Tag: original sin

God Denies Original Sin Exists

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Before we can start this discussion, we should make sure we all know what the term “Original Sin” means.

If you prefer to watch a video, click on this link: Watch the video. 

There are many different definitions, and I found that Wikipedia did the best job. Here is what they say:

Original sin, also called ancestral sin, is a Christian belief in a state of sin in which humanity has existed since the fall of man, stemming from Adam and Eve’s rebellion in Eden, namely the sin of disobedience in consuming the forbidden fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Theologians have characterized this condition in many ways, seeing it as ranging from something as insignificant as a slight deficiency, or a tendency toward sin yet without collective guilt, referred to as a “sin nature”, to something as drastic as total depravity or automatic guilt of all humans through collective guilt.
Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyon first alluded to the concept of original sin in the 2nd century in his controversy with certain dualist Gnostics. Other church fathers such as Augustine (354-430) also shaped and developed the doctrine, seeing it as based on the New Testament teaching of Paul the Apostle (Romans 5:12–21) and 1 Corinthians (15:21-22) and the Old Testament verse of Psalms 51:5.

That’s a mouthful, or for those watching the video, an eyeful, but it is pretty good, overall, in identifying what we all knew already, which is that “Original Sin” is a Christian doctrine.

But wait a minute! Are you saying that Jews do not believe in original sin?  How can that be, if David in Psalm 51 says we are all shaped in iniquity, and that his mother conceived him in sin?

In fact, within Judaism – Talmudic Judaism, that is – there is a condition called the Yetzer Hara, which is an evil inclination and we are all born with it. It drives us to selfishness and material desires, which will (unchecked) lead us to do evil. The Yetzer Hatov, the good inclination, comes to us when we are about 13 years of age and it controls the Yetzer Hara. In Freudian language, the Yetzer Hara is like the Id, and the Yetzer Hatov is like the Ego.

The main difference between the Jewish view and the Christian view is that Judaism says we are born with the potential to become a sinner, and Christianity says we are born sinners, already, because of the “fall”.

Well, what does God say?

It seems that God agrees that the sins which our parents perform will also fall on our children because in Exodus 20:5 God says this:

You shall not bow down yourself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generation of them that hate me;

So it appears, at first glance, that God is going to make the children suffer for the sins of their parents. This fits in with the Christian idea of original sin, but not really with the Jewish Yetzer Hara, so did the Rabbis get it wrong?

But (again) wait a minute!  Look at what God says in Ezekiel 18:1-4:

The Lord’s word came to me:  What do you mean by this proverb of yours about the land of Israel: “When parents eat unripe grapes, the children’s teeth suffer”?  As surely as I live, says the Lord God, no longer will you use this proverb in Israel!  All lives are mine; the life of the parent and the life of the child belong to me. Only the one who sins will die.

So the Rabbis were right when they said we are born with the desire to sin, but not already in sin. But now what happens to original sin? I mean, when God told this to Ezekiel, that was sometime between 590 and 571 BCE. That was something like 800 years before Augustine said we all are born sinners because of the sin of Adam and Eve.

And what about what God says in the Second Commandment?

The main conflict seems to be between what God tells Moses, i.e. that he will cause the children to suffer the sins of the fathers to the third and fourth generation, and what God tells Ezekiel, which is that the children won’t suffer for the parent’s sins.

What happened? Did God change his mind?

No, God didn’t change his mind; the conflict isn’t with God, it is within our understanding of what God meant when he gave the second commandment to Moses.

Let’s look closer at what God said about the children suffering: he said that the iniquity (sin) of the fathers will be visited on the children “…of them that hate me.” In other words, if the children follow the parent’s rejection of God, worshipping other gods and disobeying the Torah, then God will visit on them the same punishment that he visited on their parents. The rest of that verse states that God will be merciful to the thousandth generation of them that love him. The real meaning is that those who hate God and teach their children to do so will cause their children to suffer the same punishment they do for 3-4 generations, but those that worship God correctly and teach their children to do so will be rewarded for a thousand generations.

