The Texts
"My days pass away like smoke; my bones burn like a furnace; my heart is struck down and withered like grass."
"He became their Savior; in all their affliction He was afflicted; He redeemed them in love and pity."
Psalm 102 is the most thoroughgoing lament of physical and existential dissolution in the Psalter. My days pass away like smoke; my bones burn like a furnace; my heart is struck down and withered like grass; I forget to eat my bread; my days are like an evening shadow; I wither away like grass. The psalmist is not describing a bad week. He is describing the experience of a nature that has been corrupted at its source: the mortality, frailty, and sense of divine abandonment that are the existential form of what FC Ep I calls original sin. The Epitome's diagnosis, that nothing healthy or uncorrupt has remained in the body or soul, in the inner or outer powers, is Psalm 102's lament stated in doctrinal language.
Job 33 provides Elihu's account of how God rescues a person from this condition. God speaks in dreams and terrors to turn the soul from wrongdoing and keep it from the pit. If there is a mediating angel, one of a thousand, to declare the person's uprightness, God will be gracious and ransom him from going down to the pit: his flesh shall become fresh with youth; he shall return to the days of his youthful vigor. And the conclusion of Elihu's speech is Job 33:30: to bring back his soul from the pit, that he may be lighted with the light of life.
The Depth of the Corruption
FC Ep I opens by establishing the scale of the diagnosis. Original sin is not a slight, insignificant spot on the outside, not a mere blemish or surface defect. The Epitome confesses that it is so deep a corruption of human nature that nothing healthy or uncorrupt has remained in the body or soul, in the inner or outer powers. It inheres in the nature, substance, and essence of fallen man: not as something he does but as something he is, the fountainhead from which all actual sins flow. The depth of this diagnosis is such that human reason cannot fully discern it; it must be believed on the basis of God's revealed Word, not derived from introspection or moral inventory.
Psalm 102's description of smoke and furnace and withering grass is not merely a description of suffering; it is the phenomenology of a nature under the weight of its own inherited corruption.
FC Ep I insists that the corruption is total, inhering in the very nature and substance of fallen humanity, and that human reason cannot even fully discern its depth. Psalm 102's lament is the experiential form of this diagnosis. How does a pastor preach the depth of original sin without either minimizing it to the point that the Gospel seems unnecessary or maximizing it to the point that the congregation loses any sense of themselves as God's creatures still bearing the divine image?
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Nature vs. Sin: The Crucial Distinction
The historical target of FC Ep I is Matthias Flacius, who argued that because the corruption is so total, original sin had become the very substance of fallen humanity. He was trying to take the devastation of the Fall seriously; his error was in concluding that total corruption of nature means that sin is now identical to nature. The Formula's rejection is structural: if nature and sin are identical, then either God is the creator of sin (since He continues to create human beings), or the devil is the creator of human bodies. Neither can be accepted. The Epitome insists that the distinction between our corrupt nature and original sin itself is as great as the distinction between a work of God and a work of the devil.
FC Ep I preserves the distinction between fallen human nature and original sin in order to maintain both human dignity and the full weight of the corruption. How does that distinction change the way a pastor speaks to a person who has concluded, from their experience of their own moral failure, that they are nothing but sin and therefore beyond reach of grace, compared to what the Epitome actually teaches about the relationship between the sinner and the corruption she bears?
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What Christ Assumed and What He Destroys
FC Ep I's Gospel conclusion follows directly from its diagnostic distinction. Because human nature and original sin are distinct, Christ could assume the one without the other. The Epitome states that the Son of God has assumed our human nature, however, without sin, into the unity of His person, and according to it has become our true Brother. If Flacius were right and nature were identical to sin, Christ either could not have assumed our nature at all, or He would have had to assume sin itself. The Incarnation requires the distinction: the nature that was corrupted in Adam is the nature Christ took into His divine person to redeem, while the corruption that infected it remained alien to Him.
FC Ep I says Christ assumed our human nature without sin, redeemed and sanctified it, and will raise it at the resurrection entirely free of the corruption that now clings to it. Job 33:30's light of life is the resurrection's form, and Psalm 102's withering is the present form. How does the specific claim that original sin will be entirely destroyed at the resurrection, not reformed or reduced but destroyed, change the way a congregation member living in Psalm 102's wasting and burning understands the relationship between her present experience and her final condition?