I was raised in the Methodist Church, which at that time did not spend much time talking about sin. My early understanding of sin was that it encompassed the things that God didn’t want us to do, which missed a larger mark. (If you remember Rich’s message on Romans 3, “missing the mark” is the best translation of the Greek word hamartia, which Paul uses throughout this book and which we translate as “sin.”) There is a larger underpinning to sin than simply our missed marks. God created the world without sin, and it was only through the actions of Adam and Eve that sin entered the world. That might be a heavier dose of reality than many of us want to read when these devotionals arrive at 6:00am.
Sin existed since Adam and Eve chose to listen to the serpent and eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Their action allowed for all of us to look, not at God’s true desire for us, but at our ability to take what He intends for good and miss that mark. I often see this occurring in my own parenting: I know that what will be best for our kids is to allow them to fail so that they might learn from their failure, yet I will instead swoop in under the belief that I’m being a kind and loving dad and “protect them” from their mistakes. My action causes them to miss out on an opportunity to learn how to “fail forward.” For me, these actions are a case of me acting in a way similar to how I was raised; I’m a product of my own family of origin.
In similar ways, our sin, our missing the mark, comes from the fact that Adam and Eve missed the mark by not heeding the voice and command of God. We are all products of our spiritual families of origin. In the midst of these thoughts, I remember the words that the Lord spoke through the prophet Jeremiah: “In those days people will no longer say, ‘The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge’” (Jeremiah 31:29). Through Christ, we do not have to repeat the mistakes of our forebears, both our biological ones and our spiritual ones.