrupts.

This is my take I'll just throw into the mix but won't argue for:

I think the verse saying "sin entered the world" means "the world" as in the world in general, like, "sin came on the scene" or like "sin showed up among men". As in, before Adam's sin, sin was not present in mankind, and after Adam's sin, it was present in mankind, in Adam. I do not think that this means something like Adam's sin entered into all of humankind's flesh. To be sure, the end of that verse is "because all sinned". So death spread to all men 'because all sinned', not because Adam's sin spread to us all and we somehow have someone else's sin causing us to....sin.

Man fell, but I see no evidence that "Adam's nature changed", that somehow Adam started out with a different "nature" than we do. I think we all, Jesus included, were born with a free will human nature, with desires to and free ability to do good/right things or bad/wrong things. I mean, Jesus freely WANTED to do something opposite of what God wanted, but aligned Himself with His Father's will. For us to be born with some kind of sin-bent would mean God is judging us for a serious predisposition out of our control, AND would mean we are born with a fundamentally different nature than Jesus who was supposed to be "made like us in every way" (yet without sin, which I hold to be not a nature, but, as in "yet He did not commit a sin"). Or maybe I'm wrong, but then God just takes the sin-predisposition takes it into account when judging?). However, I think as I've argued elsewhere on the forum, then God's repeated exhortation to His people in the Old Testament to obey Him, and His punishment when they don't, makes no sense if they have some kind of built-in or inherited sin nature by which doing the right thing is inherently out of their control.

I would agree, though, that sin corrupts. So my take would be that as each of us sinned, and as we then chose to sin again, sin corrupts us each individually. Sin has a corrupting effect in us leading to more sin. But that's the effect of our own choice to sin, not that someone else's sin corrupted us. Just my 0.02.

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