Voices In My Head (The Rick Lee James Podcast) Episode 488: You Do Not Have A Sin Nature by Ken Tanner
You do not have a “sin nature,” you have a human nature that participates in sin, contrary to your good creation in the divine image.
Your participations in evil are not who you are but tragic negations of your created human goodness, a deep down formation in and by the love that is God, which all who share human nature have from the beginning. This is the divine image in humanity. This is the meaning of "God saw all that he had made—and it was very good!"
And there’s something else: we confess that God shares our common humanity in Jesus Christ. God is human. What it means to be human and what it means to be God is forever tied to one person. And this human is sinless.
The sinlessness of Jesus Christ is greater than the collective sin of humanity and his life story of perfect obedience is now the measure of every human.
Sin is a denial of our true nature. We are made in the image of love, not hate, in the image of humility, not pride, in the image of generosity not greed.
While it’s evident that the sin of our ancestor, Adam, has wide-reaching destructive consequences in everyone, everywhere, Christians are the ones who trust that the obedience of the human God is greater than Adam's transgression.
The effects of his good humanity will override every evil in us and in creation. This is a basic Christian trust.
And this changes the way we look at everyone. Jesus is the lens through which we view every human.
Sin does not belong to human nature. That human nature is not inherently evil, but rather participates in an original created goodness that is wounded by sin.
This seems plain but maybe that’s why we miss it. God cannot become what is inherently evil. When God becomes human he takes on human nature as he finds it, subject to the conditions of the fall, for what has not been assumed has not been redeemed, but our good creation remains however stained.
God becomes what God makes and what God makes is always good.
We are sinners, as we confess every week in the liturgy. Sin is a power that afflicts us. But it’s also important to understand that we are not our sins. They do not define the human person. The human God does.
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