Now we can see that these two verses (Exodus and Ezekiel), which seem to contradict each other, are actually saying the same thing. If you do the bad things your parents did, you will get the same punishment they did, but if you follow righteousness, whether or not your parents were righteous won’t matter because each person will be held accountable only for what they do, themselves.

I think the Rabbis got it right in the Talmud when they say we are all born with the Yetzer Hara, which the Bible calls “iniquity”, which can overcome with the Yetzer Hatov.

As for the Christian belief in original sin, well…God says that doesn’t exist, and if God says it ain’t so, then it ain’t so.

If you have been brought up believing that you are born a sinner and that your infant child has to be baptized because it is already under sin, don’t worry about it. We are all born with the inclination to sin, but we are not born sinners, already. Really, do you think God would send an infant to eternal hell and torture?

I don’t think so.

What we are born with is the desire to sin, but we are not born as a sinner, already. We are not accountable for ourselves until we are old enough to know good from evil, and in both Judaism and Christianity that begins at about 6 years old, when parents (hopefully) start to send their kids to a religious school.

Now that you know the facts about original sin, make sure that you do what is right in God’s eyes, and even more important than that, make sure you teach your children to do what is right, as well.

Children are not held accountable for what their parents do, but if you do not teach your children the right way to live and worship, then you are setting them up to be punished by God.

Thank you for being here; please share these messages with others and subscribe. I always welcome your comments.

Until next time, L’hitraot and Baruch HaShem!

 

Stuff happens

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One of my coworkers has to deal with his wife passing away, suddenly. They are barely 40, and he has two young, low-functioning autistic children.

When such tsouris happens, we have to think about why. Is this a judgment from God? Is it an attack from the enemy? Is it just plain lousy luck?

I choose to believe that it is all of those things. God judged Adam and Eve, so yes- living in a fallen and cursed world where stuff happens is a judgment from God. And since the enemy attacks those who do God’s work on the earth, yes- it may have been that (although neither of them are Believers.) And does it just happen to people because these things just happen to people? Yes, of course.

Stuff happens.

God is in control of everything, but that doesn’t mean He does control everything. He is not a micro-manager.  We live in a fallen and cursed world, and we sin. Many times, I would like to think most of the times, we sin because of our nature and not because we want to. I have said this many times:

I used to be a sinner that rationalized my sins; now I am a sinner who regrets my sins. Bottom line: I am still a sinner.

But that’s not everyone, and where sin is concerned, I believe there is always, always, always…collateral damage. The sinner isn’t the only one who suffers. In this physical plane of existence, we all suffer the sins of those around us.

Jews suffered the sins of Hitler (along with a lot of other religions); Jim Jones was a mass murderer, and the masses he killed (his own followers) suffered because of his sin; thousands suffered from the sins of the terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center. I could go on and on and on- just read the newspaper. Every single day, hundreds (if not thousands) of people who are innocent suffer because of the sins of others.

If you walk through a cow field, don’t expect to reach the other side with clean shoes. No matter how carefully you watch your step, you will step into something, sooner or later. And probably more than once.

That’s how life is in a cursed and fallen world. It sucks to be here, but there’s no where else to go right now. Of course, we could be with the Lord, but if you want to serve the Lord you can’t really do it when you are with Him- His work isn’t finished here on the earth so we who serve Him must remain here. That was the problem Shaul had (Philippians 1:21), and it’s the same one we all have, too- we want to be with the Lord but the Lord needs us serving Him here.

The good news is this: we who are Believers will be with the Lord, and when we are it will be for all eternity. The lousy lot we are stuck with here on earth is temporary. Yakov (James) says it is like a mist; this life that we suffer through. It seems to take forever, but it will be such a short memory throughout eternity we will barely even notice it. It will be as nothing once we are with the Lord, so suffer through it and be patient. As Shaul advises: keep your eyes on the prize.

