What is the origin of sin?

He is not the author of it: the devil is, he sins from the beginning (1 John 3:8). There was no sinner before him. Set in the most exalted position in which creature was ever set, his pride rose up in rebellion against the One who had made him, and who in goodness gave him that exalted place. We have him addressed by the prophet under the figure of the king of Tyrus (Ezek. 28), and he is told, “Thou wast perfect in thy ways, from the day that thou wast created, till iniquity was found in thee.” Sin began to exist in the thought of that anointed cherub. There the inky river whose foul waters found their way into the garden of Eden, and from thence have filled the world with violence, corruption, sorrow, death, and woe, is traced to its source. How many ages have run their courses since this terrific being brought sin into God’s fair creation Scripture does not say, but the earth seems to bear upon its granite ribs many a scar of past conflict, and violence seems to have been for ages rampant in the lower order of creation, as it is today; but whether this was due to the influence of sin’s primogenitor, or whether it was not, we cannot tell. We do know that he was the first transgressor, and that to this day he remains the same evil, lawless, God-hating being he ever was, and that all who have fallen under his baleful influence remain in their fallen condition unchanged—all except man, who has become the subject of grace, and from whose race God makes a selection, recreating the objects of His choice, that they may be vessels of His praise. The rest remain in their natural rebellious condition, the enemies of God and of His Christ and of the gospel of His grace.

In 1 John 3:8 it is written, "for the devil sinneth from the beginning", and this, with some Old Testament Scriptures, leaves us in no doubt that sin originated with Satan. Moreover, though Adam brought sin into the world, Satan was behind it, seducing Eve, and bringing upon man the righteous judgment of God. But God accepted the challenge of sin, and in Eden announced that He had in reserve One Who would crush the serpent's head, giving the death-blow to the originator of sin, and glorifying God in regard to every question that sin raised. In infinite wisdom God has taken the occasion of the introduction of sin into the world to deal with it in its entirety, and for ever, so that He could have new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness could dwell.

The apostle would have the saints well assured of this. They were not to allow themselves to be deceived by the pretensions of men. Those who practised righteousness were righteous, even as He is righteous, because they derived from Him. The thing that was true in Him was true in them. They were born of Him, and everything produces after its kind. Those who practised sin were of the devil. The apostle goes right back to the source. Adam brought sin into the world, but he was not the originator of sin; the devil was. He sinned from the outset of sin. He was the first sinner. Hence, John does not stop at Adam, in tracing the genealogy of those who rejected the light of God, he goes back to the very beginning. But the Son of God was manifested that He might undo the works of the devil, and the manifestation of the Son of God has brought a new generation into existence who can be spoken of as begotten of God, and such do not practice sin, for his seed remains in him, and such cannot sin, because they have been begotten of God.

I suppose that there can be no doubt that the lawless and ambitious will of the "anointed cherub" in Ezekiel 28:14, et seq., was sin, nor that he, after his fall, brought it into this world. This contrast between this, and Him who was manifested to take away our sins, is complete. It might be well to compare the eighth chapter of the gospel of John, where the Son, perfect and always absolutely the same, is presented in all the moral glory of His obedience in contrast with Satan, who abode not in the truth.

When man fell, he abandoned God as Master; he gained by sin another master, even Satan, the great rebel against the true God. The race followed the fallen parents. "Through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin; and so death passed unto all men, for that all sinned" (Rom. 5:12). Such is the moral history of man, recorded in Genesis, there summarised, here reasoned on by the apostle. So vain, so blind, is every man, that he is apt to go no higher than himself in accounting for sin. But it is not so: neither Jew nor Gentile originated sin. It began with the head of the race, long before those distinctions. It was an innocent man too, though Adam was not deceived, but the woman being quite deceived was involved in transgression (1 Tim. 2:14). Sin became the state of all, while each added his own sins also. Satan thus became master in fact of the race; and from the first the guilty pair hid away from God's presence, before "He drove out the man."

When God made man, He did not make him as he is, any more than the world as it is. He made everything good, but He was not pleased to put forth His power to keep everything good. He was pleased to put the creature to the proof. He tried the creature in two great spheres — above and below. The angels fell before man; and the chief of those that fell above is the great tempter. No man can account for sin, for the ruin of the world, in any other way than Scripture reveals. Many a man has essayed to do so. The brightest wits and the greatest minds have attempted it; but they have never conceived anything that was not rubbish when they have not followed the word of God. Some have endeavoured to account for sin by supposing that there are two Gods — a good one and a bad one; because there are evidences of goodness all around us, and there are too plainly the evidences of badness. This hypothesis, I need not stay to show, is sheer folly. There is but one who is Almighty; and man cannot get rid of the consciousness of One — not merely one thing but One Being — One who has power and will and purpose, One who has affections no less than mind, but who, nevertheless, subjects the creatures that He made to a moral probation. If He kept everything from falling, there could be no such trial at all. All would be mechanical or chemical; and the wonderful scene of the conflict of good and evil — of good wrought by His grace in the heart of man, and rising above Satan's power and wiles of evil — would be quite lost. What is still more important, the active display of love and righteousness on God's part, of moral qualities reproduced in repentant believing man, would be completely destroyed, if it were merely divine power so keeping the creature that there could be no failure.

