Genesis
3:4-5 The serpent said to the woman, “You
will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be
opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” So when the woman saw
that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and
that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and
ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they
knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made
themselves loincloths.
Our first parents were led
astray by the cunning temptation of Satan and sinned in eating the forbidden
fruit. It pleased God to allow them to sin, because in his wisdom and holiness
he planned to order their sin to his own glory.
By this sin they fell from
their original righteousness and fellowship with God, and so became dead in sin
and completely polluted in all their faculties and parts of body and soul.
Since Adam and Eve are the
root of all mankind, the guilt for this sin has been imputed to all human beings,
who are their natural descendants and have inherited the same death in sin and
the same corrupt nature.
This original corruption
completely disinclines, incapacitates, and turns us away from every good, while
it completely inclines us to every evil. All actualized sins proceed from it.
During life on earth this
corrupt nature remains in those who are regenerated, and, although it is
pardoned and deadened in Christ, yet it and all its impulses are truly and
properly sinful.
Every sin, both original and
actual, transgresses the righteous law of God and brings guilt on the sinner.
Every sinner is consequently subjected to the wrath of God, the curse of the law,
and death, with all the resultant miseries, spiritual, temporal, and eternal.
The Westminster Confession of Faith
The Westminster Confession of Faith