Be compassionate, be loving, expect to have problems. You will. But don’ let them get you down. There will be people who harm you, physically and emotionally. Don’t let them hurt your spirit.

There will be people who hurt themselves, people you care about, and it will make you suffer to see them hurting themselves. Try to help them by showing them how much you care, and by treating them with understanding, but still maintaining a firm resolution to let them know that what they are doing to themselves is unacceptable, and that it hurts you. Ultimately, it is their choice to change or remain as they are, just as it is our choice to suffer with them or leave them to their own devices. Even Shaul, who said without love he is nothing, gave up on some people at times and had nothing further to do with them.

We all make choices, whether we want to or not; for instance, abstaining is not making a decision one way or the other, but it is, in and of itself, a decision. We always have a choice, and we always make a choice.

And we will be accountable for the choices we make. Like it or not, that’s the way it is. Get with the program.

I feel for my co-worker, I can’t begin to understand the stresses he is feeling. I am glad we work for a compassionate and family-oriented company who will work with him during this devastating time in his life. I also wonder how I will deal with the loss of Donna, if she should go first. I don’t think anyone who knows of someone suffering the loss of a loved one doesn’t immediately reflect on their losses, too. Life and death are natural to us; in fact, it’s to be expected, and even though we all know everyone will die sooner or later (hopefully later), it still feels like a punch in the stomach when it happens to someone we care about.

The worst thing there is, to me, is losing a loved one who has refused to accept Messiah Yeshua- that is the real loss. It’s bad enough losing the person’s company, but to know what that person is going to have to deal with when the Acharit haYamim (End Days) are done and the final judgment comes to us all, well- that is the most painful part of all.

The best thing to remember when someone close to you suffers a loss is that you need to let them know you are there for them, especially since everyone else is probably shoving their own losses down the poor persons throat. That’s what we do: we share our grief with people who are grieving, in the hope that we make them feel less alone. Trust me- they don’t feel as alone in their grief anywhere near as much as they feel like telling you to shut up!

Pray for people who are suffering, hold their hand, comfort them with silence, and when you talk with them tell them how much you loved and will also miss the one they lost. Honor the life of the lost person, and don’t share your losses. This person has enough loss- they don’t need yours, too. Talk with them normally because what they need is normality.

The loss of a loved one is hard, it is different, and it tears you out of reality. We need to comfort people suffering a loss by bringing reality back, just enough to make them feel comfortable, just by being a friend who is there.

Stuff happens; however, knowing that doesn’t make it feel any better when it does. All I can say is thank God I have God to help me though it.

 

Respectfully, Yeshua, I disagree

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In each of the Gospels (B’rit Chadashah) when Yeshua is praying before His arrest, He asks the Talmudim (Disciples) with Him to stay awake, but they are sleeping when He returns from praying. He says, “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.”

Respectfully, Yeshua, I disagree.

The problem we have as human beings is that the flesh is strong, often stronger than the spirit. Now, nothing is more powerful than God, and when we call on His spirit all things are possible (Yeshua says that, too, and I fully agree!), but the flesh is our humanity. It is our physical presence in a physical world, one which resents and rejects the very Ruach (spirit) that is what we really need to survive being “in the flesh.”

The flesh is what causes us to not just sin, but want to sin.  Our nature is sinful, in that we are drawn to hedonistic opportunities. The little red guy with the horns and pitchfork on our left shoulder usually beats the stuffing out of the little white-robed guy with the harp and the halo on our right shoulder. If that little angel really wanted to, he could knock the red guy into the next century, but that’s not in his nature. Yeshua was led like a lamb to slaughter, not saying anything. He was humble, even to death. We are told that the proud will be humiliated, and the humble raised. That’s the reason, I believe, the little guy with the harp gets the short end of the stick most of the time. However, when we work with that guy, we can overcome our nature. With the spirit, our flesh can be subdued and the spirit can be the stronger. When we partner with the Holy Spirit (Ruach HaKodesh) it will help us to overcome the Yetzer Hara, which is the Evil Inclination that we are all born with; in Judaism it is the Yetzer Hara, in Christianity it is called Original Sin- either way, we are born into sinfulness and must spend our entire life overcoming it.

