Chapter 6

Of the Fall of Man, of Sin, and of the Punishment Thereof

  1. Although God created man upright, and perfect, and gave him a righteous law, which had been unto life had he kept it, and threatened death upon the breach thereof;1 yet he did not long abide in this honour; Satan using the subtlety of the serpent to subdue Eve, then by her seducing Adam, who, without any compulsion, did willlfully transgress the law of their creation, and the command given unto them, in eating the forbidden fruit;2 which God was pleased, according to His wise and holy counsel to permit, having purposed to order it, to His own glory.
  2. Our first parents, by this sin, fell from their original righteousness and communion with God, and we in them, whereby death came upon all;3 all becoming dead in sin,4 and wholly defiled in all the faculties and parts of the soul and body.5
  3. They being the root, and, by God's appointment, standing in the room and stead of all mankind, the guilt of the sin was imputed, and corrupted nature conveyed to all their posterity, descending from them by ordinary generation,6 being now conceived in sin,7 and by nature children of wrath,8 the servants of sin, the subjects of death,9 and all other miseries, spiritual, temporal and eternal, unless the Lord Jesus set them free.10
  4. From this original corruption, whereby we are utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good, and wholly inclined to all evil,11 do proceed all actual transgressions.12
  5. The corruption of nature, during this life, doth remain in those that are regenerated;13 and although it be through Christ pardoned, and mortified, yet both itself, and the first motions thereof, are truly and properly sin.14

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Footnotes:

1. Ge 2:16-17.
2. Ge 3:12-13; 2Co 11:3.
3. Ro 3:23.
4. Ro 5:12-21.
5. Tit 1:15; Ge 6:5; Jer 17:9; Ro 3:10-19.
6. Ro 5:12-19; 1Co 15:21-22,45,49.
7. Ps 51:5; Job 14:4.
8. Eph 2:3.
9. Ro 6:20; 5:12.
10. Heb 2:14-15; 1Th 1:10.
11. Ro 8:7; Col 1:21.
12. Jas 1:14-15; Mt 15:19.
13. Ro 7:18,23; Ecc 7:20; 1Jn 1:8.
14. Ro 7:23-25; Gal 5:17.