Reading USCCA, Chapter 6: Man and Woman in the Beginning
I believe I am created by God in God's Image. I believe each and every person is specially created by God in His Image. What this means to me is first of all that God celebrates His own Goodness and Truth by expressing Himself in all of His creation, and especially in the Personhood of each human-being. I am designed by God to be capable of knowing Him, wanting to know Him, relating with Him, and finding my Being in loving relationship with Him. The Lord-God (Father-Son-Holy-Spirit) has willed me into being because God is Love, and Love enjoys the fruitfulness of giving life.
I believe that when we sin, we mar that image of God, and we distort our own being, who God designed us to be and become. I believe that the Original Sin of Adam and Eve caused the biggest mar/wound/breach/broken-ness. But the amazing thing about God's Love is that Love can take the materials of evil, sin, broken-ness, etc., and use it for an even greater Wholeness-in-Him: redemption. Jesus-Christ's work of Redeeming all people by becoming enfleshed, living as a man, dying on the Cross, resurrecting from the dead, and ascending into Heaven, was no after-thought. This self-giving on God's part, most fully expressed in Jesus-Christ, was always part of God's God-ness. God IS self-giving. God IS the initiator. God creates. God redeems.
I think most of the people I know who might reject or struggle with the idea of sin do so because they have attached their concept of themselves to that first sin, like Adam and Eve, of believing they can know Truth apart from God, and that they can have life apart from their Creator. I think a "First Humility" is required to be born again, to recognize God, and to accept His Grace. I think this "First Humility" is within our very essence as creatures. God formed us from the earth, humus... I'm not talking about any sort of piety or circumstantially imposed baseness; I'm talking about the very fact that we are creatures. As creatures, we can't really know anything in Truth (i.e. w/out distortion), until we know ourselves in relation to our Creator. If we deny the Creator, the idea of sin makes no sense. If we are the authors or designers of our lives and context, then any notion of morality has to be relative to ourselves. Sin implies we have a relationship with Someone to Whom we are accountable. There might be other reasons people struggle with the idea of "sin" or especially in thinking of themselves as "sinners," but for most of the people I personally know who struggle with this, it's because of what I would call an "intellectual sin;" at some point in their lives they embraced the deceiver's lie that God need not be our starting point, that we can explore and learn apart/without God.
That some people believe they can earn salvation through their own efforts is, from my perspective, surprisingly very akin to the notion there is no sin and no need for God. My understanding of "sin" (whether it be Original Sin or our own sins) is that we have turned away from God, we have chosen something that is not according to God's Will/Plan, we have in essence killed our living relationship w/ our Life-Source: God. The breach/ death that sin causes is something we can't repair or revoke. Only God can "bridge the gap," repair our nature, revive/renew/re-create a life-giving relationship with us.
I do believe that faith without works is dead. But it is not the works that saves us. Our works are our response to the gift of faith. God has done all the saving-work, but we accept and grow in our relationship with God by gratefully obeying Him, which is how we let Him live in us, and in so doing, we become (again through the work of the Holy Spirit) the creature we were meant to become: created in His Image. Jesus Christ is the way of salvation because Jesus Himself IS our salvation, Jesus IS our Life; it is by being alive in Christ that we are united with our Heavenly Father.
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans%205:20&version=NIV
Thanks be to God!