When Yeshua said the flesh is weak, what He really meant is that the human ability to overcome our nature is very weak. The “flesh” Yeshua was talking about was our self-discipline, our desire to do good, our ability to overcome ourselves. That is weak because the sinful nature of our flesh, the self-absorbed, hedonistic and undisciplined mindset we all have hard-wired into our very psyche is humanly impossible to get past.

But with God, all things are possible. And that means that even the meek, humble and forgiving little angle on our shoulder can rip the horns off that little devil and stick them where only a proctologist will be able to recover them. He can do that, with our help, with our support and with our desire to obey the Torah.

As a human I love, first and foremost, myself. To some degree it is a necessary thing- self-preservation is the most basic instinct of any living creature. However, God teaches us that to give one’s life for a friend is the epitome of love, and we all know at least one person whose self-love is so out of control that they live an unhappy, solitary and depressed life. I don’t want to end up like that, do you?

We can’t weaken the flesh, but we can strengthen the spirit. I have asked God to take a certain desire from me, I have lifted it up to Him and said, which I really, really feel, that I can’t do it and I need Him to just excise this desire and these thoughts from my mind. You know what His answer was? He told me, “It doesn’t work that way.”  He showed me that I need to work with His Ruach, I need to strengthen my ability to draw on His spirit for strength, He showed me why Shaul (Paul) said in 2 Corinthians 12:9:

But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.

The flesh is strong and the spirit is weak in each of us, but the flesh is as strong as it is ever going to be, whereas the spirit can grow stronger every day until we die. As I try to obey God’s word (that means the Torah) more and more, I strengthen the indwelling spirit simply by getting myself out of the way so that the spirit can fill me. In other words, each day I try more and more to die to self.  The more I die to self, the more the spirit will fill me, the stronger it becomes until it rules my every action, and even though I will always have sinful thoughts, the spirit will be speaking to me louder than the flesh can. My flesh will whisper and God’s Ruach will shout, so all I will hear is God.

We are told that God’s Word never returns void, so here’s an easy way to strengthen your spirit: read a chapter of the Bible every day.

That’s a spiritual exercise everyone can do.

The Flood was a short-term solution

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We all know the story of Noah and the Ark. Because the Earth was full of sin and treachery God regretted that He had made people. He decided to destroy all the evil there was, except for Noah, who was the only righteous one and who God allowed to be saved.

Have you ever wondered whether this meant that only Noah was righteous, but not those in his family? Could it be that they were saved for Noah’s sake?

I don’t mean to question God’s actions, and especially not to cast doubt on God’s ability to do whatever He wants to do, but I have to ask myself this one question: did God really think that the next generation would be any different? Let’s get real, people…the world was still a cursed place. With the flood the Earth did undergo a kind of T’vilah (baptism, or cleansing), but the new generation of people were still under the curse that Adam caused us to suffer, weren’t they? Noah was born with original sin, so were his sons and all the wives, and their children would be, too. No change there.

So, nu? What was the reason for the flood? If it was to destroy, once and for all, the sins of mankind, well, sorry- didn’t happen. Sin was evident as soon as Noah got fall-down drunk. That was a sin. Then Ham, of course, not doing anything respectful, such as covering up Dad’s exposed equipment when he saw him dead-to-the-world on the ground, also sinned. We haven’t even gotten past the generation that was saved and already we have sin.

As I have said, and will repeat often, when interpreting the Bible we cannot make an argument from nothing, but if I was to read between the lines (in Judaism we call that giving a midrash) is it possible that Ham didn’t just tell his brothers about his father? Is it possible that Ham went to them and, like a child, was laughing about it and left his father that way so he could bring them over to see, then they could all have a good laugh? Maybe? It seems that Noah’s curse on Ham is a little over the edge if all Ham did was let his brothers know that Dad was passed out. What do you think?

