At the heart of depravity is inability: the inability to will in accord with God. At its most fundamental, inability rests in not being God. It is an inability to be good (by extension) but that is not evil in itself. I submit that Adam and Eve were in this state in Eden before the Fall, and that the Fall is actually a consequence of their innate, “prelapsarian” inability. In that state they were not evil, for God had pronounced them good, until their inability ripened into sinful intention and action.
In the garden, their innate inability could be and was overcome by intimate, cooperative and congruent “being” with God. I think that was an issue of faith and the Breath of God. Adam and Eve did not remain in that overcoming state; however, they doubted God’s character, became uncooperative (self-willful) in attitude, and acted out of step with God. They sinned; died to God, stopped breathing spiritually if you will; their bodies catching up with their spirits some hundreds of years later.
In death, Adam and Eve brought upon themselves a fuller experience of inability. After the Fall, they were no longer capable of intimate, cooperative and congruent “being” with God. The breath of God was gone—Ichabod! In this state, not only were they innately unable because they were not God, but now they were absolutely unable because they were not in “touch” with God. If the Devil had his way with them in Eden, their existence on the other side of the cherubim was bound to be a field day for him.
Deadness is the existence they had when they reproduced, deadness is what they had to pass on to their children. We are all conceived in sin and born to death as a result. Without God and hope in this world, we act as we will, only serendipitously in accord with God if at all, absolutely unable to change our condition, to walk in accord with God, or to rectify our attitudes. Without an intervention by God, there we would stay until irretrievably unable, smoke rising from our burning frames in eternal judgment.
