Many who have grown up in the church know from memory how to answer the question: “What is the wages of sin?” One word often satisfies the answer: death. The wages of sin is death. But it is possible that such familiarity has bred a degree of contempt. Many people can give that true answer but do so with a measure of glibness. To be biblically minded means we must grapple with the true horror of sin, and what A.A. Hodge called the “indescribable curse.”

With rhyme and reason the Catechism weaves together our history. Previously, it taught us of man’s noble and glorious creation (Q. 17), God’s particular providence in that estate (Q. 20), and man’s fall (Q. 21), resulting in our present existence in what is called “an estate of sin and misery” (Q. 23). In the question before us, the Catechism seeks to biblically answer what the sinfulness is of our fallen estate.

It is a foundational truth—and one on which the gospel itself depends—that prior to any possible personal choice or action we begin to exist with a nature that justly condemns us and most certainly predisposes us to actual sin. This is often called original sin. The Catechism emphasizes four parts to this foundational truth.

First, we participate in the guilt of Adam’s first sin. As previously taught in the Catechism, because God made a covenant with Adam as a public person, he represented all mankind who would descend from him “by ordinary generation.” This representation means that all of humanity—the Lord Jesus excepted—fell in Adam and so incurred the guilt of his first sin.

The biblical proof of this is found in the universality of death. The apostle Paul wrote, “Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned” (Rom. 5:12). Tragically, in this sinful estate the moment of conception can be immediately proceeded by the moment of death. Death does not wait upon will and act, and the grave is no respecter of persons. As all are subject to death—young and old—so the guilt of that first sin is stamped upon the human heart.

Second, the Catechism tells us that the sinfulness of our present estate is found in the “want of that righteousness wherein he was created.” The image of God, as the Catechism previously highlighted, included original righteousness—meaning Adam was without sin; he too was created “very good.” As the Preacher discovered: “God made man upright” (Eccl. 7:29).

Through the fall we became deprived of this righteousness. The biblical proof for this is found in the universality of unrighteousness. After contending with Jew and Gentile alike, the apostle Paul concludes that both are “under sin” (Rom. 3:9). Because of sin’s bondage over mankind, the Scriptures say “There is none righteous, no, not one” (v. 10).

Third, the Catechism tells us we have a corrupted nature. Very simply, our nature is the what of our identity. The Bible tells us that there are two parts to the whole of our nature—body and soul. Sin has corrupted both. In other words, even before we can choose good or refuse the bad (or choose bad and refuse the good!) we are corrupt, having inherited the corruption of sin. This is why David can sing: “In sin my mother conceived me” (Ps. 51:5).

The biblical proof of this is found in the universality of sin’s influence. Sin has impacted our hearts (Matt. 15:19), imaginations and thoughts (Gen. 6:5), minds (Rom. 8:7–8), our will (John 15:5), desires (James 1:14), and our bodies (Matt. 5:29–30, Rom. 6:12). In short, there is not any part of what makes us us that is not influenced by sin. The result of that is, as the Catechism says, we are unable to do what is spiritually good (see Eph. 2:1–3, Rom. 5:6, 8:7–8), and rather we are continually inclined to doing evil.

Finally, as is the root, so is the fruit: “A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit” (Matt. 7:18). It is out of this guilt, unrighteousness, and corruption that we act—and from it, our actual sins, in time, proceed.

Maybe too simplistically but truthfully, it is not that we sin and so are sinners but that we are sinners and so we sin. This is the “indescribable curse” into which we have fallen, and from which only the gospel of Jesus Christ can sufficiently save.