Written on 12/31/2023

To all you believing friends,

Have we chosen to be sinners?

– Have we chosen to be sinners from birth?

– Did we choose to be sinners after we were born?

These questions about our condition as ‘sinners’ are important, primordial, to the point of having become ‘vital’.

With the answer that comes naturally to us, everyone will be able to approach the meaning of God’s Gospel on a good basis; a sound basis; a basis ‘outside anything that could be conceived by means of a human concept alone’.

Indeed, Scripture makes it clear that Jesus ‘loves sinners’, and that it was especially for them that He came into the world.

Is it not because Jesus knows the gravity of what affects us that we find no accusation on His part, and that He offers Himself as a substitute for our justification? Because He knows our inability. Above all, He knows our inability to get out of this condition we inherited at birth.

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This ‘non-responsibility of man’, as well as the ‘non-accusation of God’ towards the state of man, is therefore primordial.

Yes, it is essential, because this non-accusation shows God’s true position towards everyone.

For, in fact, according to Scripture, ‘man is not guilty of being a sinner’.

Man does not have to be held responsible for his sinful nature.

Man can only regret it, because sin was introduced into man by deception and therefore against his will.

Doesn’t the fact that man feels bad in this ‘sinful state’ show that he is being subjected to something outside himself that he doesn’t like?

Doesn’t it show him, on the contrary, that from the beginning he was created in the image of God?

Doesn’t the fact that man feels uneasy about sin show him that he has two natures within him?

– An inner nature, of Divine origin.

An inner spiritual nature, of a celestial nature, in order to return to the life of the ‘kingdom of God’, the One Jesus was always talking about.

– Then there is another nature, an external one, linked to our ‘sinful condition’.

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It’s a “strange” condition that man neither wanted nor desired.

In this case, isn’t Jesus’ work also to rehabilitate our contact and position with the Father?

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… Are we “guilty” of this “other nature” that followed on from the first?

Jesus, Himself, had no problem rubbing shoulders with prostitutes or people of ill repute, as the Gospel of God preached by Jesus shows us.

But if Jesus never made any accusations about the condition of “sinful man”, why should we constantly have to justify ourselves for what we neither chose nor wanted?

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To sum up:

Didn’t God create “man in his own image”?

– Yes, he did.

So where does this sinful nature come from?

So who is the originator and the author?

Here’s what Jesus says on the subject:

John 8 v 44 He (the Devil) was a murderer from the beginning (so before the creation of man), and he does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks lies, he speaks from his own heart, for he is a liar and the father of lies.

What’s more, the apostle John writes after Jesus: He who sins is of the devil, for the devil sins from the beginning (i.e. before the creation of man). 1 John 3 v8Thus, the devil, because he was already in the beginning, brought sin into the world, making “man a sinner”. But as it is written: The Son of God appeared to destroy the works of the devil.

For us who believe in the Son of God, this is the most important thing. For if the devil brought sin into the world, Jesus took away the sin in the world. He took away sin by dying on the cross, before being resurrected by the Father.

By His general Work, Jesus took away the “accusation and guilt” that men brought upon themselves. And it would be a good thing if men didn’t put them back.

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What joy and deliverance today to know that, through the work of God in Jesus Christ, we have been enabled to share in the inheritance of the saints in light.

And above all: “who has delivered us from the power of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son of his love…. Colossians 1-13

Colossians 1:12-14 Give thanks therefore to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light, who has delivered us from the power of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son of his love, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

The brothers and sisters of levangilededieu.fr