Were we created to sin?
Recently, I wrote a message titled “A Malachi Prophecy for Today” that included a prophetic word from the Lord comparing the Levitical priests of Israel in the Book of Malachi to His royal priesthood today. According to Revelation 1:6, Jesus has made all of us, who believe in Him, priests unto His God and Father. The Lord was warning the priest of Israel about sin and impurity in their sacrifice. The Lord showed me how His church today has the same problems, and He showed me how He was going to purify us with the fire of the Holy Spirit. As I was reading through the Book of Romans this week, the Lord took me deeper into this revelation and showed me how to live free of sin. It isn’t some great mystery. It’s written out in the scripture. One just has to have the “ears to hear” and the willingness to obey His word. There are many teachings on this subject already, but the Lord has asked me to share with you what He has shown me. I hope it encourages you in your walk with Him.
Romans was written by the Apostle Paul and is a spiritually deep and thought-provoking book in the New Testament. Even the Apostle Peter said that Paul’s teachings were difficult to understand. With that in mind, I am going to try to share with you in the limited space of this forum what the Lord showed me about sin, and how we can live this life without allowing it to control our life. I believe one day in the near future I will be able to share more on this topic with you in the form of a book, but for now, this is how the Lord wants me to share it. In order to understand what I am going to share, it would be helpful to understand two things.
The first is that we were created in the image of God. There is no sin in God, so we were not made to sin. In Genesis 1:26, “God said, “Let Us make mankind in Our image, according to Our likeness.” According to 1 Thessalonians 5:23, we are made up from three parts. “Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be kept complete, without blame at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.” In Matthew 28:19, Jesus said, “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.” There are many more scriptures that substantiate this truth, but for now, we will have to conclude by these three scriptures that we are made up of the same three parts (spirit, soul, and body) that make up God. As it says in Genesis, we are created in His image and according to His likeness.
Secondly, it is important that we understand that there are many different words for sin in the Greek, but for this purpose, we will be looking at the Greek word hamartia. It is derived from a word used in archery that means to “miss the mark" and can refer to both willful rebellion and unintentional mistakes. This is the word that Paul uses in Romans 7:14-25 when he says that he agrees with the Law and that he does not want to sin, “For I know that good does not dwell in me, that is, in my flesh; for the willing is present in me, but the doing of the good is not…But if I do the very thing I do not want, I am no longer the one doing it, but sin that dwells in me.”
There are also different Greek words for body and flesh, and they are sometimes used interchangeably as in 1 Corinthians 6:16 when Paul says that a man becomes one “body” with a harlot or one “flesh” with them when he joins himself to her. The Greek word for flesh is sarx and for body is soma, but he uses them to mean the same thing in this scripture. There are other scriptures where these two words are interchangeable as well, but for now, this example will suffice.
If we read through Romans, we can see that Paul was a distressed man when it came to understanding sin and its method of operation within him that was separate from his spirt and mind. At one point in Romans 7:24, he cries out, “Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death?” Paul understood that our salvation is “by faith, in order that it may be in accordance with grace, so that the promise will be guaranteed to all the descendants.” He said in Romans 5:9, “Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from the wrath of God through Him.” Paul recognized that we are saved by our faith in Jesus and His grace alone, but he also realized that we were not to continue to live in sin simply because of His grace. Romans 6:1 says, “What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase? Far from it! How shall we who died to sin still live in it?” Do you see the difference? He says we should not live in sin in this verse, but later in 7:20 he says that sin “dwells in me.” This conflict occurs because we live in a physical body or flesh. According to Paul, sin lives in the flesh or body that our spirit abides in. This is key to understanding the way we can be free of sin.
Where did this sin come from? Paul explains in Romans 5:12 when he says, “Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all mankind, because all sinned.” This sin was ingested by Adam when he ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and it began to dwell in the flesh of man from that moment moving forward. That sin brings forth death according to the scriptures, and God gave the Law to man in order for them to be able to see the sin in their life, repent, offer a sacrifice or atonement for it, and be reconciled to God. By being the perfect sacrifice, Jesus paid the price for all the sin that Adam let into the world. If anyone chooses to believe in Jesus and receive His grace, they can have eternal life while being reconciled to God.
Paul explains salvation in Romans 6:3-7, “Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? Therefore, we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too may walk in newness of life. For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin; for the one who has died is freed from sin.” Do you remember in Genesis 1:26 it says we are made in God’s likeness? When Adam brought sin into the world, he changed our bodies or flesh by allowing sin to dwell in us. Instead of being made in the image or likeness of God, we became something else. We cannot be in His likeness if we have sin dwelling in us because God does not have sin dwelling in Him. When we are united with Jesus in the likeness of His resurrection, we once again become creations like Adam in the image of God, but there is more to it than that.
