How Can You Believe in Original Sin?

Yeah, so much to unpack there.

So I love how you brought up how in the New Testament we see Christ and the church or Jesus and his people being described by Paul as the the telos, I guess, the sort of original meaning of marriage, which is we first see this strange idea of one man and one woman becoming one flesh in Genesis 2.

So that's between the first creation account of Genesis 1 and Genesis 3 when everything goes horribly wrong and Adam and Eve both rebel against God's rule.

We see at the end of Genesis 2, therefore, a man will leave his father and his mother, be united to his wife, and they should become one flesh.

And when Paul picks that up in the New Testament, he says, this is a profound mystery, and I'm saying that it refers to Christ and the church.

So that even from the very beginning, God's creation of human beings, male and female, with the capacity for sex and marriage and the kind of ordaining of this one flesh union.

in marriage, also as the means by which other humans are created, that was always sort of preaching to us about Jesus' love relationship and his one flesh union with his people.

And likewise, and this is where all of our heads should be spinning, but I think it's okay.

Gray and I are, you know, Gray is a man and I am a woman.

We are both made equally in the image of God, according to Genesis 1, male and female who are created in the image of God.

And actually, both of us are part of Jesus's bride.

So every Christian is included in this picture of the wife or bride of Christ, which is the church, regardless of whether they are male or female, while Jesus is uniquely the husband in that scenario.

So on the one hand, theologically it is true that Gray and I are both our sort of federal head was Adam before we trusted in Jesus.

It's also true that there's a sort of representative role that Eve plays for me and Gray as the first sort of prototype of the one flesh union between one man and one woman, which is really ultimately all about Jesus and his people.

crazy and fascinating and wild and I think actually kind of great.

Yes, absolutely.

And it's the one context where I could generally say I'm so happy to be the bride, right?

Right.

And conversely, actually, I can say that I am a son of God in the sense of the sonship language in the New Testament referring to inheritance, which in the ancient world was very much something that went to the Son first and foremost.

So there's a meaningful sense in which I can use that language of myself just as Gray can use the language of being included in in the bride of Christ.