Most of the Christian churches today spend quite a bit of time focusing on the fact that we are all miserable worthless sinners. But just what is sin? I will spend the next few posts on that topic. Of course the first thing that comes to mind for Christians and Jews when the topic of sin comes up is the ten commandments. These came from the Torah and the Jewish tradition. Other lists of sins have popped up from time to time throughout human history. Jesus even gave his version of the ten commandments. I will investigate these different lists to see what they have in common and how they are different.

To start off I am going to try and give you my very condensed version of the history of sin according to my view of Christian theology. I might entitle this series “A Complete Idiots Guide to Sin”. But since I am not trying to sell you a book on the topic this discussion will be measured in words , not pages. I know this is a big task but being an ignorant layman I will go there anyway 🙂 . What is the old saying “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread”. Well this fool is rushing in on this topic. So here goes.

In the beginning Adam and Eve did not trust God as to what was good for them. He gave them everything they needed but it seems they were just not satisfied with God’s choices. They wanted to know what “good” and “evil” were that God told them they didn’t need to know. Even at this very very early point in human history I guess man had a driving desire to become gods themselves. This fact was the core of the first sin. I am not going to try and put the blame on anyone here; I will just say against God’s desires they obtained this knowledge of good and evil. Once they had this knowledge it was impossible for them to go back to the way it was. This desire to be like God was deemed the “original sin”. As a result of this sin God became very angry and basically told them “you are on your own”. They had to leave God’s estate and start life elsewhere. You might say this was the first act of tough love. God never stopped loving his creation but since they went against his will they had to suffer the consequences. When they were forced out of God’s house they also had to give up a lot of perks. Life would never again be as easy as it was for them or for any of us descendents.

Next time we will continue our journey on the question of sin.