The Fall

We believe that, although God created man morally upright, man was lead astray from God’s Word and Wisdom by the subtlety of Satan’s deceit, and chose to take what was forbidden, and thus to declare his independence from, distrust for, and disobedience toward his all-good and gracious Creator.  Thus, our first parents, by this sin, fell from their original innocence and communion with God.  As head of the human race, Adam’s fall became the fall of all his descendants, in such a way that corruption, guilt, death, and condemnation belong properly to every person.  All persons are thus corrupt by nature, enslaved to sin, and morally unable to delight in God, and overcome their proud preference for the fleeting pleasures of self-rule.  Furthermore, God has subjected the creation to futility, and the entire human family is made justly liable to untold miseries of sickness, decay, calamity, and loss.  Thus all the adversity and suffering in the world is an echo and a witness of the exceedingly great evil of moral depravity in the heart of mankind; and every new day of life is a God-given, merciful postponement from imminent judgment, pointing to repentance, so that all people might receive eternal life in God, through Jesus Christ.