The Fall, Sin, and Misery
Trace how the Standards account for the entrance of sin: a covenant broken in Adam, a nature corrupted in his posterity, and an estate of guilt and misery from which we cannot deliver ourselves.
Having confessed God as Creator of an upright humanity, the Standards turn to the hardest fact about us. Created good, our first parents did not remain so; and what they lost they lost not for themselves alone but for all whom they represented. The doctrine of the fall is the dark backdrop against which the gospel will shine.
A covenant, and a fall
The Standards frame Adam's first estate as a covenant. God set our first parents under a covenant of works, promising life upon perfect, personal obedience and threatening death for transgression, with one prohibition appointed as its test. Left to the freedom of their own will, they broke that covenant by eating the forbidden fruit, and so fell from the estate of righteousness in which they had been made.
This single act was no trivial slip. It was rebellion against the God whose word forbade it, and because it violated a covenant it carried covenantal consequences. The Standards are careful to locate the entrance of sin not in God, who cannot be the author of it, but in the free and culpable act of the creature.
Sin imputed, nature corrupted
Adam did not stand alone. The covenant was made with him not only for himself but for his posterity, so that all descending from him by ordinary generation sinned in him and fell with him in his first transgression. The guilt of that sin is therefore imputed to us; the original righteousness in which we were made is lost; and our whole nature is corrupted, leaving us indisposed and disabled toward good and bent toward evil. From this corrupt fountain flow all our actual transgressions.
Sin itself the Standards define with great economy: any want of conformity unto, or transgression of, the law of God. The definition is exact because it keeps the measure of sin where it belongs, not in our sense of guilt but in God's holy law.
The estate of misery
The fall brought mankind into an estate not only of sin but of misery. Having lost communion with God, we lie under his wrath and curse, made liable to all the miseries of this life, to death itself, and to the pains of hell forever. The Standards do not soften this. Every sin, original and actual, deserves God's wrath in both this world and the world to come.
Yet the very weight of this estate prepares the reader for what follows. To know oneself shut up under sin and misery, with no remedy in oneself, is to be made ready to hear that God did not leave all mankind to perish there.
Study the full text, Scripture proofs, and commentary on each:
- Read WSC 16 and WCF 33 (ch. 6.3) together and ask how each accounts for the imputation of Adam's sin to his posterity.
- Compare the definition of sin in WSC 14 with WLC 24, then trace the Scripture proofs offered for it.
- Work through WCF chapter 6 section by section and note the movement from one act, to imputed guilt, to corrupted nature, to deserved punishment.
See how this doctrine is stated across the Reformed confessions side by side.
The Fall, Sin, and Misery →