Questions for discussion (from Good Word Online):

Leading Question: What happened to God’s beautiful new world – to plants, to animals, and to human beings — when our parents disobeyed God’s command?  Why?

The Bible does not tell us how or how quickly the world was transformed from its perfect condition to the one that we now see all around us. What we can say is that the gulf between the perfect creation of Genesis 1-2 and the fallen world of Genesis 3 is wide and deep.  But even the world of Genesis 3 would appear to be several steps removed from our present understanding of the results of sin. In its most extreme form, some Christians see the sin of Adam and Eve as leading to the taint of “original sin” in all human beings, and “original sin” is interpreted as an inherited taint, even inherited guilt. In Roman Catholic understanding, a baby who dies without being baptized cannot be saved because the taint of original sin has not been washed away.

Adventists would be numbered among those Protestants who agree that we are tainted because of the sin in the garden and that we are lost as a result of that sin. But we would not go so far as to say that we are guilty for the sin of Adam and Eve. What does Scripture actually say?