The first time sin happened was not in the Garden of Eden.
The first time it happened was when Lucifer wanted to set his throne above the stars of God.
God had made Lucifer His most beautiful creature, but Lucifer wasn’t happy being number two. Now, sin had never entered God’s creation before, and it shuttered when somebody said, “No” to God. So one third of the angelic host went with Satan, and all of creation shuttered.
Sin is wanting to set your throne above the stars of God. So when God tells you to do something and you say “no”; or He tells you not to do something and you do it anyhow, you are in a battle regarding “who is going to be god in this situation”. That is original sin: Who is going to be god?
We dare to stick our face into God’s face and say, “No!”
All sin comes out of this type of rebellion. And we’ve all done it.
You see, sin is like a pane of glass. Imagine a sheet of glass with a circle etched into it. Within that circle, there are ten pie-shaped wedges etched. Now, call each of those pie-shaped wedges the Ten Commandments. When you take a hammer and try to break one piece of pie, the whole pane shatters. With this metaphor, you see that when you break one of the Commandments, you have broken them all.
Because the root of sin is all about who is going to be god: you or God?
All of the religions in the world, save one, have been devised by men and women to try to tell us what God thinks. The Pharisees made 613 rules to help interpret the Ten Commandments. But those 613 laws that they made became the equivalent of Scripture for them. Things written by men became the equivalent of Scripture.
That’s just men wanting to be god, really.
And one of those, in a subtle way, is this: God grades on a curve.
If you do more good works than bad works, you’re probably going to be okay. Well, who thought that up? That’s not in Scripture. It’s just men trying to justify their own sin.
Or, how about this one: I’m going to tell you how much you have to do to work off your sin. That’s men telling men what God is saying. That’s just men playing god, isn’t it?