By Caleb Symons

Those who seek to explain away sin and evil often propose that sin is not our fault, but the fault of our parents’ failures or our circumstances.

This fails in several ways. 1. It simply gets us nowhere. If sin was not your fault, but was your parents’ then where did their sin come from? If I ask them, they will say it was their parents…who will blame their parents, and on and on it goes.

It is an infinite regress of the blame game, and it never answers any of the relevant questions: What is sin and where did it come from?

The second problem is it assumes that original sin and federal headship do not exist. It assumes that if we could pin sin on our parents, or our circumstances then that gets us off the hook. The problem is that this assumes there is no federal head, and we know there is.

Adam is the federal head of humanity and when he fell we were all plunged into sin, by birth and by choice. Saying “well my sin is my parents’ fault” is like saying “well my citizenship is my parents’ fault” the problem still remains…you are still a citizen. Even if your sin could be blamed on your parents the problem persists…you are still a sinner.

Why? Because we are all fallen in Adam…and if we are to rightly understand sin and human nature we must understand the biblical concept of federal headship. Especially as Christians we must understand this because we have a new federal head in Christ.

A failure to understand headship is a failure to understand how we can be found blameless in Christ…the only way to get there is to start with the reality that we were found guilty in Adam first.