Billy Graham believed in "inherited guilt."
Since that fatal moment the human race has been trying to get back into that Garden without success. Try as we might, its happiness and perfection elude us. The reason is because we too are fallen creatures, living in a fallen world. Adam and Eve’s sin affected not only their lives, but ours as well. The consequences of their rebellion against God have come down to us, and we share in their guilt and shame.
Some people have a hard time accepting this. Why, they ask, am I responsible for what Adam did? It’s a logical question; after all, if your great-grandfather committed a crime a century ago, no one would think of taking you into court and charging you with his crime today.
But Adam was different, for he was the fountainhead of the whole human race. I remember as a boy on my father’s dairy farm finding one of his cows dead beside a creek running through our property. We discovered that a textile mill some distance upstream was discharging poisonous waste into the creek, and eventually we had to fence it off to safeguard the animals. My father wasn’t responsible for the pollution, but he still had to live with its consequences. In somewhat the same way, Adam’s sin flows down through the ages, polluting everything in its path.
To put it another way, in the Garden of Eden Adam acted as our representative. When we send someone to Congress or Parliament, we expect them to act as our representative. In other words, we expect them to vote the way we would vote if we were actually there. And that’s what Adam did: He voted the way we would have voted if we had been there. You might contend you would have acted differently—but if you are honest, you know you would have done exactly what Adam did, because you do it every day. The Bible says, “Sin entered the world through one man, . . . and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned” (Romans 5:12).
Billy Graham, The Journey: Living by Faith in an Uncertain World (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2007).
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