Paul says in Romans 6 that we have died to sin because Jesus died to sin once for all, and we are united with Him in His death and resurrection, so that we might live free from sin in Christ. He says we should present ourselves as slaves to righteousness rather than slaves to sin. What does that look like? Paul says in Romans 8 that we should set our minds on the things of the Spirit instead of things of the flesh because a mind set on the flesh is hostile towards God and cannot please Him. He says in Romans 8:9-11, “However, you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. But if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Him. If Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, yet the spirit is alive because of righteousness. But if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you.” This is not a great mystery, but you have to be willing to see it.
If we are given life to our mortal bodies, what must be missing from our flesh? If the wages of sin is death, how can we have life with sin still dwelling within us? The answer is much simpler than it might seem, but that doesn’t mean it is easy. Romans 7:4 says, “you also have become dead to the law through the body of Christ, that you may be married to another—to Him who was raised from the dead, that we should bear fruit to God.” Are you familiar with Genesis 2:24? It says, “For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.” Ephesians 5:25 says, “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her.” You see…there are many scriptures that describe the Church as the Bride of Christ. If we are united with Jesus as a man is to his bride, then we are to become one flesh or one body with Him. Sin cannot dwell in the resurrected body of Jesus, and if we become one body or one flesh with Him then sin cannot dwell in us anymore either.
How did sin come into the world? Adam ate the flesh of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Jesus said in John 6:35-58 that He is the bread of life, and “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in yourselves.” Adam brought sin and death into the world by eating the flesh of the fruit, and Jesus brought freedom of sin and life into the world by allowing us to eat His flesh. Adam changed the creation of man by having man lose the image and likeness of God because of sin, and Jesus restored to man the image and likeness of God by removing the sin from our flesh and giving us His own. 2 Corinthians 3:18 says, “But we all, with unveiled faces, looking as in a mirror at the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit.” We cannot be in the image and likeness of Christ unless we become one flesh or one body with Him.
We also cannot be in the image and likeness of Christ unless we have the Spirit of Christ living in us as it says in Romans 8:9. Jesus came to fully restore us to the Father: spirit, soul, and body. He came to make us into the image and likeness of God in the earth once again. I mention in my book “Prodigal to Prince” that Jesus’ death not only restored us completely to the Father, but He also made us adopted sons and daughters of God. His life was substantially worth more as the Son of God than our lives were as mere humans. When Jesus died, the Father had to account for the imbalance. In order to balance out the payment of His only Son’s life with the debt of mankind’s sin, the Father had to elevate mankind to the status of coheirs with Jesus as it says in Romans 8:16-17. “The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, heirs also, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with Him so that we may also be glorified with Him.” One of the greatest lies the enemy possesses is that we are only human. We were only human when we were slaves to sin. Those of us who have been restored to the Father through Jesus are now coheirs with Him. We are not only human anymore. When people say they cannot stop themselves from sinning it is because they believe they are only human and are still slaves to sin.
Romans 8:18-25 speaks of a coming time that I believe we are entering into right now. When Adam ate the forbidden fruit, sin entered into mankind’s body but also into the rest of creation. Paul says that “creation waits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God.” Creation will “be set free from the slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” He says, “And not only that, but also we ourselves, having the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons and daughters, the redemption of our body. For in hope we have been saved, but hope that is seen is not hope; for who hopes for what he already sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, through perseverance we wait eagerly for it.”
Paul had not realized this promise yet when he wrote this. I believe we are at a moment in history where we will see this word come to fulfillment. What are we missing in order to see this promise fulfilled and for our bodies to be fully redeemed as adopted sons and daughters? We are saved by faith or hope because we do not physically see what we are believing in. We must have faith to believe that we are one flesh with Jesus, one with His spirit, and one with the Father as sons and daughters of the Most High God. Sin cannot dwell in us anymore because we are the resurrected flesh and body of Jesus, literally. Receive it by faith, and your health will be restored, you will no longer struggle with sin, and you will walk in the “freedom of the glory of the children of God.” Have you ever seen siblings who looked so much alike? They have the same flesh. They have the same DNA from their parents. As believers in Jesus, we have the DNA of God in us. We literally have His flesh. When we see the “revealing of the sons of God” and the “glory of the children of God” in the earth that Paul was talking about, it will be easier to have the faith to believe this truth, but God is looking for someone to carry that mantle of faith now. Are you willing?
You can read more about this and other truths by obtaining a copy of “Prodigal to Prince” by Beau Walsh at BarnesandNoble.com or Amazon.com.
