OF THE FALL OF MAN, OF SIN, AND OF THE PUNISHMENT THEREOF

1.  Although God created man upright and perfect, and gave him a righteous law, which secured life for him while he kept it, and threatened death upon breaking it, yet man did not abide long in this honor; Satan using the subtlety of the serpent to subdue Eve, seduced Adam by her, and he, without any compulsion, willfully transgressed the law of their creation and the command given to them by eating the forbidden fruit.  God was pleased, according to His wise and holy counsel to permit this act, having purposed to order it to His own glory.[1]

2.  Our first parents, by this sin, fell from their original righteousness and communion with God, and we in them; and from this, death came upon all: all becoming dead in sin, and wholly defiled in all the faculties and parts of soul and body.[2]

3.  They being the root, and by God’s appointment, standing in the room and stead of all mankind, the guilt of the sin was imputed, and corrupted nature conveyed, to all their posterity descending from them by ordinary generation; their descendants being therefore conceived in sin, and by nature the children of wrath, the servants of sin, the subjects of death, and all other miseries, spiritual, temporal, and eternal, unless the Lord Jesus set them free.[3]

4.  All actual transgressions proceed from this original corruption, by which we are utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good, and wholly inclined to all evil.[4]

5.  During this life, the corruption of nature remains in those who are regenerated; and although it is pardoned and mortified through Christ, yet this corrupt nature and all its motions are truly and properly sinful.[5]