But evil never came from God — only from the creature once innocent, now fallen, that kept not his first estate, but chose to do his own will and have his own way. An angel did this first. Man was misled by him who, straying and exalting himself, beguiled others both in heaven and on earth. That creature is called Satan — the Devil. All efforts to get rid of this fact have proved utterly vain, so much so that the boasted lights of antiquity fell consequently into one or other of these notions: either that God is everything, which denies sin; or, secondly, that there is no such being as God at all; while both cases led to worshipping ever so many false gods. Witness now the two greatest philosophers of Greece who have exercised perhaps the largest and most enduring influence over civilised men outside the Bible — the one the head of Pantheism, the other of Atheism. There is what man's thought ends in when it is logically carried out. Man in his fallen estate may reason God away; yet he excludes God, not from his conscience, but in his reason; for at the bottom of the man's heart who does so there is the uneasy feeling that what he sees around him did not grow like a potato — least of all, he himself and his fellows. He feels that, though fallen, he is a moral being who will have to give an account of his action; and to whom but to God — the One who made him and all things?

The case of the sinner is here stated (verse 12), not on the moral evidence of personal evil, but on the decisive testimony of death. Death is God's pervading and irrefragable witness of the presence, in and throughout the world, of that which produced it, even sin. "Sin entered into the world, and death by sin." But the means of this entrance of sin are immediately stated. It was "by one man." Adam died by the direct sentence of God pronounced upon his transgression. Mankind die because born of one who was himself mortal as thus judged. But death is not derived to the posterity of Adam, merely as an effect of his mortal condition, but as a consequence of his sinful nature. Sin, having taken hold on Adam, vitiated utterly the nature in which it lodged. And so it is sail that death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.* Death is never separable from sin. The participation, therefore, of a sinful nature, produces death as its necessary effect. Sin, having found entrance and lodgment in the nature of Adam, did not vacate the world at the death of the first transgressor. It remained in the nature which reproduced itself in Adam's seed. It was in the world (verse 13), antecedently to the Law.

“By one man sin entered into the world.” Innocence existed in one man — Adam. God made Adam free from evil; without the knowledge of sin. This was the starting point of man's existence upon earth — a life in its moral characteristics totally distinct from our present life. But Adam preferring disobedience to obedience, and exercising his will, his nature became evil, and thereupon the character of the fountain of human life became changed. Innocence disappeared from the earth, and sin entered the world. This is the origin of our sinful nature which we received through our parents, and with which we were born. We trace the river from this present day to the past generation — we follow it back further and further till we reach its source — and we find that every age has produced a nature which is sinful.

The nature of man is, moreover, actively evil, and the activities of our nature are our own individual responsibilities. If a wicked father beget a wicked son, the wickedness of the son is his own wickedness and his own responsibility, and not that of his parent. The law of the land would not excuse a thief because his father and grandfather had been thieves before him, and neither does the divine law excuse us individually because of the sinful nature of the parent of our race.

We now come to man's fall through disobedience. No sooner had God brought light out of darkness and order out of the chaos, and placed man in the garden of Eden, as the head of the lower creation, when Satan, whose character, ever since his fall, it was to envy all that was good and happy, and try to defile and destroy everything which God had established for blessing — succeeded in instilling into man the same spirit of pride and independence that had caused his own fall, and thus to lead him to disobedience. Thus the first sin entered into the world, by which Adam betrayed himself and the lower creation, over which God had placed him as head, into the hands of the usurper, who thus became in fact, though not by right, "the prince of this world." And not only became Adam an exile from that scene of perfect earthly bliss, to eat in the sweat of his face, in sorrow, all the days of his life of a ground that was cursed for his sake, but by his sin of disobedience he brought in death and judgment, and opened upon the world the flood-gates of sorrow, pain and misery, under which creation groans, subject to vanity for man's sake.

But, alas, sin soon marred all that. Satan, who himself could not endure the presence of a holy God, and could not endure the thought of creature subjection to Him, had already fallen from the estate in which he had been created. He had exalted himself against God, and therefore was the fallen, relentless, hopeless foe of all the holiness, goodness and mercy of God. He brings in the subtle doubt of that goodness and beguiles the woman. The man, with full knowledge, follows her. Thus sin enters the world, and so, when God comes down to have (may we not say?) His accustomed intercourse with His creatures, they flee from Him and hide among the trees of the garden.