8. The Fall of Adam
8. The Fall of Adam
The fall of Adam has made us heirs of the vengeance and wrath of God, and heirs of eternal damnation, and has brought us into captivity and bondage under the devil. And the devil is our lord and our ruler, our head, our governor, our prince, yea, and our god. And our will is locked and knit faster unto the will of the devil than could an hundred thousand chains bind a man unto a post. Unto the devil’s will we consent with all our hearts, with all our minds, with all our might, power, strength, will, and lusts: so that the law and will of the devil is written as well in our hearts as in our members, and we run headlong after the devil with full zeal, and the whole swing of all the power we have, as a stone cast up into the air comes down naturally of its own self, with all the violence and swing of its own weight. With what deadly poison and venomous hate hates a man his enemies! With how great malice of mind inwardly do we slay and murder? With what violence and rage, yea, and with how fervent lust we commit adultery, fornication, and such like uncleanness? With what pleasure and delectation inwardly serves a glutton his belly? With what diligence deceive we? How busily we seek the things of this world? Whatsoever we do, think, or imagine is abominable in the sight of God. For we can refer nothing unto the honor of God; neither is His law or will written in our members or in our hearts. Neither is there any more power in us to follow the will of God than in a stone to ascend upward of its own self. And beside that we are, as it were, asleep in so deep blindness that we can neither see nor feel what misery, thralldom, and wretchedness we are in, till Moses come and wake us, and publish the law. When we hear the law truly preached, how that we ought to love and honor God with all our strength and might from the low bottom of the heart, because He has created us, and both heaven and earth for our sakes, and made us lord thereof; and our neighbors (yea, our enemies) as ourselves, inwardly, from the ground of the heart, because God has made them after the likeness of His own image, and they are His sons as well as we, and Christ has bought them with His blood, and made them heirs of everlasting life as well as us; and how we ought to do whatsoever God bids, and abstain from whatsoever God forbids, with all love and meekness, with a fervent and a burning lust31 from the center of the heart—then begins the conscience to rage against the law and against God. No sea, be it ever so great a tempest, is so unquiet. For it is not possible for a natural man to consent to the law, that it should be good, or that God should be righteous, Who makes the law. It is contrary unto his nature and damns him and all that he can do, and neither shows him where to fetch help, nor preaches any mercy, but only sets man at variance with God (as witnesses Paul [in] Romans 6), and provokes him and stirs him to rail on God, and to blaspheme Him as a cruel tyrant. For it is not possible for a man, till he be born again, to think that God is righteous to make him of so poison a nature, either for His own pleasure or for the sin of another man,32 and to give him a law that is impossible for him to do, or to consent to—his wit, reason, and will being so fast glued, yea, nailed and chained, unto the will of the devil. Neither can any creature loose the bonds, save the blood of Christ only.