So, the flood has come and gone, all the baddies are dead, and Mr. and Mrs. Noah (already hundreds of years old) are going to repopulate the Earth, with his children’s help, of course. Big job, and I can just imagine how the women felt about this (“Oy…I’m gonna be pregnant for the next couple of centuries!”) Maybe they were happy that human mortality was about to see a significant change with regards to one’s expected lifetime.

Going back to my question, was it God’s plan to remove all sin? If it was, it didn’t work. If it wasn’t, then why would He do what He did? Why destroy so many people, and all those innocent animals (there’s a good discussion- can an animal be innocent? After all, to be innocent, don’t you need to have the potential to be evil, and animals act on instinct, so they can’t really be evil, so they can’t be innocent, but they are the ones to sacrifice because the shedding of innocent blood is the only way to absolve sin, but if they aren’t evil and they can’t be innocent can their blood really work?)

Maybe the animals had to be destroyed because they are innocent, if we define “innocent” as meaning devoid of evil intentions and desires. And by destroying the animals, i.e. shedding their blood (figuratively, since they drowned), each animal that died was a sacrifice to atone for the sins of each and every one of the people destroyed? Maybe not so much to cleanse the person, but to cleanse the land? I don’t know!

There were some significant changes after the flood; for instance, up until the flood there was no rain. The Earth was watered by a mist every morning and everyone, animals and humans alike, were herbivores (read the beginning of Genesis.) After the flood the animals and humans feared each other because now they were food to us, and we were food to some of them.  And the animals also would eat each other. Carnivores, herbivores, insectivores, and all the other -vores now inhabited the Earth.  There were going to be seasonal rains, which were absolutely necessary for the agricultural economy that existed.  We would have droughts and famines. What might have happened if there were no famines in the land? Would Abraham have gone to Egypt? Would Yitzchak have moved? Would Pharoah have had the dream that Joseph interpreted, fulfilling the prophecy God told Abraham about his descendants being slaves? If there hadn’t been a famine to cause Israel to send his sons to Egypt for grain, would we have had Moses? The Torah? If there had not been a drought, how would God have shown His glory and power to the Northern Kingdom inhabitants when Elijah called fire from heaven on Mt. Carmel?

Ya know? Maybe the flood was necessary not just to get rid of sin, which it didn’t, but to get a fresh start. To kick it up to the next level, allowing for this new generation of humans to take the next step in God’s plan of salvation.  Maybe, just maybe, the story we hear has more to it than just a flood to ged rid of the drek of society.

That is one of the many things I love about reading the Manual every day- you read something you have read many, many times before, and suddenly….WHAM!!! You get this revelation, this new view, on what you have been reading for years. You see something in there you never saw before and have ask yourself, “How could I not have seen this?”  It’s like the Bible is one of those optical illusions, except this is, maybe, more like a spiritual illusion, where you’ve seen one thing for years and then you see something different, in the same place. Like the picture below: is it two faces or is it a lamp?

The point to this whole thing is that we will never know, for certain, what God is up to all the time. Sometimes He makes it clear, sometimes He doesn’t. As He tells us in His Word, that which He wishes us to know we will know, and that which He wishes to remain secret will remain secret. God is no respecter of persons- He tells us that Himself. He will do what He wants to do, and when He wants to do it. He will tell us, or He won’t- it’s His game, His rules.

The best we can do is make sure that whatever He has told us, we study and learn. We will need to know it when the real spiritual battle begins. And what He wants to reveal to any one of us at any time, He will do through the Ruach.

In the meantime, keep reading, keep asking the Ruach to guide you, and stay faithful that just because we don’t know what’s happening or what’s going to happen, God does.

And faithfully believe that God is in control.