This My Soul: Sin and Grace

What first struck me about this song was the clever lyrical turn that happens at the end. Singer-songwriter David Radford takes the usual verse-chorus-verse-chorus structure and plays with it so that when the chorus comes around the third and final time it means something entirely different than what it did the first two times. The words are exactly the same, but the verses provide the context that flips the meaning.

I remember listening the first time and saying to myself, “Ah, Mr. Radford, I like what you did there!”

As we said in the last post, the song revolves around the theological theme of the first and last Adam. The first two verses explore our birth into all that resulted from that fateful day in Eden when Adam ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil as told to us in Genesis 3:

Verse 1:

A voice came and spoke to the silence / The words took on beauty and form / The form took its shape as a garden was born

Then man from the dust came reflecting / All goodness and beauty and life / But he lowered his gaze as he listened to the face of low desires 

Chorus:

This my soul you were born / You were born into / What this man has done / It all extends to you / Let the words shake on down along your spine / And ring out true that you might find new life 

Verse 2:

The voice came and swords blocked the garden / None could return with their lives / A curse there was placed upon every man to face for all of time

No wisdom of man or rebellion / Could deliver new life out of death / But the voice with the curse spoke a promise that the word would take on flesh 

[Chorus]

The theological concept that names what is described here is referred to as the doctrine of “original sin.” Original sin names both Adam’s transgression and the extension of that transgression upon all who are born into the human race. It describes the primordial act of sin as well as the fallen condition that continues to plague every human ever since. 

Even if some of us may have a hard time believing that the literal events described in Genesis 3 actually transpired, it is hard to argue against the larger truth presented to us in the doctrine of original sin. As G.K. Chesterton once quipped, it is perhaps the only doctrine that can be empirically verified. In our more sober moments, I think we know all too well the flawed nature of our humanity. There is something deficient in us.

Of course this is not the end of the story. Neither is it the beginning. We may call it original, but Sin is not our place of origin. Scripture does not begin with Genesis 3, but with Genesis 1. And there we find that we were not born in Sin, but in the image and likeness of God. Sin is neither the first word nor the last. Both belong to God. The human condition as we find it in Scripture, is our exhausting (and exhaustive) inability to be who we were created in and what we were created for. We may be born into sin, but we were created in the image of God.

All this is to say, Sin is not part of God’s creative act “in the beginning.” It is utterly alien, a destructive intruder inimical to the life God wants to share with us and the good world that God spoke into existence. The doctrine of original sin does not give us an explanation for why there is Sin, only that there is Sin. It holds up a mirror to keep us awake to the lowercase sins we commit that perpetuate and accentuate the power of uppercase Sin.

This emergence of uppercase Sin, as far as we can tell in the witness of Scripture, appears as mysteriously as does the crafty serpent in Genesis 3. It is an inexplicable disruption into the shalom that characterized life in Eden — a sudden outbreak of opposition to all the “goodness and beauty and life” God intends for God’s creation. In a way, the Christian belief is that Sin is unintelligible, both in its existence and its origin. And what we find in Christ is that its end comes about as inexplicably as it began. 

Here is where Grace comes in.

Just as Sin is this incomprehensible disruption, so too is Grace. Grace is the unanticipated eruption of God’s saving act into a world helplessly held captive to Sin. Grace everywhere in Scripture is synonymous with Gift. This language of gift reminds us that there is a Giver. Grace is the gift of God that comes to us from beyond us, outside of us. As Paul puts it in Ephesians, “It is by grace that you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God,” (Eph. 2:8). It is not in the power of humankind to save itself from Sin. Indeed, it is often our attempts to “fix” things that often lead to unforeseen evils that introduce even more sin and death into the world (as witnessed to by every Sci-Fi movie worth watching).

What we need is something that could not be anticipated or expected.

This is what we believe about the Gift that Jesus is to us. Sometimes theologians will add the words “sheer” or “utter” to highlight the unique quality of this Gift. What this kind of language is trying to get at is the astonishing way in which God has dealt with Sin. It is a gift that is sudden, abrupt — a gift that could not be predicted or accounted for beforehand. Jesus is the unforeseen eruption of God’s action to save and deliver us.

It is sheer and utter gift.

Whereas the disruption of Sin brought death, the eruption of Grace does so much more. And this is precisely what we hear Paul saying in Romans 5:15-17:

15 But the gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God’s grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many! 16 Nor can the gift of God be compared with the result of one man’s sin: The judgment followed one sin and brought condemnation, but the gift followed many trespasses and brought justification. 17 For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ!

Listen to all the echoes of gift here.

This is what we hear described in the final movement of the song:

Verse 3:

Then the perfect son of man / Took the place the voice had planned since the garden and before / He took the swords and cursed the grave / There’s nothing more to separate us from the promise / The words of a living hope

Chorus:

This my soul you were born / You were born into / What this man has done / It all extends to you / Let the words shake on down along your spine / And ring out true that you might find new life 

I think it worthwhile to point out the dynamic at work here. The experience of Grace entails the realization that there is something wrong with each and every one of us. This is what the doctrine of original sin is all about. We have a disease to which none of us are immune. This realization magnifies the Gift in many ways. To understand the depths of Sin is to recognize the immensity of Grace — and not only that, Paul wants us to see how much more is Grace!

This dynamic is baked into the very fabric of the lyrics. At the end of the song, we hear the same words that spoke of original sin, now speak the word of Grace. We feel in our spine that Adam’s failure extends in some real way to us. But now, with the sudden emergence of Grace, we find that what Jesus has done now extends to us in a more determinative way.

What the song helps me to hear is the interconnectedness of both Judgment and Grace — that these are two sides of the same coin; a coin we might call the Love of God. In the context of Scripture, Judgment creates the context for Grace…it makes Grace, so to speak, intelligible. Grace, on the other hand, sets the telos or purpose for Judgment, such that, Judgment is not made in order to condemn, but to restore. As we live in the time between promise and fulfillment, both of these must be heard when we speak of God’s Love. The same is true for either side of the coin as well. When we say Grace, we hear the echo of Judgment. Similarly, Judgement must be heard with an ear towards Grace.

But when it is all said and done, we know on what side the coin will fall. That is, Grace will get the last word. What we hear in the end is that all is sheer and utter Gift.

This my soul you were born into.

Amen.